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Twitter shuts down Fame for unspecified ToS violation

28 points by acak 15y ago

shasta 15y ago
What's the difference between this and a real person retweeting what the winner says?
- spullara 15y ago
  Nothing. I suggested in a comment on the first story about @fame that they ought to just retweet whatever the winner tweets for a day. It is the same thing but better for all.
j_s 15y ago
"Twitter has informed us that we are violating the spirit of their TOS." "We actually don't violate any particular rule, it was simply an arbitrary decision that we aren't aligned with the spirit of what they want." Keep it classy!
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
witten 15y ago
"This is one of the great tensions of the web era we are living in and increasingly so as the open web grows. We actually don't violate any particular rule, it was simply an arbitrary decision that we aren't aligned with the spirit of what they want." I found this quote interesting, particular the phrase "open web". A single site like Twitter, which can arbitrarily shut down accounts based on alleged TOS violations, seems very distinct from a truly open, federated web.
- chimeracoder 15y ago
  > a truly open, federated web. Keep in mind, we're talking about a single website (among many) with a proprietary, non-open, non-free codebase, so the contrast shouldn't be surprising. If we were talking about a similar-but-open-source service like Identi.ca, this would play out very differently.
apike 15y ago
The Twitter documentation forbids mass following and mass unfollowing. Spam of course is the main reason for this - not just blatant spam but people who follow hundreds of accounts to generate "is now following you" emails, and periodically purge people who didn't follow back. Still, Fame is entirely opt-in so it's not really clear to me what they didn't like about it. Two guesses: 1. it triggered or messed with automatic spam prevention heuristics. 2. it's all fun and games until Fame tries to monetize the mass following, and they wanted preempt that.

28 points by acak 15y ago

shasta 15y ago

What's the difference between this and a real person retweeting what the winner says?

spullara 15y ago
Nothing. I suggested in a comment on the first story about @fame that they ought to just retweet whatever the winner tweets for a day. It is the same thing but better for all.

j_s 15y ago

"Twitter has informed us that we are violating the spirit of their TOS." "We actually don't violate any particular rule, it was simply an arbitrary decision that we aren't aligned with the spirit of what they want." Keep it classy!

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

witten 15y ago

"This is one of the great tensions of the web era we are living in and increasingly so as the open web grows. We actually don't violate any particular rule, it was simply an arbitrary decision that we aren't aligned with the spirit of what they want." I found this quote interesting, particular the phrase "open web". A single site like Twitter, which can arbitrarily shut down accounts based on alleged TOS violations, seems very distinct from a truly open, federated web.

chimeracoder 15y ago
> a truly open, federated web. Keep in mind, we're talking about a single website (among many) with a proprietary, non-open, non-free codebase, so the contrast shouldn't be surprising. If we were talking about a similar-but-open-source service like Identi.ca, this would play out very differently.

apike 15y ago

The Twitter documentation forbids mass following and mass unfollowing. Spam of course is the main reason for this - not just blatant spam but people who follow hundreds of accounts to generate "is now following you" emails, and periodically purge people who didn't follow back. Still, Fame is entirely opt-in so it's not really clear to me what they didn't like about it. Two guesses: 1. it triggered or messed with automatic spam prevention heuristics. 2. it's all fun and games until Fame tries to monetize the mass following, and they wanted preempt that.