Mark. Blog.: Twitter Lists Make Twitter Dangerous to Use | Mark.
JessicaGottlieb
· 1 month ago
1. not all lists are public 2. not true 3. if you don't want to be on a list it's the same as being followed in someone's profile, simply block the list owner and the problem is solved.
Sorry, but this whole post is way off base.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
1. I can't control which lists, public or private, I've been placed on. The public ones affect me. 2. I suggest you check again. Every profile has a link to the lists that person has been placed on. 3. Please read my update, and the discussions I linked to. I discussed, in detail, how boneheaded blocking a person is to solve this problem.
Before making accusations of things being off base, I suggest you do some fact checking.
JessicaGottlieb
· 1 month ago
I've done an enormous amount of fact checking, as I've had lists for a while. I've blocked a few users who had me on lists I didn't want to be on and that stopped the whole problem.
I'm sorry to be a little harsh on your home court, but lists are far from dangerous.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
The second point you made, that lists are attached to a person's profile is not true, is just mistaken. You've repeated the point about blocking to opt-out of lists, without considering or acknowledging that I know that it is a possibility and that I have provided reasons why i think it's not the solution. I'm more than happy to discuss factually accurate points, or points that have considered and address the entire conversation that's already taken place.
JessicaGottlieb
· 1 month ago
The more I use the lists, the more I find that they are exactly the opposite of what your fears are. I can listen more intently to smaller groups. My best lists are private, so the spam you worry about (I still don't understand why) is a non issue.
I sense that this is going in circles, and that you worry so much about privacy, spam and intrusions that social media might not be the best place for you. And I say that with not a trace of sarcasm, judgement or bitchiness, I say that with sincerity and the hope to help.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
From the hundreds of retweets and comments I've received, and from the largely positive feedback I've gotten, this is obviously a conversation a large group of Twitter users want to have. To throw this back at you, you worry so much about this blog post that my blog might not be the best place for you. And I say that with not a trace of sarcasm, judgement or bitchiness, I say that with sincerity and hope to help.
johnny
· 1 month ago
I may be wrong, but I think lists might just be the death of Twitter. They completely undermine the follow system. They're like a shadow follow system with no visibility of who's actually following who. In addition, lists will become powerful cliques where a few voices dominate. The great thing about Twitter was that follow and block gave someone all the control they needed. Now what's the point of followers who are probably not listening to you. It completely breaks this system.
In other words, Twitter just went from a being a more social many-to-many medium to a more hierarchical one-to-many medium, bit like the old unsocial media model we've been leaving behind.
Of course people aren't going to disappear from Twitter overnight, and I'm sure the service will continue to grow, however, the long term implications of lists seem really ill-concieved to me.
John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises)
· 1 month ago
Johnny, you may be wrong, unless I misunderstand you. You stated that lists are "like a shadow follow system with no visibility of who's actually following who." I have the visibility of knowing who has placed me on a list, which is all that matters to me. Are you concerned about other levels of visibility?
John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises)
· 1 month ago
At first I was thinking that you were being extremely paranoid, and that you could simply get out of an offensive list by de-friending the offender...until I discovered that I could put people in lists even though I'm not following them. See http://twitter.com/empoprises/notfollowing (and no, that's not Britney Spears' real account).
Probably the reason for this big hole was a perception that even if a list is public, the primary consumer of the list is the person who created it. I created my lists with that thought in mind. But now that the lists are out, the new game is to find the coolest lists, and list competition may get worse than the competition to get into Studio 54 back in the day. Until Studio 54 jumps the shark, and you're stuck on a "I liked Gossip Girl's first season" list or something horrible like that.
Perhaps the best solution would be the ability to remove yourself from any list - a mini-block, as it were.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
I think simple measures like that could fix lists and bring Twitter back to the same risk level it was before they were rolled out: I don't understand why basic countermeasures like that weren't put into place, or how it got past so many intelligent people.
mattb4rd
· 1 month ago
Much ado about nothing. Humans have been categorizing each other since Xenu dropped us on the planet (that's a joke). Twitter didn't invent it.
Britney Bennett
· 1 month ago
Twitter still seems to be very much a work in progress. I think in another year or two it will be much more a finished product.
Hugh Briss
· 1 month ago
You make it sound like all a spammer has to do is send a tweet to a list and everyone in that list will get it. Wrong. The only thing you can do is follow the list which means those updates will appear in your stream. In order to send an @ reply or DM you have to do it manually, one by one. Spammers use scripts and don't need lists to come up with a huge list to send to.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
The lists take the leg work out for spammers: instead of having to figure out what a person's interests are, or spamming everyone indiscriminately, they just need to look at a high authority figure's categorization scheme. Let's say Robert Scoble has an "influencers of tech" list: a spammer (or heck, a guy looking to make cold pitches for whatever thing he's peddling) just got a great list for free and without having to do anything. The people on that list don't have an option other than ask Scoble to remove them and hope he does it in a timely manner, or block Scoble. Both are not the most ideal situation. It's akin to people selling email or phone lists: it was wrong then, and it's still wrong now.
