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Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

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Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#91

Post by swombat »

HowardRoark wrote: post #89
drp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Instead of manually finding interesting people on my niche, I set my criteria and let my program do the dirty work for me. What's wrong with it? I don't even spam people. I send one link to my site per every 5 witty and inspirational quotes. A few people that I met over there have contributed to my site as guest bloggers. I am not doing anything evil - just automating something that I would hate to do manually.

You're a waste of space. I hope your accounts all get suspended. Witty and inspirational quotes? Wow, I guess your followers should feel blessed to find themselves at the receiving end of your awesome RSS'ed wisdom.

Spammers like you end up making people judge Twitter as "more spam" and giving it up before they've really tried it properly.

Your followers are probably more likely than normal users to give up Twitter because it's just pointless noise.

Simple utilitarian argument against what you're doing: if 10% of the Twitter population did what you do, Twitter would become mostly useless.

I really hope they write scripts to detect and ban you.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#93

Post by imack »

jarek wrote: post #73
HowardRoark wrote: post #69

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…

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."

I've often wondered how much influence one really gains doing the follow/unfollow method. I mean, I suspect most of these types are just "social media coaches" following other "social media coaches". I suspect most accounts that have roughly the same number of followers and following above 500 are like this. I'd be interested in seeing a CTR for links published like this (though, not so interested that I'd do this scummy thing). Really if you're following over a thousand people, are you really paying attention to any?

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#95

Post by symesc »

obsaysditto wrote: post #60

Its coincidental that Conan tweeted this message a couple days ago: "If it ever says I’m following more than one person, I’ve been hacked. I’m a completely monogamous Twitterer—I only follow Sarah Killen." http://twitter.com/ConanOBrien/status/13631062967

In the past couple minutes I watched Conan's page while his "following" list went from about 11 to 2 and then back to just Sarah.

Page refreshes were very slow. The elves are busy.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#96

Post by jacquesm »

HowardRoark wrote: post #69
rmorrison wrote: post #56

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…

Man that HN etiquette can feel limiting at times.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#97

Post by Tichy »

jarek wrote: post #73
HowardRoark wrote: post #69

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…

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."

Well if they always do as told, they are the perfect clients.

"Now buy this thing, plz".

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#98

Post by akadien »

swombat wrote: post #91
HowardRoark wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of manually finding interesting people on my niche, I set my criteria and let my program do the dirty work for me. What's wrong with it? I don't even spam people. I send one link to my site per every 5 witty and inspirational quotes. A few people that I met over there have contributed to my site as guest bloggers. I am not doing anything evil - just automating something that I would hate to do manually.

You're a waste of space. I hope your accounts all get suspended. Witty and inspirational quotes? Wow, I guess your followers should feel blessed to find themselves at the receiving end of your awesome RSS'ed wisdom. Spammers like you end up making people judge Twitter as "more spam" and giving it up before they've really tried it properly. Your followers are probably more likely than normal users to give up Twitter b…

For the sake of pointing out the obvious, Twitter already is mostly useless. Anything the previous poster can do to destroy the remainder, I'm all in favor of.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#100

Post by julio_the_squid »

yigit wrote: post #12

the user who found this says he was trying to tweet "accept pwnz" where accept is a music group name.

Yeah! BALLS TO THE WALL!

This is such an odd bug. I guess it goes to show that nobody knows what strange code which should have been removed four years ago lurks in the heart of Twitter.

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