#hadit Why #Twitter is Doing a Disservice to its Legit Users

Do you feel your user experience on Twitter has taken a nose-dive recently? I do. Why? Three words: Phishing, spam, and porn.

Before the usual barrage of "spammers are getting smarter," "you live with hacking online these days," let me say, "I know!" My gripe is, why haven't we heard from Twitter regarding these concerns. I haven't. If you have, please provide a link.

And this writing is intended to be a solution-seeking, constructive criticism. To give many users' concerns a voice, I started a petition:

http://act.ly/19h

This is my beef, and it's mainly related to porn on Twitter, specifically porn that shows up in my timeline from accounts I'm obviously not following.

My son will be 11 in December. We search on Twitter when he has school projects. We found the "vegetarian spider," "the tree-eating crab," the "smallest carnivorous dinosaur" in these searches. Or I'll favorite these posts to refer to later.

In other words, he looks at my stream, knows many of you by your username and is otherwise involved in my Twitter "life," even helping me decide who to follow-back.

One of these days he's going to be staring at the screen when that fellatio avatar shows up with its unsolicited nonsense.

This is not the way to serve your users.

Recently, Twitter has disallowed "recurring tweets." Obviously, a filtering system has been implemented.

I don't claim any technical or software know-how. I do know Twitter has virtually unlimited access to a community that does.

If our tweets can be and are filtered, then how come the letters Brit.n.ey can't be?!

In fact any account created with certain flagged words can be immediately put under review, or disallowed on the spot. This way, it's handled at the root level.

It's not just about my son. I'm offended too.

What Twitter has done so far, albeit passive, is to include a new option on the gear wheel next to an account which blocks it and notifies Twitter that it's inappropriate. That's only effective when checking out your followers.

It doesn't stop porn from showing up in your stream.

As for all the recent phishing scams in direct messages...I tweeted the other day that a CAPTCHA could be included when we DM someone. It's only one little extra step for us. I'm pretty certain that these phishing DMs are the work of bots, and that's exactly what a CAPTCHA is designed to prevent.

I get cynical when I read that Twitter raised $35 million in February and yet there's no communication regarding justifiable concerns from us, Twitter's legit users. I'm not a cynical person, and simply want to enjoy my friends on Twitter.

It seems that with the recent funding, Twitter is under pressure to monetize and thus all development in the last few weeks has been about getting us to spend more time on Twitter's web interface. This is partially why lists have been introduced and the reinvented retweet function is in beta testing.

It always baffels me when a company, any company, grows without addressing fundamentals. And for a communiction platform, Twitter sure is quiet about phishing, spam, and porn.

At least reassure us. Put up a few blog posts. Tell us what's in the works to decrease accounts and activity that make legit users cringe.

I know spam, hacking and porn is hard to deal with, that perpetrators are scummy pestilence, but c'mon!

Are you fed up with all the unsavory accounts and activity in your stream on Twitter? Do you have to hide your screen from your kid because a fellatio avatar may pop up any moment? Are you unwittingly sending phishing DMs to your friends and being assaulted by spam DMs yourself?

Please sign this petition:

http://act.ly/19h

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