Hugh Briss
· 1 month ago
Spammers do target everyone indiscriminately and don't do leg work. Why do you think women get emails about penis enlargement? ;)
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
It's more lucrative, and provides a lower barrier to entry, if the lists are targeted: which is why email and phone lists are so valuable. With lists of things that are attached to a demographic, someone who wouldn't normally be apt to regular spammer techniques (like, say, a pitchman or a salesman) can come in and produce essentially the same result for the recipient. It's like the keyword following that's rampant on Twitter now, but now, you have people telling you exactly who to target.
Hugh Briss
· 1 month ago
How is it that you think spammers will target you on Twitter? They can't send you a spam DM unless you follow them and they already send tons of @ reply spam tweets. I get several @ reply spam messages a day already where spammers just ad 3 @ names to each tweet and send hundreds or thousands of them before their accounts are suspended. Following your logic, the only difference now might be that those @ reply spams might actually be for something that is appropriate.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
I don't discriminate between unsolicited pitches or messages that are irrelevant to my interests and unsolicited pitches or messages that happen to intersect with my interests (or at least my interests as defined by someone else). Both are unwelcome forms of spam, and Twitter lists do nothing to help alleviate that problem, and actually make it easier for more people to do it.
Hugh Briss
· 1 month ago
And yet you didn't answer my question. Just how is this spam going to be sent to you? In my experience spammers make use of hash tags for the most part and they fill the trending topics with their garbage. The other way is to send tweets to multiple @ names which is already being done. So as I said, except for the fact that the @ reply spam may be more targeted if they target a list, I doubt it's going to increase because of lists. The only thing this might make easier is to target the recipients a bit better but there's no reason why lists need to alleviate the problem and I seriously doubt they will ad to it.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
Twitter doesn't exist in a bubble, and spammers don't use just Twitter to spam people. Lists are analogous to concepts that exist in other communication media that have been exploited by spammers to great success. When trying to make a cold sale, the most important part is to close quickly so you can move onto the next prospect: one way to do that is to play the law of large numbers, and spam tons of people indiscriminately in hopes that there's a certain percentage that convert. You can increase that conversion ratio by knowing more about the prospect, but finding information to create a buy-in takes time.
With lists, that information becomes trivial to obtain: that's true not just for Twitter lists, but for email lists, phone lists, and professional lists. The danger with any targeted list is that it's inconvenient to unrealistic to get your name removed from them. Twitter had (and still has) an opportunity to improve upon this heinous sales tool and provide convenient and non-drastic ways for people on those lists to get out of it, but it didn't. That sucks, it's misguided, and should give anyone who hates the crap they've gone through with communication media before Twitter cause for concern.
The method by which someone spams you isn't interesting to what I'm arguing. All unsolicited messages are bad, whether they're DMs, @replies, or other means.
Christopher F Clark
· 1 month ago
As I said in my other comment, I work for Intel as a network security researcher, but these opinions are mine and not Intel's.
So, you're suggesting someone will use a twitter list to put you in a demographic category and from that list choose to spam you through another avenue, say email. Unless someone has very tight demographic categories that give high sales rates that isn't going to be cost effective. The point is lists don't give spammers a new way to send you unsolicited messages. At best they give them better ways to find certain target audiences. However, there are lists being sold (very cheaply mind you) that give better data on demographics that are known to be interesting.
Your comment about targeting influencers may have some relevance. I am here on twitter because Intel hopes I will find interesting security workers to interact with. Can I use lists to find such tweeps? Yes, that looks a little easier. Can I send them unsolicited messages? Well, no. I can follow them and hope they follow me back. I can tweet or RT interesting security information and hope they read it, either directly or by someone RT'g me. But, I can't actually spam them. There is no way through twitter to send them an unsolicited message--yes an @ message goes to their mentions folder, but they still have to read it and doing just a little of that will get me blocked and barred from twitter. Can I get an email address from a twitter name? Maybe, but not directly from twitter. So, if you have an issue about spam on twitter, make @ messages opt-out-able, so people can't send you info unless you follow them. That's a better way to stop twitter spam directed at you.
Note, I don't deal here with your other points, and I think your consent point is valid, just not for this reason.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
Hey Christopher, thanks a lot for your comments, it gave me a lot to think about. One of the things email spam did was force people to change their email behaviors in how they categorize or store email messages: you couldn't just get all messages sent to an email address, you had to do some sort of filtering to make sure the unwanted stuff didn't come to you. I'm sure that's generally "the way it is" for most people, but to me, that's broken.
