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Organically Increase Your Followers With the Twitter API and a Little Python

43 points by jwmoz 13y ago

pieterhg 13y ago
I've tested this before and while it works incredibly well, essentially it's just gaming the system by spamming favorites. If everyone would do this (and they will when more services start popping up that offer to automate this), everyone's Twitter notifications would turn into a spamhaven of fake favorites.
kevinconroy 13y ago
Auto-Favorite Tweets to Trigger Automated Emails to Thousands of Twitter Users and Hope Lots of them Follow You
- jere 13y ago
  It does seem kind of spammy, but to play devil's advocate: 1) At least the favorites are related to the account. I get favorites from spam bots all the time with seemingly no connection to anything. 2) I might be wrong, but I believe by default emails are only sent if the favorites come from people you already follow. So it clogs up your "Connect" tab, but not your inbox.
  - omershapira 13y ago
    Yes, this form of social engineering is just a minor annoyance. Still, there are multiple ways of making the world a better place if you only had those 15 seconds of attention back.
  - jamesbritt 13y ago
    "I might be wrong, but I believe by default emails are only sent if the favorites come from people you already follow. So it clogs up your "Connect" tab, but not your inbox." The thing is, I'm more interested in knowing about new people who favorite a tweet of mine than people I already follow. So I've set the notifications to 'Anyone'. Sadly, this has become largely spam, i.e. useless.
omershapira 13y ago
I, uh, one question please. How is making something that farms humans for time and influence – while deceiving them into believing they're interacting with a human – sit with you morally? Is it part of any future you'd like to imagine, on the receiving side?
- jwmoz 13y ago
  It's hardly preventing me from sleeping at night.
cruise02 13y ago
This seems to be farming of a sort, but I don't know if I would call it organic.
- jwmoz 13y ago
  Automatically organic.
  - cruise02 13y ago
    Is that a thing? I think organic in this context implies that a person is in the loop taking an action somewhere. Don't get me wrong. I can think of a couple of legitimate uses for this, so I don't think it's a 100% scammy tactic. I just wouldn't call it organic.
GauntletWizard 13y ago
Anytime I notice this going on, I report the account as a spammer, and you should too.
- jamesbritt 13y ago
  Tweet-favoriting is an insidious form of twitter spam. What's weird is that almost all favoriting done by someone I don't recognize is done on a tweet that is many weeks old. It's always bullshit.
BigBalli 13y ago
you can do the same thing within your browser. simply open the desired search on twitter.com (such as https://twitter.com/search?q=giacomoballi.com https://twitter.com/search?q=giacomoballi.com) and then paste the following in the address bar: javascript:allFavs=document.getElementsByClassName("favorite");for(var a=0;a<allFavs.length;a++){allFavs[a].click();}
swanson 13y ago
This is basically what FollowGen[1] does. HN discussion of when the guy that built FollowGen wrote about how Twitter should shutdown his app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5607186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5607186 [1]: https://followgen.com/ https://followgen.com/
rockin 13y ago
There is tools that do that for you incl conversion monitoring and more sophisticated targeting. Check: http://audiencebuildr.com http://audiencebuildr.com
antoinec 13y ago
Use the streaming api, instead of the search, and favorite every targeted tweet with a 20s-60s delay, that's incredibly efficient.
- jwmoz 13y ago
  Nice.
shrikant 13y ago
Unfortunately, the spammers have already figured this one out before James. Nearly every tweet of mine that has certain product or service keywords gets favourited by a spambot or two attempting to grab eyeballs. (I also vaguely recall a front-page article about this on HN a year or so back..)
jmduke 13y ago
I think the best analogy for something like this is getting coupons/ads/"special offers" in the mail. They aren't sent out completely indiscriminately (good distro strategies will use a fair amount of segmentation), but they're not exactly bespoke. You're basically shoving your content into a traditionally high-signal-to-noise ratio arena, hoping that the mismatch works in your favor. Still, there's nothing incredibly malicious about it besides the fact that its annoying and is a signal that you're a low-value brand. Besides, some people really like leafing through a valpak; similarly, if a customer sees your favorite, clicks on your handle and decides you're worth the follow, what's the harm? If you're a company or startup seriously considering doing this, consider two things: 1. Think about the mechanics behind a drip campaign. You don't want to inundate your users; you don't want to annoy them; you don't want to overgeneralize them. One of the difficulties of these auto-favoriting campaigns is that a favorite is a very low-value, low-information interaction; have you thought about creating multiple accounts and working on a reply queue system (just as one would create multiple email campaigns to target different consumer segments?) 2. What would the potential consequences be if someone posted a blog post about you using these tactics, and that post got a lot of coverage? Would it be worth the extra few hundred followers? (Honestly, in some cases, yes! But in other cases -- particularly if you're targeting developers -- probably not.)
ultimoo 13y ago
It's about time that Twitter did something about this 'favorite-spam' problem.
dohertyjf 13y ago
I still find it amazing that people respond with a "thanks for favoriting" tweet. I get it when someone shares out your link, but favoriting? Who really knows why someone has favorited - it could be so that they remember it later, so that it pushes to their Pocket or Instapaper account (via IFTTT), or a multitude of other reasons. And yes, I agree with @ultimoo that Twitter needs to do something about this.
aleprok 13y ago
If you want bots and some real people to follow you who are trying the same. Join twiends.com it's a follower exchange and you get 10 credits per day for visiting the site which equals 5 twitter followers. If you want to play ugly actually use the exchange and few weeks later some mass unfollow tool. This is pretty damn ugly way to get followers and I know it because I did it almost two years ago and in a month gained around 10k followers, afterwards I stopped doing it and the follower count has slowly been degrading. Though if you want actual followers who discuss with you. Follow those tags and reply on their tweets. Some might actually enjoy that you replied to them even though you are not following them and start following you.
hippich 13y ago
just tried for fun this technique (with node.js + twit + 7 lines of code). My account was suspended within an hour. Probably i choose too popular words or something, but Twitter do stop this type of interaction.

