How-To Geek
How to Stop The Obnoxious “Top stories today by @yourname” Spam on Twitter
Lately I’ve noticed an annoying trend on Twitter—people constantly spamming your @replies feed with these posts saying that you were the top story on somebody’s feed. Very irritating, but here’s how to get rid of it.
If you aren’t familiar, here’s the obnoxious social network spamming feature from Paper.li, who have some sort of service that’s a combination of a personal Twitter newspaper and a spam-generating machine.
For the Love of FSM, Make It Stop!
According to their stop mentions page, all you have to do is tweet out a response to @NewsCrier like this:
@NewsCrier stop mentions
You can just to to the page, click the Tweet button..
And then you’ll be able to quickly make it stop.
One has to assume this will actually make it stop, but who knows if somehow they will add a new feature in the future to spam you.
Dear Paper.li Owners
Please make your service less annoying. Constantly getting spammed is frustrating, and it’s not a solid way to build a useful service.
Got Feedback? Join the discussion at discuss.howtogeek.com
Comments (14)
Programmer by day, geek by night, The Geek, also known as Lowell Heddings, spends all his free time bringing you fresh geekery on a daily basis. You can follow him on Google+ if you'd like.
- Published 10/1/10
you are right, I have not noticed it, I will inmediately stop my paper.li account, or find a way to stop it from sending the announce with my contributors @names menthioned.
re: for the love of FSM.
That took me just a moment — could NOT recall where I’d seen that… then it hit me: CFSM! Touched by His Noodly Appendage!
@MilesB
But of course. What else would it mean? =)
Pastafarianism FTW! :D
lol One man’s spam is anothers notification that their post was mentioned… So I suppose me Tweeting this is spam as well… so I wouldn’t want to do that you might end up in my paper,,, and offend you even more… *sigh* #shakeshishead
Sorry, I don’t consider it spam at all. Not sure why you’re so offended. I like seeing where my tweets end up. You need a hobby.
Oh, and how did I find this post? Through someone’s paper. I’ve never been here before so you gained a view at the minimum and you could have gained a reader. All because of a tweet that I was included in someone’s paper. Do you see the value now?
It’s obnoxious to have your @replies stream constantly bombarded with these posts when you didn’t ask for them. That’s the key problem – I didn’t ask for them.
Twitter already has a retweet feature built in that tells you when somebody else likes your post.
And you can still find people’s tweets via paper.li without them having to notify me about it. There’s absolutely no benefit to notifying me when I don’t want the notifications.
If it wasn’t for the obnoxious notifications I’d be a fan of their service.
Click name of spammer, -> block and report as spammer.
That’s all an easier.
Sorry, I agree with ‘Me’ and ‘Terry,’ I can’t see how this is annoying – I get them too and appreciate the mention.
> I can’t see how this is annoying
I use twitter for communicating with people (definitely not for self-promotion). Automatic notifications that tell me nothing more or less, almost every day, than ‘someone is subscribed to you’ are useless and irritating to me. I find it strange that you can’t empathise.
Does anyone know how to kill off your paper.li account? I guy I know found hardcore porn on his. Don’t need that stuff on mine.
I do not consider it spam. I appreciate the mention.
The paper.ly user has the option to auto-tweet or not.