How Facebook killed spam | Hacker News Reader

How Facebook killed spam

fastcompany.com

Should have been "How Facebook permitted all kinds of spam as long as the market could bear, then stopped and got lauded by FastCompany for fighting spam". Sheesh.

I get a lot of spam on facebook. The main categories are:

1. Applications unwittingly installed by naive friends that post annoying updates all the time to my wall, effectively hiding the little signal in there. Each time a friend uses a new application I get more spam until I hide it. A variant of this is the unhideable notification that a friend started using a new application; getting rid of these requires hiding the friend forever. Both these examples require an action not simpler than using gmail's "filter messages like this" function to mark them as trash.

2. I have some relatively popular friends who are often unwillingly tagged in cheap promotions, religious events (they're atheist), musical events they're not attending, etc. This effectively spams all their friends with a "this person has been tagged" notification until they decide to remove themselves from the list.

3. I have also received unsolicited facebook messages of a very dubious comercial purpose that I would report as spam in gmail.

All in all the signal-to-noise ratio in facebook ends up being so low I have a twitter account specifically for keeping up with friends, and it ironically enough makes it easier to do the low-cost maintaining people usually associate with facebook.

Most of this comes from the fact that, while I mostly trust my friends, I can't trust all of them (as refusing friend requests is usually seen as very rude), and while I can (and do) hide friends, I can do nothing about the bad friends of my good friends, and those end up being a regular source of spam.

the best way to increase the signal to noise ratio is to install a third party filter program. FB Purity, is an excellent example, it filters out all the previously mentioned application spam, and also lets you filter out events, facebook places, tagged in messages, etc etc. You can hide as many message types as you like, you will notice a huge improvement, you can get it here: http://www.fbpurity.com

"(Indeed, search Google for “stop Farmville notifications,” and you’ll get over 50,000 results.)"

Why do people always insist on citing the number of Google search results as a measure for popularity?

It's worse in this case since the author didn't include the double quotes around her query string. Doing so, I get 8680 results.

Doesn't seem like too hard of an accomplishment (compared to traditional spam detection), I mean, all of the spammers in this case are registered and accounted for by Facebook.

Granted, the end effect is actually quite nice. I block every application that pops up. I even think I turned them off blanket fashion. Kudos to FB for allowing this.

I don't see how this is different than the typical spam fighting tactics used in email. Email providers like gmail take action on messages that are flagged as spam across their network.

It would be very useful to share those per application analytics to Facebook developers so developers know which messages are getting reported as spam / liked / etc instead of just telling developers after the fact that their message is now blocked (or their app got killed).

that would be a boon to the spammers though, as it would let them fine tune their messages until they can get through the filters

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