On February 20th, Pinterest has upped its game against spam, announcing that they have cut the number of Pinners who click on spam in half during the last six months. The company says that the amount of spam reported has “nose dived” so low that the metric is practicably nil.
Pinterest says that the system that they put into place can respond twice as fast to internal spam request. “Our system’s ability to successfully respond to bad behavior improved from 95 percent to 99.99 percent,” writes Pinterest “Black Ops” manager Marty Weiner. Previously, dismantling an attack would take four hours to an entire day, but now can be dealt with in milliseconds.
This anti-spam effort was a result of a system that Pinterest began building last year called Stringray. Stringray is a stream processor and rule engine that can pre-empt spam attaacks.