The spam problem on Twitter reflects that fall from grace: I can't use Twitter the way I want to not because of a technical problem, but because unscrupulous people have (or in the case of Twitter Lists, I argue will) use it in a way that forces me to use it in a way that protects me from spamming. You mention that @ replies aren't that big of a deal because they go into a separate mentions folder, but that's one way people handle mentions. For example, I get @ mentions via iPhone push notifications and via growl messages: they come to me and alert me so I make sure I respond to legitimate people who are trying to get ahold of me via Twtter.
With the rise of @ mention spam, I can't do that anymore, or if I do, I'm a sucker because of all the @ mention spam and who want to sift through spam? I have to change my behavior, or someone has to come out with essentially a spam filter for Twitter.
There's an argument to be made, and I think most people have accepted it, that technology is just a series of behavior modifications: you're always going to have to change how you think and how you act in order to use the latest technology. To me, that's a fundamentally broken concept: technology works for us, not the other way around. I believe Twitter has the opportunity to improve upon this facet of communication, and the way they did it implements it more or less the same way it's been implemented for the better part of a century.
I do like the idea of @ replies only getting to you if you've subscribed to a person: other companies have been floating that around for asynchronous connections (FriendFeed, a while back, was thinking of allowing an option to prevent people commenting on your feed unless they were subscribed to you), but Twitter doing that would be a really great thing.
Obviously, putting those sorts of barriers up flies directly in the face of a free and open internet where anyone can say anything to anyone else, or find information freely (like you being able to find and interact with other security workers freely). I'm not sure how to reconcile the two seemingly incompatible philosophies of creating a world based on trust and creating a world where everything is Free.
Christopher F Clark
· 1 month ago
Thank you. Your point about changing behavior is very valid and since I don't get any twitter traffic on my phone didn't realize the issue. However, one slowly is going to have to change the behavior anyway. I'm sure the spammers are going to discover the @ trick--in fact, I'm sure they have given some of the @ mail directed at me. So, being able to privatize @ is an important issue by itself. But, still the list service certainly may speed that process up. Hopefully, the twitter folks will realize that consent is important and incorporate it (into not only lists, and @ messages, but all their future offerings). To me one of the advantages of twitter is that is primarily an opt-in model. They've already established a good precedent for that. You (mostlyh) have to follow to receive info, and if you make your page private, you have to consent to people hearing from you. Thus, the system allows opt-in behavior on both sides. That is a good thing. Getting them to expand that policy is a better thing.
Christopher F Clark
· 1 month ago
Oh, and another thing to technology and adapting. Your ideal of technologies that don't force us to adapt may be laudable. However, very few technologies actually have had that characteristic. When the car was invented, everyone had to adjust to its intrusion into their life, even if they didn't drive. Only two nuclear bombs were ever dropped, but they changed everyone's impression of warfare and gave us all fears we will never escape. Video games have exposed young people to levels of violence that books never could have, and have even changed our taste in movies. Technology and "progress" almost always inconvenience someone and that isn't an excuse not to consider those effects and to try and mitigate them, but the genie is so far out of the bottle on the changes social media is causing that we need to adapt to it generally, while trying to determine how to mold it to our needs.
And, that gets to the heart of my point above. The users of twitter were already finding ways to force people into the public conversation and will continue to do so. However, if we (the users of twitter, even if just a vocal minoruity of them) get twitter to place some controls, we will actually have better control than we would have had with the pure organic growth that was happening. With twitter, there is one point of control, with tweepml and the competitors that were bound to spring up, we would have had to make the issue many-many times.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
That's a great point, Christopher. You've given me a lot to think about with your comments, I really appreciate it.
kmskala
· 1 month ago
Like anything, lists need to be taken with grain of salt. Most will be ego boosts and people trying to chum one another. I don't think lists will be a "game changer". Too subjective
ptamaro
· 1 month ago
People make way too much hay about Twitter. It ain't no big thing. Really...
Matt B
· 1 month ago
But you can just block people, which removes you from their list. You can also set the list private. i think it may bring in a few spammers, but we've had spammers almost since twitter was released. there are a few downsides to this new feature, but mostly good things. it can help me get tweets from friends and family without the tech and design tweets getting in the way, or the other way round.
~@MattBrox
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
I've responded with what I think about blocking being the only action I can take within Twitter to opt-out, but to your point about making a list private: I can't, as a member of a list, make that list private. Only the list creator can.
Christopher F Clark
· 1 month ago
As a network security researcher for Intel, I worry a lot about privacy and safety concerns, but I don't make recommendations on Intel's behalf about them. These opinions are purely mine.
The point about categorization without consent is an interesting one. However, even without lists I was finding myself on #FollowFriday lists of people I hadn't heard of and weren't my followers. So, that problem is bigger than lists. Now, that we have lists, at least we have the option of pressuring twitter to make the behave like we want. I find it hard to believe that if people press twitter for an opt-out/remove-me feature for lists, twitter won't oblidge.
