9 ms·

This business model isn't analogous to "promoted tweets" or "Twitter ads". It's analogous to "email spam". You're a spammer essentially. Using an automated bot

• scrabble 14y ago
  I disagree. These are people who are following accounts because the accounts favorite a tweet of theirs. If you follow someone without looking into their profile and deciding if you are interested in their content then you get what you deserve.
  • unreal37 14y ago
    Just as if you click a link in an email without understanding who it's really from, you get what you deserve. So, spam works. It still doesn't make it morally right to trick people into following you.
  • AznHisoka 14y ago
    So by your logic, you have no problem with email spammers because the people who fall for their spam get what they deserve?
    • khafra 14y ago
      Not quite. Following people is always opt-in.
      • richardwhiuk 14y ago
        So is clicking on an email link.
        • nkorth 14y ago
          which are decidedly different things. By definition, the bigger problem with spam is receiving it, not clicking on it.
    • scrabble 14y ago
      There's a big difference between being notified that someone favorited a tweet and an email spammer that is attempting to replicate an official email or is lying about a situation. Favoriting a tweet has no connection with "Hey, I tweet about stuff that you are interested in so you should follow me." It's not even a request for someone to follow you.
      • AznHisoka 14y ago
        Is there a difference between a bot favoriting your tweet, and spam that claims to saw your facebook profile, and wanting to sell you something? Both are lies, and intended to get your attention.
  • wpietri 14y ago
    Ah, the "if the victim is that dumb, they deserve it" school of thought. Note that you can substitute all sorts of adjectives for "dumb". E.g., "those nerds are so unpopular they deserve to get beaten up". Or, "those people are poor enough that they deserve to live next to a toxic waste dump". Basically, it's a way of taking whatever characteristic you pride yourself on and then making yourself feel even better about it by enjoying when shitty things happen to other people.
    • mindcrime 14y ago
      Ah, the "if the victim is that dumb, they deserve it" school of thought. No, the "take responsibility for the outcome of your own actions" school of thought. Or do you think one should be able to wander through life, doing and saying anything one pleases, completely oblivious to your environment, and not expect bad things to happen sometimes?
      • wpietri 14y ago
        If the only thing you could imagine someone meaning is something obviously idiotic, you probably aren't imagining hard enough.
        • mindcrime 14y ago
          I could imagine a lot of things. I'm just trying to point out that you can't just absolve individuals from being responsible for the outcomes of their decisions. And that's not the same thing as saying "The victim was dumb, they got what they had coming to them".
          • rxantos 14y ago
            Bad judgement on one individual doesn't justify bad actions of another individual. A woman might choose to wear clothes that make her look sexy. But that doesn't justify a guy raping her. I agree that people act dumb. But that doesn't justify predatory behaviour.
  • nobodysfool 14y ago
    But the act of "looking into their profile" is valuable to the spammer. You get an ad when you do that. So, it doesn't matter if you follow them or not. If you do follow them, of course, it means they have direct access to send you ads. If you don't because you viewed their profile, you at least saw one of their ads.
  • moskie 14y ago
    "because the accounts favorite a tweet of theirs." I think this is incorrect. The intended purpose of "Favorites" is to communicate that a living, breathing person (as opposed to an "account," as you describe) saw my tweet, enjoyed it, and liked it enough to Favorite it. The OP's product fraudulently claims to Twitter users that the customers of this product are engaging in that action.
    • vshade 14y ago
      I use the favorites to mark something to read later, it means that I'm interested in some link that was posted but I wasn't in conditions to read at that time. The OP service is spammy but no one told me that the favorites should only be used in the way you describe.
      • moskie 14y ago
        The scenario you described sounds like exactly what I said, with different words. You, a living, breathing person, saw the tweet, enjoyed it to the point where you said you want to check it out later, enough such that you decided to favorite it. edit: The main point being that the intended purpose is to communicate that an actual person actively read the tweet, and for whatever their reasons, actively decided to favorite the tweet.
  • some1else 14y ago
    "You get what you deserve" Please don't use that rationale. Lots of people never get what they deserve, and pretty much nobody deserves the shit some people have to go through. Either way, there are some people who don't just follow back, so they don't deserve the spam even by your definition. Most people here can automate follows, favorites and similar interactions, but don't. Some of us would like to keep those meaningful.
• AznHisoka 14y ago
  I agree. The OP foolishly brought Twitter's attention to his schemes. They will probably shut it down due to the spammy nature, not because it competes with their ads.
