A/

/ How Twitter Could Beat Spam

Quite simply, new accounts should not be allowed to have tweets with @replies in them show up in the streams of others, period.

The reason for this is because spammers use new accounts as throwaways from which to crawl name lists and @reply to people with links to their crap. Now, there’s a possible problem with this that my friend Sarven brought up: what if your friend joins Twitter and you want to see their @replies? Well, you could have a mechanism where a ‘trusted’ or proven account could vouch for a new one, or people could opt-in to @replies from a given account.

I know, it sucks, but we can all thank spammer scum for having to implement countermeasures to their crap.

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