I'm not sure how we will deal with libel and slander via list memebership--e.g. the suspected sex offenders list. Someone will certainly sue someone over that soon enough. At least in that regard we don't have anonymous lists. Someone has to make the categorization (the list owner), so someone is responsible and that responsibility is being tracked at least to some level.
However, as to the spam issue, I'm not sure I accept the argument. The only tweets you receive are the ones you select to receive, either by following a person, or looking at your mentions column. Now, having people mention you without permission is an issue, but again it was an issue before lists. It seems like solving that would take a separate feature--a way to opt-out of being mentioned by people you aren't following and who aren't following you. And, while I agree spam is an issue on twitter--it is less so than on email, because you have more control over what you receive and it is harder to carpet-bomb twitter readers, than email addresses because of the opt-in points mentioned.
As a security worker I am more worried that someone will crack twitter in such a way that they can send mass-spam messages like they do on email. I also worry more that someone will find ways of getting viruses distributed via twitter--I've seen the proof-of-concepts on the last and they frighten me a lot. Both of those seem higher risk issues than the list feature. The one list issue I do worry about is the clever criminal/miscreant who manages to create a list that seems like it follows interesting people, but gets some kind of bot/trojan/virus user on the list and gets people duped into following it and it exposes us to malware.
Finally, I want to talk about whether lists will make twitter more a one-way communication vehicle. I'm not sure I buy that. There are certainly people on twitter today using it as a one-way communication device, getting on to hawk whatever viewpoint or ware they happen to be pushing. However, twitter is still opt-in in that regard, one simply chooses not to follow such people. The related question is: will lists make a few people have a higher concentration of listeners? Maybe. However, my feeling is that lists will actually democratize twitter to a certain extent. There are already tools that tell us who the most followed tweeps are and also the ones who tweet on specific issues. Famous people are always easy to find. What lists give us is a way to mention many more tweeps who happen to move people, the logical extension of #FollowFriday.
In my case, it will help me find other security researchers who have said something interesting enough once that someone noticed them. Those people are hard for me to find. Those are the people I hope to dialog with. Am I going to immediately follow everyone on every security/tech list? No, I don't trust every list writer yet. But, I think I will be able to follow a lot more interesting people by finding lists on the right topic and of the right size (I don't want to add 100 people to my friends in one swoop, 10-20 maybe.) And, I will get those new friends through the democracy of user generated lists.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
I tried to respond about the spam issue in my other comment, but that's a good point about #FollowFriday, and thinking about it, lists and FollowFriday both point to a behavior that I'm not sure is welcome or necessary in the natural evolution of communication. That is, there's a minority of people who have an idea that everyone, whether they consent to it or not, ought to be part of a global conversation, and these tools allow us to prod and push them into the conversation regardless of their consent.
It's probably the Burkean conservative in me, but I think it's something that we ought to step back from and decide, as a whole, whether those people are right. I'm not convinced that they are, and would hope Twitter and other social media companies would try to capture how most people want to communicate (or as you put it, if enough people speak out about it, Twitter will behave we want). Facebook, for all its apparent faults, I think got that concept, much to the dismay of a lot of people.
As I said in the other comment, maybe these are two philosophies that are irreconcilable, but I would hope that they're not, as that smart companies like Twitter can take the time to find how to satisfy both rather than implement a feature that alienates one.
Regarding one-way communication of Twitter, I'm not sure I buy that either. The standard use has always been two way, and I don't see how lists change that at all: you can't broadcast to lists.
Finally, there's something appealing about the democratization of lists, but as an outsider to a particular field, let's say if I was an outsider to technology, I have no idea what list, of the thousands of "tech people" and variant lists out there, I'm supposed to follow. Maybe that's functional: to force people to rely on a separate, third party source to identify the best list, but I go back to my wish that Twitter had and has an opportunity to progress this concept and they didn't.
Christopher F Clark
· 1 month ago
One last small point. I agree with the thousands on tech-lists being a "problem".
However, I have a "simple" solution for that, the same one I use currently for links. I only will explore lists of people I already know and trust, just like I only explore links from people I know and trust (and I never pass on a link I haven't verified is valid, contains useful into, etc.). If one starts from one's own web-of-trust and builds out slowly, life will be mostly safe. And, that's definitely the introvert in me talking, because that's our general approach to life.
I think in the twitter world, you are forced to use third party sources (and have to decide which third party sources one trusts). So, I'm sure that getting on mashable's list of tech gurus will be highly prized status, because it will confer almost instant stardom.
However, I myself will look to see if there aren't smaller lists from people I know with more tightly focused topics--I already found one (a cloud researcher I know listed his cloud resources and I found other researchers I respected on it), so I made that list my FollowFriday for the week--and even it was a little long. I'd like lists of 10-20 people ideally, as those are the amount I can absorb in a week. If I add too many new friends, I find I don't really follow all of them, which for me defeats the two way part of the conversation.
