I just woke to find these four stupid messages in my Twitter inbox. All in a tidy row. I’ve received more and more of these over the last several days, and over the last many months, I’ve been bothered by people inviting me to play their spy games, their mafia games, and to answer trivia.
This is less-than-useful. This is the kind of behavior that will encourage me to pull back my participation on the platform. I currently have a policy of following back everyone who chooses to follow me, and then just weeding out the annoying stuff. I do this so that people also have access to send me a direct message, should they need my attention.
I won’t be following that policy any longer, if I am going to receive a raft of spam like this.
The problem isn’t the fault of the users, per se. They often times don’t realize what the 3rd party site they’re using will do once they submit the information. These 3rd party sites then access Twitter via the API (a kind of connection point developers build for other developers), and pow, I’m asked about which city I should live in.
Please, Twitter. Enough.
RECOMMENDATION: reactively block URLs that promote spam behavior like this. Find the obvious culprits and block their access to the Twitter API portals.
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