A Running CountAs many people have noticed, over the past year Twitter spam problem has become increasingly bad. [I decided today](https://twitter.com/joelhousman/status/91211190839164928) that I am going to start a running count on Twitter of each and every spam Tweet I get. Starting today.

There seems to be two types of spam tweets: replies and cold tweets.

Replies

With this type of Twitter spam, you only get spammed after you've recently tweeted. Send a tweet with many popular marketing-friendly words, such as iPad, iPhone, Apple, Mac, Loan, Money, Job, Bookstore, Cash, Gold, etc and you'll probably get a spam reply back trying to get you to click a link to some type of marketing related spam. This has gotten progressively worse in the past year. I feel this is the most harmful type of Twitter spam because it causes me to self-censor my tweets when talking about certain subjects to avoid getting spammed. I hate that. Twitter really needs to fix this.

Cold Tweets

More recently, within the past 6 months, I've started to get 2-5 of these a day. These "cold tweets" as I've taken to calling them is just an @reply with a link in it. I've never clicked on any of these so I don't really know what is on the other side of any of these links. This type of spam is annoying, but I get these whether I'm actively tweeting or not. My count so far (starting today): 1. What's yours? Tweet it. Yes, I know by my tweeting a number for each spam I receive is spamming, but I want to be active in complaining about this with the goal that if enough people complain, maybe Twitter will take a more active role in fixing the problem. I apologize in advance for the semi-spammy tweets from me counting upwards. Update: @joshtheoak, @macphotog and I discussed and came up with a normalized hashtag for these spam count tweets: #tootsagainstspam