  • Aqueous 14y ago
    I think he wants to be shut down because he feels guilty about being the last one standing despite being in clear violation of the TOS ( I suppose, though I haven't read the TOS and I'm not sure the author has either - can he point to which clause he is in violation of? )
    • wjy 14y ago
      If he wanted to be shut down over guilty feelings, he could, you know, just stop. So that's probably not it.
• mkrecny 14y ago
  OP here. Ultimately I want access to the Twitter Ads API, at which point I'll switch from favorites to serving promoted tweets/accounts. I think I've innovated on the Ads UX and the form which the impression takes is secondary. This is a surrogate impression. It has allowed me to build an Ads product and an Ads customer base in anticipation of Ads API access.
  • MartinCron 14y ago
    I think I've innovated on the Ads UX What you've done is move ads from the place where they're supposed to be (promoted tweets) to the place where they're not supposed to be (your interactions). Innovative spam is still spam.
    • maxbrown 14y ago
      I'll play devil's advocate to this one... you're saying "interactions" are places where ads aren't supposed to be? Isn't any interaction between a business and individuals on Twitter really marketing?
      • tomkarlo 14y ago
        Arguably, but there are social bounds to what's considered acceptable, as well as bounds enforced by Twitter to prevent abuse of the medium. Any phone conversation B2C is similar, but in general, we don't like businesses calling us on a false pretext just to get our attention. It's like those annoying snail mail envelopes designed to look like a federal government notice so you'll open them.
      • MartinCron 14y ago
        Even if all business->individual interactions are marketing, that doesn't mean that all marketing is spam. Marketing and customer engagement is fine. Spam isn't. The distinction for me isn't between marketing/non-marketing but between humans and robots. If a human representing some business favorites my tweet because they feel that it's worth favoriting, that's great. In fact, it makes me feel good that some human at an organization is reading and caring about what I have to say. Wonderful, I write things so people can read them. Robots just going out and marking things as favorites just to get attention and followers? That's the kind of spam actively undermines the value of the example above.
• pdeuchler 14y ago
  Meh. Doesn't seem any more offensive than a targeted ad on Amazon. It's just a favorite, after all. A subtle, "Hey, check us out." These are company/marketing/publicity accounts anyway (I'm assuming). It's not like followgen is masquerading around with a stolen identity like most follow bots, spitting out bit.ly spam with suggestive tweets and racy pictures. It's simply programmatically allowing twitter accounts to reach out to people who happen to fall into a statistical category. It's also important to remember that follow bots make it easy to follow-back via the "follow" link in notification emails. On an iPhone, to follow the account of someone who favorites my tweet I would 1) see the notification, 2) open the app, 3) select the interaction 4) select the user 5) follow the user (I count 3 interactions using the web app, already having the page loaded). If it truly is spam I can just ignore the notification, as opposed to having to block and report a follow bot. Rather ingenious, if I do say so myself. The favorite interaction has become increasingly important over the past year or so... I know friends (non-technical friends) who joined twitter recently who would rather get a favorite than a retweet, as a favorite feels more personal. This opposed to a retweet, which seem to be given out much more frequently than a year ago. It would also be pretty cool to be favorited by a recognizable name. Now that I think about it... could be a pretty useful recruiting tool, if targeted properly.
  • tomkarlo 14y ago
    It's an abuse of a messaging channel that degrades it for everyone to benefit a small number of parties. Similar to spam or telemarketing or chain mail. (Or, say, pollution. There's a mismatch between who the benefits accrue to, and who pays for it.) It's also leveraging the fact that twitter (for now) emails the original user to tell them their tweet was favorited. So it's essentially spamming by proxy. (Also, we've seen this before. It's just follower spam.)
    • pdeuchler 14y ago
      Or ads on GMail? Seems like with that definition you can define any sort of advertisement on a communication medium "spam". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic) Note: "indiscriminately" I wasn't aware of the emails, I haven't received one and I've been favorited before.
• ritchiea 14y ago
  I see where you're coming from but let's put this another way: If a service simply pulled a list of tweets from users that you might be interested in there's nothing wrong with that, correct? It's just curating a list of tweets for you. There's also nothing stopping you from favoriting them all to get the most attention from those users. But when the human act is entirely faked it's spam. And I agree. But it's also a pretty slight distinction we're making since humans can easily choose to behave like bots.
