What is the funniest thing about Twitter – Spam Support

By Matt Dunlap on July 10th, 2009

Tweet Tags: spam, support

Your Twitter account is filling with spam and you want to stop it. You start to look throught the help docs at Twitter and find a couple ways.

There are not a lot, I count 2

First, There is a block button. Which is fine, but in most cases you want to stop spam before it hits your stream.

Secondly, this is where is gets ridiculous – You can send a direct message to twitter user “spam” and they will look into it.

Why is this funny… To start you can’t send a direct message to someone until they follow you back. So, you have to follow “spam”, then wait until they follow you back. Looking at http://twitter.com/spam you will see they don’t follow everyone back. In fact over 60,000 people follow spam, but spam only follows 34,000. They need to get their asses in gear and follow the 26,000 people that are trying to report spam. I see they have a new option to reply to @spam too, but then it is visible in your stream. You can see in the twitter search, nobody knows about this

A couple days ago, I was looking through the API and ran across an enhancement for a spam button. Basically a community control spam button, similar to the flagging system on Craigslist.

Here is the thread. I saw this thread before the last message from support, and tweeted it. “Twitter working on spam button” and got a few replies from people that were excited about it. I just looked at the thread again this morning to find the status has been updated to “Won’t fix”  and this message.

Please simply DM @spam or @reply @spam with the account. We use this data.
If you want to create a report spam button, simply use a DM in the background to
notify @spam.

This is just another Twitter support FAIL. Don’t get me wrong, I Tweet, I see the benefit in Twitter, but for a company that’s mantra is “What are you doing” They are pretty bad at recipricating the service.