Oh, well, so much for it being one small point--it started as such....
Christopher F Clark
· 1 month ago
worth noting: I've just seen the first "spam" list. It's simply a list of what appear to be bot accounts attached to a teaser presumably bot account. This first attempt looks pretty blatantly poor, but it won't take long for the spammers to get more sophisticated.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
Well that didn't take long, did it?
susanoshea
· 1 month ago
I utilize Twitter to direct people to My Space Music, which, to me, is the most legitimate site, as they always let you know when you're being threatened, and your copyright remains your own! I can't work out Twitter for the life of me! I will definitely avoid lists here as much as I avoid Facebook, as Facebook (it's in their fine print!) OWN your work as soon as you put it on there. I'm no computer whiz, but I DO read fine print. Would love you to drop by, as for the life of me, apart from leaving funny ha ha comments, I haven't worked out HOW to communicate with anyone else here!
susanoshea
· 1 month ago
I wouldn't go near lists. My main site is myspacemusic, and I direct people there. It's the oldest and most legitimate site, as, unlike Facebook, my copyright stays Mine, where anything posted to Facebook becomes theirs! (it is in their fine print!) Apart from Tweets, I don't have a clue what else to do with this! If you can enlighten, that would be great, but check out myspace.com/susanoshea to get an idea of who I am and what I do! I'm perfectly safe!
Frank Divergent L.
· 1 month ago
I can see some of your concerns about visibility for those that choose to make their lists public (private is an option, too). However, If I am a hardcore ESF/EFL Twit, then being able to see Larry Ferlazzo's EFL list or Clay Burrel's EFL list helps me to locate my educational community of interest more easily. I can then grow my lists to be more powerful and meaningful to me.
I will continue to watch for any issues related to visibility. I would rather have lists than not have them. I don't really care too much how other's categorize me ... as they say, "Stick and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." Although not entirely true, that's my story for now. We already have sex industry and other repugnant types (drug traffickers, etc.) Twits that follow us and their followed Twitters are easily visible even before the advent of lists. I simply block those morons.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
Indeed. The sex industry (and other repugnant types, as you call it) is the use case that sparked me to think more on this and eventually write this post. Let's say there's a person who buys some porn online or something like that. They've already given up their email address in that transaction, which is then used to find that person on Twitter. So far, it's no different than what's occurring now: they get followed by a sex peddler bot, and that's that. Who's following a person doesn't really matter. Now, with lists, that bot can classify that person as (likes-sex-act-that-really-shouldnt-be-made-public, or bought-this-porno-were-trying-to-get-other-people-to-buy) and thus what was once private becomes embarrassingly public.
That level of transparency may be great for public figures, but seems wrong for private people. Then there's also libel and irrelevant spam, as I talked about in my post. My main point is that Twitter is allowing others to modify your profile and how your profile talks about you (that is, it's allowing others to classify you publicly) without your consent. That's something it didn't allow before, and it's something that should be thought about before diving head first in.
Adam Backstrom
· 1 month ago
How is this any different from someone calling you a child molester on Blogger, or Delicious, or a hundred other sites that host user-generated content?
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
My argument distinguishes between saying things in your own space, that is, if you wanted to call me a jerk on your own Twitter profile, I have no problem with it. The difference between that use case and lists is that the lists show up on my profile, meaning it crossed from your name being attached to the comment about me (and you taking all the responsibility for saying it) to your comment being attached to my name, largely anonymously, without my consent.
I don't deny that there are other services that act largely in the same way, and I'd say that any time that happens, without proper controls like the ones I outlined, it's wrong.
Christopher F Clark
· 1 month ago
After this discussion, in my opinion the privacy and consent issues alone mean we should get twitter to modify the list functionality. As a result, I've tweeted out the following plea to twitter (and if you agree, I'd appreciate the RT).
@Twitter plz give us way 2 remove self from lists + block others frm adding us w/o our permiss (f u agree, plz RT #stopbots)
tattooed_mummy
· 1 month ago
I like that but I used #listdanger as #stopbots is in use for something else
kcarruthers
· 1 month ago
This is just like complaining because the people at work are talking about you in the corridor without your consent.
tattooed_mummy
· 1 month ago
no it's not - because that is temporary - said and gone, this is like writing a comment on a person you know so all can see it! and also putting the comment on a notice board.
kcarruthers
· 1 month ago
so the behaviour is not changing but the nature of medium is - it is going from ephemeral to (semi) permament
tattooed_mummy
· 1 month ago
I've been added to a list BY A FRIEND that listed my location, which I don't want to be public. If someone adds me while I'm away from twitter I could be listed for days or weeks as something I am not or do not want to be known as. Lists are nasty in the hands of nasty people, and so Twitter should make them safer - on the whole and in the hands of most they are fun and silly, but they could encourage spam, vigilante attacks etc etc
Blocking is not the answer as it's retrospective, and while my friend may remove me on request they may think i'm being silly and not do it - thus meaning I have to block them, not fun.
