The problem is false positives. Graham's experience of combating spam involved writing a Bayesian filter for his mailbox. That's fine. Somebody misses a message and one of the two parties feels bad, but they eventually either catch up or get over it. You can't "leave" that platform.
Twitter, on the other hand, is pretty sensitive to false positives, and the vernacular is so unique that naive Bayesian filtering would destroy a lot of communities with their own vocabularies and languages. If messages start arbitrarily dropping on it, its users won't stick around.
Sure, you could absolutely knock out spam. It wouldn't be that hard. Because fighting spam isn't the hard part. It's dodging the problem of firing on innocent people that the spam is using as body shields that's the hard part.
They already get incredible volumes of criticism for what little false positives they already have. Imagine if it was normal to be put in a time-out box by a Bayesian filter that wasn't tailored for your community!
Combating spam is something that has very few possible upsides for twitter, and a catastrophic failure case. Right now, spam mostly tends to effect larger accounts, who are going to stay on the platform anyway, because it's where the people are. What little spam small accounts see is manageable, and they won't leave because of it because it's so insignificant. If suddenly they couldn't send messages to others at random and without warning? Why would they stick around, then?
I do believe Twitter isn't doing well at fighting spam, also that it's a pretty hard problem. But where do you think people will go after leaving Twitter? Is there an option?
Does it matter where they'll go? People will always find some spot on the internet to have conversations after a given platform hits the friction threshold, and some might not even go anywhere: They might just leave.
Where people will go doesn't really matter, because there are a billion places they can, and there's not always a clear migration path. Sometimes, a social platform just dies, and its communities form a diaspora on different platforms, without any "clear" successor (like what happened to Orkut), or just stop doing the whole social media thing (many Google+ contributors no longer post online anywhere).
My question was kinda selfish. I want to move now. If there are a billion places, please tell me so I can move there now before the masses arrive and even that gets ruined :)
There's no easy answer to this. A billion different places users could go doesn't mean they have active communities, and if I mentioned where I like to hang out on the internet, those areas would probably get ruined.
Instead, I'll mention two platforms some of my friends like, to avoid taking the cost of a ruined platform myself:
sqwok.im: This one is the most microblog-like of the two, but it's also the least conventional. The quality varies; the front page only looks good every once in a while.
tildes.net: This one is invite-only, which helps mitigate the masses jumping in somewhat, and is run by a former reddit administrator. The existing community isn't great, but it's good. Friendly enough people.
Twitter, on the other hand, is pretty sensitive to false positives, and the vernacular is so unique that naive Bayesian filtering would destroy a lot of communities with their own vocabularies and languages. If messages start arbitrarily dropping on it, its users won't stick around.
Sure, you could absolutely knock out spam. It wouldn't be that hard. Because fighting spam isn't the hard part. It's dodging the problem of firing on innocent people that the spam is using as body shields that's the hard part.
They already get incredible volumes of criticism for what little false positives they already have. Imagine if it was normal to be put in a time-out box by a Bayesian filter that wasn't tailored for your community!
Combating spam is something that has very few possible upsides for twitter, and a catastrophic failure case. Right now, spam mostly tends to effect larger accounts, who are going to stay on the platform anyway, because it's where the people are. What little spam small accounts see is manageable, and they won't leave because of it because it's so insignificant. If suddenly they couldn't send messages to others at random and without warning? Why would they stick around, then?