Twitter's new 'followers' page reveals how spam-filled the community is

Twitter this morning launched a redesigned 'followers' page which reveals more than just the logo and name of your most recent followers. It also shows the most recent tweet and the location of your buddies. What in reality that has done is reveal how spam-filled the Twitter community is, and how much filtering out of the noise one needs to do to make Twitter valuable.

Here's what it looks like:

I've seen numerous articles recently about the make-up of the Twitter community as a whole (here's The Guardian and TechCrunch) and it fits with my brief observation here.

I'd be interested to know if others are seeing a similar trend, or if anyone knows what Twitter is planning to do about this amount of spam.

Comments

[Justin Reid]

Yep, been seeing the same thing - often when I set up new accounts the followers list quickly fills up with spam and porn.

What I'd like to see is these accounts being REMOVED from the list when blocked...
I don't care if my follow list is some pitiful number if it's real - though I guess some might like the inflated numbers...

[Becky McMichael]

Bloody Hell Drew. I clicked on the link you tweeted this morning and I really wasn't prepared for the sheer volume of boobs I saw this morning when looking at my followers. :-)

I just struggle without the alerts to block spammers as I go so it ends up a fairly dull and boring job. gearing up for a cull sharpish though. Becks

[segat1]

I used to spend one day a week going through my followers and deleting spammers. Now, it's every 2 days :( . Spamming makes baby Jebus cry.

[Dirk Singer]

So much for the recent Harvard research about men not following women.

Simple explanation for the imbalance, a lot of the 'hot' AVs you see turning up on your followers list sadly are anything but!

[Ben Cotton]

I think you are spot on Drew... the levels of spam are making Twitter less and less useful. I like most, regularly go through and delete spam followers.