Christopher F Clark
· 1 month ago
The retroactive pt is key here. Yes, you can get yourself removed from a list, by force (blocking) if you have to. But, it puts the onus on the person who doesn't want listed. That is an opt-out model. Twitter has been quite good at doing things primarily on an opt-in basis. Look at protected tweets. You can be on twitter and decide who reads your tweets--that's opt-in. You can also be on twitter and totally public. We just need the same thing for being on a list. You should be able to be on twitter, but not publicly listed in various groups, not without your control. That's all--and not having to continuously check what lists one has been added to. Similarly, look at how twitter sends you mails of new followers--I use that to quickly block certain tweeps (the Britney's) I don't want to follow me at all. Twitter makes effort to help you keep your follower list "clean" and again, you can lock it entirely simply by protecting your tweets. We are just asking for the same thing here.
Kenneth Younger III
· 1 month ago
Your friend could have accidentally outed you on any blog, he just chose Twitter. I agree that consent for profile placement would make it obvious that you did not approve of that list, and therefore in your instance might not give credibility to the information about your location. It would also make it a lot harder to find.
Kenneth Younger III
· 1 month ago
CURRENTLY, you can @reply ANYONE on twitter without their consent, which would show up in a public search if the person tweeting had a public stream. My handle is @kenny, and I can't tell you the number of tweets that people (especially new to twitter is seems) direct at me accidentally. I sometimes wonder if someone were to do research on me, if these tweets could get confused with all those that are actually aimed at me.
Twitter is blogging, just at a small scale. I could make a list on my blog with as many people on it as I wanted, all for the world to see. I will agree that the difference in this instance is that those list are automatically placed on your profile as if they are approved by you.
Mark Trapp
· 1 month ago
My argument centers around the lists showing up on my profile without my consent, not that people are talking about me without my consent. Remove the lists from being attached to me (via my profile), and there is not much of an issue: @replies and blog lists are attached to the people who created them, not the person they're about. My profile, on any service, should be my domain alone.
Kenneth Younger III
· 1 month ago
Understood, but my point stands. Allow people to make lists that are public. That can be done on any blog anywhere. I could create a douchebag list on my blog and put you on that list (not that I think you are :). Everyone in the world could see that I put you on that list. That would be no different than a public twitter list system.
Again, the critical difference, as you pointed out (and I agree is the really big failure here) is the inability for required consent to place on profile.
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2. not true
3. if you don't want to be on a list it's the same as being followed in someone's profile, simply block the list owner and the problem is solved.
Sorry, but this whole post is way off base.
2. I suggest you check again. Every profile has a link to the lists that person has been placed on.
3. Please read my update, and the discussions I linked to. I discussed, in detail, how boneheaded blocking a person is to solve this problem.
Before making accusations of things being off base, I suggest you do some fact checking.
I'm sorry to be a little harsh on your home court, but lists are far from dangerous.
I sense that this is going in circles, and that you worry so much about privacy, spam and intrusions that social media might not be the best place for you. And I say that with not a trace of sarcasm, judgement or bitchiness, I say that with sincerity and the hope to help.
In other words, Twitter just went from a being a more social many-to-many medium to a more hierarchical one-to-many medium, bit like the old unsocial media model we've been leaving behind.
Of course people aren't going to disappear from Twitter overnight, and I'm sure the service will continue to grow, however, the long term implications of lists seem really ill-concieved to me.
Probably the reason for this big hole was a perception that even if a list is public, the primary consumer of the list is the person who created it. I created my lists with that thought in mind. But now that the lists are out, the new game is to find the coolest lists, and list competition may get worse than the competition to get into Studio 54 back in the day. Until Studio 54 jumps the shark, and you're stuck on a "I liked Gossip Girl's first season" list or something horrible like that.
Perhaps the best solution would be the ability to remove yourself from any list - a mini-block, as it were.
With lists, that information becomes trivial to obtain: that's true not just for Twitter lists, but for email lists, phone lists, and professional lists. The danger with any targeted list is that it's inconvenient to unrealistic to get your name removed from them. Twitter had (and still has) an opportunity to improve upon this heinous sales tool and provide convenient and non-drastic ways for people on those lists to get out of it, but it didn't. That sucks, it's misguided, and should give anyone who hates the crap they've gone through with communication media before Twitter cause for concern.
The method by which someone spams you isn't interesting to what I'm arguing. All unsolicited messages are bad, whether they're DMs, @replies, or other means.
So, you're suggesting someone will use a twitter list to put you in a demographic category and from that list choose to spam you through another avenue, say email. Unless someone has very tight demographic categories that give high sales rates that isn't going to be cost effective. The point is lists don't give spammers a new way to send you unsolicited messages. At best they give them better ways to find certain target audiences. However, there are lists being sold (very cheaply mind you) that give better data on demographics that are known to be interesting.
