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Comment by tombrossman | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit of a tangent but why allow spam bots to appear in your followers list? I too have about a hundred followers and I vet every single new follower. I take offense at any spammer that thinks they can just slip in there and be accepted, and I don't want potential new followers to look at my profile and see a bunch of obvious spammers.

This isn't a slight against you, we all budget our time for what's important to us and cultural norms vary. I'm just surprised when I see someone with a manageable number of followers and they allow spammers to join in. I check the profile, tweet history, and if it sets my bullshit detector off even slightly I block them and report them as spam.

Quality over quantity, always.

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You shouldn't waste any more time on spammers by spending it trying to vet your followers. They got to decide they wanted to follow you, but you're in control of the most precious thing we have: our time. Don't give then even 10 seconds that it takes to try and decide their worth. They don't deserve that power over you.

I've never looked at any person's Twitter account and judged them by how many likely spam bots they have. I assume spam bots follow people all the time and I don't hold it against them for becoming victims.

Hmmm, interesting. I just never considered that my responsibility. I'll think about doing that.

One problem with blocking bots is sometimes I really can't tell if they are bots. Bots often copy profile pictures, descriptions, and tweets from real users. Some real users tweet pretty cryptic stuff. And blocking feels like such a serious step; I wouldn't watch to risk false positives.

You are probably better at detecting bots than you think. The same way you can recognise phishing and spam due to spelling or syntax errors. If I get a new follower and the only contact they've made with me is via Twitter, and their tweets are totally odd or cryptic, they aren't adding to my experience so away they go.

I've only had one false positive I know of and it was one of my wife's friends. She had a profile picture of her teenage daughters and no tweet history. I thought 'what the hell is a teenage girl doing following me - guaranteed spammer' only to find out who it was the next day. I unblocked and no offense was taken and no harm done.

Still, I guess I'm a bit stricter than average and this is something that most people don't care about.

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