Twitter growth due to spammers?
I don’t generally block people that follow me on Twitter, as long as they are individuals and not accounts set up for social causes (I’ll choose my causes, thank you). For the last week, I’ve been blocking between 1-3 followers per day, all spammers. Having just read the VentureBeat post ‘Twitter gets its sexy back. And by “sexy” I mean users.’ which talks about Twitter’s growth in June, I have to wonder if a good percentage of that is due to spammers. I’m followed by 70-some people and have been seeing these spammer accounts daily. I can personally block the spam accounts, but that doesn’t stop those accounts from following others. I’m sure most people are not aware that they can report spam accounts via twitter.com/help. I wasn’t. Reporting potential spammers is not simple, just like blocking multiple followers (a chore because you are taken back to your Twitter home page after each block). How many people are going to note the spammer’s account name, then go to the help page to report it? I think that Twitter needs to add a Potential Spammer button next to the account in the Followers list (and please, please, please don’t have that button take me back to the home page afterwards).
Twitter team, please get a handle on this now.
Otherwise, the problem won’t be the Scoble’s of the world clogging the tubes. It’ll be the spammers.
-Al Degutis