Your comment about targeting influencers may have some relevance. I am here on twitter because Intel hopes I will find interesting security workers to interact with. Can I use lists to find such tweeps? Yes, that looks a little easier. Can I send them unsolicited messages? Well, no. I can follow them and hope they follow me back. I can tweet or RT interesting security information and hope they read it, either directly or by someone RT'g me. But, I can't actually spam them. There is no way through twitter to send them an unsolicited message--yes an @ message goes to their mentions folder, but they still have to read it and doing just a little of that will get me blocked and barred from twitter. Can I get an email address from a twitter name? Maybe, but not directly from twitter. So, if you have an issue about spam on twitter, make @ messages opt-out-able, so people can't send you info unless you follow them. That's a better way to stop twitter spam directed at you.
Note, I don't deal here with your other points, and I think your consent point is valid, just not for this reason.
The spam problem on Twitter reflects that fall from grace: I can't use Twitter the way I want to not because of a technical problem, but because unscrupulous people have (or in the case of Twitter Lists, I argue will) use it in a way that forces me to use it in a way that protects me from spamming. You mention that @ replies aren't that big of a deal because they go into a separate mentions folder, but that's one way people handle mentions. For example, I get @ mentions via iPhone push notifications and via growl messages: they come to me and alert me so I make sure I respond to legitimate people who are trying to get ahold of me via Twtter.
With the rise of @ mention spam, I can't do that anymore, or if I do, I'm a sucker because of all the @ mention spam and who want to sift through spam? I have to change my behavior, or someone has to come out with essentially a spam filter for Twitter.
There's an argument to be made, and I think most people have accepted it, that technology is just a series of behavior modifications: you're always going to have to change how you think and how you act in order to use the latest technology. To me, that's a fundamentally broken concept: technology works for us, not the other way around. I believe Twitter has the opportunity to improve upon this facet of communication, and the way they did it implements it more or less the same way it's been implemented for the better part of a century.
I do like the idea of @ replies only getting to you if you've subscribed to a person: other companies have been floating that around for asynchronous connections (FriendFeed, a while back, was thinking of allowing an option to prevent people commenting on your feed unless they were subscribed to you), but Twitter doing that would be a really great thing.
Obviously, putting those sorts of barriers up flies directly in the face of a free and open internet where anyone can say anything to anyone else, or find information freely (like you being able to find and interact with other security workers freely). I'm not sure how to reconcile the two seemingly incompatible philosophies of creating a world based on trust and creating a world where everything is Free.
And, that gets to the heart of my point above. The users of twitter were already finding ways to force people into the public conversation and will continue to do so. However, if we (the users of twitter, even if just a vocal minoruity of them) get twitter to place some controls, we will actually have better control than we would have had with the pure organic growth that was happening. With twitter, there is one point of control, with tweepml and the competitors that were bound to spring up, we would have had to make the issue many-many times.
there are a few downsides to this new feature, but mostly good things. it can help me get tweets from friends and family without the tech and design tweets getting in the way, or the other way round.
~@MattBrox
The point about categorization without consent is an interesting one. However, even without lists I was finding myself on #FollowFriday lists of people I hadn't heard of and weren't my followers. So, that problem is bigger than lists. Now, that we have lists, at least we have the option of pressuring twitter to make the behave like we want. I find it hard to believe that if people press twitter for an opt-out/remove-me feature for lists, twitter won't oblidge.
I'm not sure how we will deal with libel and slander via list memebership--e.g. the suspected sex offenders list. Someone will certainly sue someone over that soon enough. At least in that regard we don't have anonymous lists. Someone has to make the categorization (the list owner), so someone is responsible and that responsibility is being tracked at least to some level.
However, as to the spam issue, I'm not sure I accept the argument. The only tweets you receive are the ones you select to receive, either by following a person, or looking at your mentions column. Now, having people mention you without permission is an issue, but again it was an issue before lists. It seems like solving that would take a separate feature--a way to opt-out of being mentioned by people you aren't following and who aren't following you. And, while I agree spam is an issue on twitter--it is less so than on email, because you have more control over what you receive and it is harder to carpet-bomb twitter readers, than email addresses because of the opt-in points mentioned.
As a security worker I am more worried that someone will crack twitter in such a way that they can send mass-spam messages like they do on email. I also worry more that someone will find ways of getting viruses distributed via twitter--I've seen the proof-of-concepts on the last and they frighten me a lot. Both of those seem higher risk issues than the list feature. The one list issue I do worry about is the clever criminal/miscreant who manages to create a list that seems like it follows interesting people, but gets some kind of bot/trojan/virus user on the list and gets people duped into following it and it exposes us to malware.
