Diluting Block Counts
I made a major change to TwitBlock the other night. The change was made to protect people who are heavily blocked, but are not “spam”. Of course that depends on your definition. (A topic for another day)
Originally each block on account would yield 10 points. Then I became aware of just how murky this issue is. Barack Obama is blocked by many accounts (Republicans no doubt) plus some people with extreme right wing views were being blocked heavily. Then the complaints started. People whose businesses survive on a huge Twitter following accused me of destroying their reputations, and generating further blocks on their account by showing the number of existing blocks.
So now two things have changed for the time being:
1. Clicks on “not spam” are deducted from blocks;
2. Blocks are diluted by the size of a user’s following. 10 points are added for every 1%. So, if you’re blocked by 40 people, but are followed by 8,000 this will only yield 5 points.
Although this has stemmed the complaints, the scanner is less aggressive and lots of real spam accounts are not showing up with high enough scores. I am struggling to find the balance in the face of all of this and may have to tweak it again.
Yep, it’s a tough nut to crack finding a blocking pattern that is almost always spam.
One thing though, your app isn’t finding the Twitteradder folks or the Big Twitter Machine and all of that other crap to be spam…you can pretty much bet if an account as any recurring posts that say “GET VIRAL FOLLOWERS HERE” they’re spam…not sure how you find that sort of account. I still manually scan most of my accounts. I hit your link on my toolbar first, but I look to see if they actually talk to people. If there is no direct conversation, or if the posts don’t appear to even be by a single person, but culled from other accounts, I block.
Thanks for the work in this area…it’s much needed.
Thanks David.
TwitBlock doesn’t [yet] analyse Tweets or conversational behaviour. This is for two reasons:
1. A deep scan would take longer;
2. Some spammers steal tweets to pad out their feeds and look “real”.
What’s more likely is we will start to crawl Twitter and identify spam ourselves for a black list. For now it’s largely heuristic. Our best signal is currently the duplicate profile pics. They bring the baddest spam right to the top of the list.
Please consider checking several twitter accounts at one time. I currently need to manage 10 accounts. Thank you for this tool. It really helps.
Check out the review we gave you today on Rev2
http://www.rev2.org/2009/09/11/twitblock-junk-filtering-and-blocking-for-twitter/
who’s -> whose
How does TwitBlock know the block lots of each account?
Thanks [I think]
The Twitter API provides access to your block lists when you authenticate. I suggest you read the about page which contains a privacy statement too.
Interesting post. I can’t help but wonder whether you would be better off letting people unfollow rather than block for spam, but I suppose that depends on how you get your block statistics. If every post is a url as well it tends to be fairly spammy. There was a great app called thetwitcleaner or twitcleaner but they got hit by Twitters somewhat odd unfollow rules. Spam is the one thing that makes Twitter pretty hellish so I thank you for what you are doing and hope you will keep it up!