The economics of Twitter spam

Recently more and more people have reported that they are being followed by spammers on Twitter. It's easy to track this problem: just search for #spam. Being followed by a Twitter spammer isn't like being stalked by a murderer; actually in the current environment, these guys are a fairly benign parasite that can work in your favor. So let's look at the economics of Twitter spam.

The upside for spammers is the usual obvious SEO shite: you've got something useless to peddle (yourself, your scam, your illegitimate business selling poor copies of pretentious luxury goods, your legitimate business selling enhancement placebos to suckers); you spend your time trying to defile fine and upstanding web pages with links to your pathetic piece of virtual real estate; Twitter comes along and your primitive brain realizes it can post its links there. You follow people so that they get a notification in their email pointing to your Twitter feed. Maybe they read it, maybe they click the tinyurl-obscured link. You cream yourself if they choose to follow you, because then they'll get all your spam, and you'll look more legit by having actual followers (like, real people from outside your cluster of bots and morons).

Now, what's the upside for normal humans in being followed by these scum?

Knowledge is work, a means for putting food on the table; information is power, a means for taking food from others.

Following as many people as you can on Twitter is a useful way to stay in front of your game: you know what people are up to, you see trends evolve, you get notice of articles before they're syndicated, you watch news unfold in your little niche of the world. And of course, the more people that follow you, the further your own message spreads: how great you are, how you're beating the system, how your pretentious beautiful designs and products can uplift and empower.

So there's an incentive to increase both the number of people you follow and the number of people who follow you. The first is easy; you just find people and press their button. The second is more difficult: you need to say something worthwhile in your tweets. Sometimes, not always, people will reciprocate when you follow them -- (SEO tip here!:) it helps if your own tweets are interesting.

However, there is a 2000 following limit: you can't follow more than 2000 people until you have 2000 followers. So, if you want to expand your reach into the info-verse, every follower counts -- even those spambots. So, now, these guys have evolved a little symbiotic, parasitic relationship with their hosts (you). You feel the first bite when they follow, but it feeds your ego. All you need is followers! no-one's going to do background checks on your popularity!

Relevance ranking anyone?

There's more to it though: Twitter search is currently being rolled out across the default user interface, and various bloggers are describing Twitter as a "search engine" (apparently that's the appropriate noun to describe someone that collects ideas). Twitter search is currently a realtime feed of query matches (the zeigeist! *fap* *fap* *fap*) with no relevance ranking. As the search feature gains usage, people will want relevant results to more complex queries. An obviously useful ranking input is the number of followers that a Twit has. These spambots will make you appear relevant!

We can follow this down silly paths -- eg. the more you tweet, the more spambot-followers you get, the more ranking relevance you have. The spammers introduce an incentive to posting often, and that mechanism has positive feedback.

More useful ranking mechanisms are things like reply frequency and analysis of re-tweets. Re-tweets are interesting to track because you can find the users who originate popular ideas: give them the microphone, dammit.

Action items

So there's an imbalance in the Twitter economy. Spammers are using Twitter and the environment encourages it.

Wishlist for Twitter:

• Track how often users are blocked, warn against and auto-ban them.
• Add user-initiated "Report spammer" buttons.
• Implement detection of spammer clusters and auto-ban them.

Action items for Twitter users:

• Block spammers on Twitter.
• Block spammers on Twitter.
• Block spammers on Twitter.

Please rant about how much you love the symbiotic parasitic relationship with your spambot-followers!

Syndicated 2009-03-08 23:59:00 (Updated 2009-03-09 01:40:27) from Conrad Parker