Finally, I want to talk about whether lists will make twitter more a one-way communication vehicle. I'm not sure I buy that. There are certainly people on twitter today using it as a one-way communication device, getting on to hawk whatever viewpoint or ware they happen to be pushing. However, twitter is still opt-in in that regard, one simply chooses not to follow such people. The related question is: will lists make a few people have a higher concentration of listeners? Maybe. However, my feeling is that lists will actually democratize twitter to a certain extent. There are already tools that tell us who the most followed tweeps are and also the ones who tweet on specific issues. Famous people are always easy to find. What lists give us is a way to mention many more tweeps who happen to move people, the logical extension of #FollowFriday.
In my case, it will help me find other security researchers who have said something interesting enough once that someone noticed them. Those people are hard for me to find. Those are the people I hope to dialog with. Am I going to immediately follow everyone on every security/tech list? No, I don't trust every list writer yet. But, I think I will be able to follow a lot more interesting people by finding lists on the right topic and of the right size (I don't want to add 100 people to my friends in one swoop, 10-20 maybe.) And, I will get those new friends through the democracy of user generated lists.
It's probably the Burkean conservative in me, but I think it's something that we ought to step back from and decide, as a whole, whether those people are right. I'm not convinced that they are, and would hope Twitter and other social media companies would try to capture how most people want to communicate (or as you put it, if enough people speak out about it, Twitter will behave we want). Facebook, for all its apparent faults, I think got that concept, much to the dismay of a lot of people.
As I said in the other comment, maybe these are two philosophies that are irreconcilable, but I would hope that they're not, as that smart companies like Twitter can take the time to find how to satisfy both rather than implement a feature that alienates one.
Regarding one-way communication of Twitter, I'm not sure I buy that either. The standard use has always been two way, and I don't see how lists change that at all: you can't broadcast to lists.
Finally, there's something appealing about the democratization of lists, but as an outsider to a particular field, let's say if I was an outsider to technology, I have no idea what list, of the thousands of "tech people" and variant lists out there, I'm supposed to follow. Maybe that's functional: to force people to rely on a separate, third party source to identify the best list, but I go back to my wish that Twitter had and has an opportunity to progress this concept and they didn't.
However, I have a "simple" solution for that, the same one I use currently for links. I only will explore lists of people I already know and trust, just like I only explore links from people I know and trust (and I never pass on a link I haven't verified is valid, contains useful into, etc.). If one starts from one's own web-of-trust and builds out slowly, life will be mostly safe. And, that's definitely the introvert in me talking, because that's our general approach to life.
I think in the twitter world, you are forced to use third party sources (and have to decide which third party sources one trusts). So, I'm sure that getting on mashable's list of tech gurus will be highly prized status, because it will confer almost instant stardom.
However, I myself will look to see if there aren't smaller lists from people I know with more tightly focused topics--I already found one (a cloud researcher I know listed his cloud resources and I found other researchers I respected on it), so I made that list my FollowFriday for the week--and even it was a little long. I'd like lists of 10-20 people ideally, as those are the amount I can absorb in a week. If I add too many new friends, I find I don't really follow all of them, which for me defeats the two way part of the conversation.
Oh, well, so much for it being one small point--it started as such....
My main site is myspacemusic, and I direct people there. It's the oldest and most legitimate site, as, unlike Facebook, my copyright stays Mine, where anything posted to Facebook becomes theirs! (it is in their fine print!) Apart from Tweets, I don't have a clue what else to do with this!
If you can enlighten, that would be great, but check out myspace.com/susanoshea to get an idea of who I am and what I do! I'm perfectly safe!
I will continue to watch for any issues related to visibility. I would rather have lists than not have them. I don't really care too much how other's categorize me ... as they say, "Stick and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." Although not entirely true, that's my story for now. We already have sex industry and other repugnant types (drug traffickers, etc.) Twits that follow us and their followed Twitters are easily visible even before the advent of lists. I simply block those morons.
That level of transparency may be great for public figures, but seems wrong for private people. Then there's also libel and irrelevant spam, as I talked about in my post. My main point is that Twitter is allowing others to modify your profile and how your profile talks about you (that is, it's allowing others to classify you publicly) without your consent. That's something it didn't allow before, and it's something that should be thought about before diving head first in.
I don't deny that there are other services that act largely in the same way, and I'd say that any time that happens, without proper controls like the ones I outlined, it's wrong.
@Twitter plz give us way 2 remove self from lists + block others frm adding us w/o our permiss (f u agree, plz RT #stopbots)
Blocking is not the answer as it's retrospective, and while my friend may remove me on request they may think i'm being silly and not do it - thus meaning I have to block them, not fun.
Twitter is blogging, just at a small scale. I could make a list on my blog with as many people on it as I wanted, all for the world to see. I will agree that the difference in this instance is that those list are automatically placed on your profile as if they are approved by you.
Again, the critical difference, as you pointed out (and I agree is the really big failure here) is the inability for required consent to place on profile.