43 points by jwmoz 13y ago

I've tested this before and while it works incredibly well, essentially it's just gaming the system by spamming favorites. If everyone would do this (and they will when more services start popping up that offer to automate this), everyone's Twitter notifications would turn into a spamhaven of fake favorites.

kevinconroy 13y ago

Auto-Favorite Tweets to Trigger Automated Emails to Thousands of Twitter Users and Hope Lots of them Follow You

jere 13y ago
It does seem kind of spammy, but to play devil's advocate: 1) At least the favorites are related to the account. I get favorites from spam bots all the time with seemingly no connection to anything. 2) I might be wrong, but I believe by default emails are only sent if the favorites come from people you already follow. So it clogs up your "Connect" tab, but not your inbox.
- omershapira 13y ago
  Yes, this form of social engineering is just a minor annoyance. Still, there are multiple ways of making the world a better place if you only had those 15 seconds of attention back.
- jamesbritt 13y ago
  "I might be wrong, but I believe by default emails are only sent if the favorites come from people you already follow. So it clogs up your "Connect" tab, but not your inbox." The thing is, I'm more interested in knowing about new people who favorite a tweet of mine than people I already follow. So I've set the notifications to 'Anyone'. Sadly, this has become largely spam, i.e. useless.

omershapira 13y ago

I, uh, one question please. How is making something that farms humans for time and influence – while deceiving them into believing they're interacting with a human – sit with you morally? Is it part of any future you'd like to imagine, on the receiving side?

jwmoz 13y ago
It's hardly preventing me from sleeping at night.

cruise02 13y ago

This seems to be farming of a sort, but I don't know if I would call it organic.

jwmoz 13y ago
Automatically organic.
- cruise02 13y ago
  Is that a thing? I think organic in this context implies that a person is in the loop taking an action somewhere. Don't get me wrong. I can think of a couple of legitimate uses for this, so I don't think it's a 100% scammy tactic. I just wouldn't call it organic.