  • samweinberg 14y ago
    I wouldn't say it's a slight distinction. Humans may be able to behave like bots by mass-favoriting tweets, but they will never be able to achieve the volume that bots do.
  • samweinberg 14y ago
    I wouldn't say it's a slight distinction. Humans may be able to behave like bots by mass-favoriting tweets, but they will never be able to achieve the volume that bots do.
• darkarmani 14y ago
  You're talking to the guy that wiped the user table of a production database for an online game he was working on: http://edu.mkrecny.com/thoughts/how-i-fired-myself http://edu.mkrecny.com/thoughts/how-i-fired-myself. The meat of the story starts with this sentence: > One of the peculiarities of my development environment was that I ran all my code against the production database....
  • sbov 14y ago
    What's your point? That he worked at a company whose standard practice was to have developers run code in development against the production database? Without backups. Of course something is going to go wrong. IIRC this was already discussed on HN.
    • jasonlotito 14y ago
      > That he worked at a company whose standard practice was to have developers run code in development against the production database? His point is probably that professionals don't do that. It's not the companies fault he was working directly on the production database.
• patmcguire 14y ago
  If they algorithmically narrowed it down to a list of tweets that the brand should favorite, and someone on the other end picked one, is that spam? What if they narrow it down to one, and the human just clicks every single suggestion? How much human do you have to cut out for it to be spam?
• Felix21 14y ago
  Twitter actually has an entire team dedicated to killing spam. Their actually doing a pretty good job for the amount of spam they actually have to deal with. Once they figure out that people have started to use favorites to spam, they'll start killing those kind of spammers too.
  • unreal37 14y ago
    Much respect to people fighting spam. It's one of the greatest challenges of the Internet age.
• Odin9 14y ago
  This is detestable. I hope everyone can translate this blog post accordingly. If not, here it is: "I publicly acknowledge I'm wrong. I'm letting Twitter know they should shut me down, but I'm just going to keep riding while the money is hot. Everyone will think I'm a great guy because of this post and my reputation will be salvaged after I'm shut down." Spammers are the lowest. If the OP has any shred of dignity left he would shut down before Twitter can do that for him.
• downandout 14y ago
  He's not a spammer, and the service actually benefits the tweet authors to some degree which cannot be said for spam. Favorite counts are posted publicly, which at least theoretically adds to the user's credibility. Additionally, the accounts doing the favoriting will have some real followers, and those followers will see the favorite and might retweet or favorite it themselves. Given these facts, I'm not sure how many Twitter users actually care if the favorites they receive are genuine or not. The reality is that few users on Twitter are real anyway. We once paid thousands of dollars for a tweet to go out to millions of followers of a celebrity. The cost wound up being about $207 per collected email address for a free newsletter that was highly targeted to that celebrity's followers. We got tons of hits to the link, but approximately 94% of the traffic to the link posted was bot traffic. This was a celebrity that the ad network we used to purchase the tweet had rated as having extremely high follower engagement metrics - apparently they didn't bother checking user agents when determining this. If you want actual users listening to you, don't go to Twitter.
  • greyman 14y ago
    > Favorite counts are posted publicly, which at least theoretically adds to the user's credibility. Yes, but that's exactly the reason why OP's behavior can be labeled as spamming. You "theoretically" adds to the user's credibility, but by automated means, so the added credibility is actually artificial, which then diminish the value of "credibility by the number of favorites" for everyone.
    • downandout 14y ago
      I'm not sure it's possible to diminish the value of credibility on Twitter.
  • MatmosOfSogo 14y ago
    > those followers will see the favorite and might retweet or favorite it themselves Um, no they won't. Things you favorite don't show up to others unless they specifically go and look at things you have favorited.
• jdrobins2000 14y ago
  This is: 1. spam, albeit targeted 2. intentionally deceptive 3. effective (because of #2 though) Twitter may: 1. shut you down 2. offer you a job 3. give you nothing 4. see no benefit in letting you use their API. But depends on whether your idea for it adds value. OP: 1. is innovative 2. probably didn't expect it to work so well 3. realizes as soon as they notice, he is toast 4. is trying to offer an olive branch 5. is likely doing some good, despite the deception My advice to OP: 1. Use your innovation to subvert something that harms the public good, thereby making the world a better place. If you are really clever, you will figure out how to do this and make money too. 2. Keep thinking about this problem, and how you can do it in a honest way, which won't lead to abuse or dilute the value of the platform (any platform, not just Twitter).