Live data from Hacker News

Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

blog.gcg.me

71–80 of 139 posts

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#71

better question: does it produce a full follow ie- if i did this bug, would billgates actually see me in his stream? OR does it just increase the follower count+i show up on his sidebar. if its the former, then wow. I know they're clearing it out now, but somebody must have been using this for a while.

I tried it between my main account and a disused one and tweets from the attacking account showed up both through the web interface and through the API.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#72
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have written a script to follow 1000 users on my niche every day. I find that around 15% of users follow me back. In the next couple of days, I remove the rest 85%. I have been doing this for a few months now and I have a few thousand followers on a few twitter accounts. I have set up websites for each of those niches and get decent amount of traffic though twitter. Been banned the first few times, but I have found…

Please stop doing that. It's bad for the world.

Please stop caring. Its bad for your blood pressure.

Seriously, it's only Twitter. Conflict, famine, and poverty are bad for the world, but Twitter doesn't matter.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, is there anybody whose career took off due to this bug? For example, a musician who got signed primarily because all of the top 50 music producers were following him on twitter.

I have written a script to follow 1000 users on my niche every day. I find that around 15% of users follow me back. In the next couple of days, I remove the rest 85%. I have been doing this for a few months now and I have a few thousand followers on a few twitter accounts. I have set up websites for each of those niches and get decent amount of traffic though twitter. Been banned the first few times, but I have found…

Incidentally, the 15% that follow you back are the ones you are least likely to engage in any meaningful manner beyond "click this link plz."

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#77

I wonder if they are going to be able to undo this. Do they have a two sided log of the follow process? If it's just one-sided, they may be able to fix the bug but not to reverse the damage.

I suspect the Summize technology is better than they let on, and they can just do a search for tweets starting with "accept." I doubt there are many legit ones like that.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#78

I would guess this exploit has always been possible until today? What's interesting is that someone has probably been wielding this secret power well before it got outed here on hacker news.

That's true for a lot of shortcuts, hacks, and tricks. People will only tend to reveal tricks if they have no economic value to them (or if using them is so illegal that they'd prefer the fame and respect than the jail time ;-))

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad plan to try this out with an account you value - if they can identify who has used the exploit they will probably ban you when the dust settles.

Is it an exploit or is it a valid command? I don't think we hacked anything, we just typed in some text that causes people to follow us, for all we know that's a new feature of twitter.

No matter what twitter planned for it, it's an exploit. Users think that only they can control who follows them, but this feature gets around that.
Post reply on HN