twitter fail blog

Mo-o-o-o-ommmmm! Make him stop!

Spammy, give your sister a break, would you?

But Mom, I’m not going anything! I’m not even touching her. I’m just sitting here minding my own business.

Mo-o-o-o-ommmmm!

Just ignore him. If you don’t pay attention, he’ll stop.

That’s kind of the way it is with spammers on twitter. Some people don’t get that, though, and have an aneurysm every time one of these losers follows them.

It’s easy to waste a lot of time and energy checking out followers and blocking the ones you don’t want to follow back, but here’s the thing: you don’t have to do anything. You can just leave them there, gathering spam dust, and eventually, they’ll drop off. Having them follow you costs you nothing, and doesn’t change the value of the tweets you read, because if you’re not following them you won’t see their tweets and won’t be tempted to buy anything.

 
Make it harder, and spammers will get smarter. It’s the natural evolutionary process of spam. Twitter spam started by slithering along its belly in DMs, dragged its knuckles into the public timeline, and now stands upright while abusing hashtags and trending topics. Give spammers a captcha and double opt-in, and they’ll just write a little program during their break from emailing 419 letters to take care of the whole thing.

 
You tell ‘em. Except, if they’re blocked, you won’t really, because they won’t see this tweet. Not that it would matter, since their motto is “so much spam, so many people to spam.” No one said they were creative.

If you’re only going to interact with people you already know, you can IM, text, email, or call them. The beauty of twitter is meeting new people, learning new things, sharing new ideas. It doesn’t happen if you don’t let someone new into the mix.

 
Yup, this is that social networking thing that twitter is all about. Having no followers, and no one to talk to. If you have no followers, no one will care to read your tweets, because they won’t see them.

We hate spam. We hate spammers even more. Every spammer, every spammy tweet and DM wastes bandwidth, which overloads twitters servers and sends in the Fail Whale, or returns a 503 error, or just causes a blank page when we try to check the stream. We hate that.

Hopefully, as twitter grows an evolves, they will find ways to stem the tide of spam. Until then, since we can’t send a jolt of electricity through the intartubes to electrocute each one of them as they talk about their new Kindle or cash gifting scam, we’ll just keep ignoring them and spend our time and energy exchanging ideas with our buds. Like how to make that electrocution thing work.

Send in the Fail Bird! Tell these tweeps you saw them on Twitter Fail