GauntletWizard 13y ago

Anytime I notice this going on, I report the account as a spammer, and you should too.

jamesbritt 13y ago
Tweet-favoriting is an insidious form of twitter spam. What's weird is that almost all favoriting done by someone I don't recognize is done on a tweet that is many weeks old. It's always bullshit.

BigBalli 13y ago

you can do the same thing within your browser. simply open the desired search on twitter.com (such as https://twitter.com/search?q=giacomoballi.com https://twitter.com/search?q=giacomoballi.com) and then paste the following in the address bar: javascript:allFavs=document.getElementsByClassName("favorite");for(var a=0;a<allFavs.length;a++){allFavs[a].click();}

swanson 13y ago

This is basically what FollowGen[1] does. HN discussion of when the guy that built FollowGen wrote about how Twitter should shutdown his app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5607186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5607186 [1]: https://followgen.com/ https://followgen.com/

rockin 13y ago

There is tools that do that for you incl conversion monitoring and more sophisticated targeting. Check: http://audiencebuildr.com http://audiencebuildr.com

antoinec 13y ago

Use the streaming api, instead of the search, and favorite every targeted tweet with a 20s-60s delay, that's incredibly efficient.

jwmoz 13y ago
Nice.

shrikant 13y ago

Unfortunately, the spammers have already figured this one out before James. Nearly every tweet of mine that has certain product or service keywords gets favourited by a spambot or two attempting to grab eyeballs. (I also vaguely recall a front-page article about this on HN a year or so back..)

jmduke 13y ago

I think the best analogy for something like this is getting coupons/ads/"special offers" in the mail. They aren't sent out completely indiscriminately (good distro strategies will use a fair amount of segmentation), but they're not exactly bespoke. You're basically shoving your content into a traditionally high-signal-to-noise ratio arena, hoping that the mismatch works in your favor. Still, there's nothing incredibly malicious about it besides the fact that its annoying and is a signal that you're a low-value brand. Besides, some people really like leafing through a valpak; similarly, if a customer sees your favorite, clicks on your handle and decides you're worth the follow, what's the harm? If you're a company or startup seriously considering doing this, consider two things: 1. Think about the mechanics behind a drip campaign. You don't want to inundate your users; you don't want to annoy them; you don't want to overgeneralize them. One of the difficulties of these auto-favoriting campaigns is that a favorite is a very low-value, low-information interaction; have you thought about creating multiple accounts and working on a reply queue system (just as one would create multiple email campaigns to target different consumer segments?) 2. What would the potential consequences be if someone posted a blog post about you using these tactics, and that post got a lot of coverage? Would it be worth the extra few hundred followers? (Honestly, in some cases, yes! But in other cases -- particularly if you're targeting developers -- probably not.)

ultimoo 13y ago

It's about time that Twitter did something about this 'favorite-spam' problem.

dohertyjf 13y ago

I still find it amazing that people respond with a "thanks for favoriting" tweet. I get it when someone shares out your link, but favoriting? Who really knows why someone has favorited - it could be so that they remember it later, so that it pushes to their Pocket or Instapaper account (via IFTTT), or a multitude of other reasons. And yes, I agree with @ultimoo that Twitter needs to do something about this.

aleprok 13y ago

If you want bots and some real people to follow you who are trying the same. Join twiends.com it's a follower exchange and you get 10 credits per day for visiting the site which equals 5 twitter followers. If you want to play ugly actually use the exchange and few weeks later some mass unfollow tool. This is pretty damn ugly way to get followers and I know it because I did it almost two years ago and in a month gained around 10k followers, afterwards I stopped doing it and the follower count has slowly been degrading. Though if you want actual followers who discuss with you. Follow those tags and reply on their tweets. Some might actually enjoy that you replied to them even though you are not following them and start following you.

hippich 13y ago

just tried for fun this technique (with node.js + twit + 7 lines of code). My account was suspended within an hour. Probably i choose too popular words or something, but Twitter do stop this type of interaction.