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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

#121

Post by iamelgringo »

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…

Dude, the ad hominem is really out of line.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#122

Post by simonw »

akadruid wrote: post #72
drp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#123

Post by simonw »

tibbon wrote: post #18

Wondering if there will be repercussions for people using this, or if they are able to track it? They aren't able to keep a lot of logs due to the volume.

My understanding is that they log pretty much everything using Scribe and run analysis using Hadoop and Pig (based on a talk by Kevin Weil and NoSQL EU the other week) http://www.slideshare.net/kevinweil/nosql-at-twitter-nosql-e...

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#124

Post by swombat »

iamelgringo wrote: post #121
swombat wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dude, the ad hominem is really out of line.

An ad hominem, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument toward the person" or "argument against the person"), is an attempt to persuade which links the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise. The ad hominem is a classic logical fallacy.

It's not an ad hominem, it's an outright insult. I am not attacking his character to win an unrelated argument. I am just attacking his character.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#125

Post by axod »

chc wrote: post #116
axod wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem like a bug to me, it looks like a poor design choice. How many other "special" tweet commands are there? edit: anyone downmodding care to suggest how putting "accept[username]" in a tweet would be considered a 'bug'?

It's not that writing "accept [username]" is a bug — the bug is that you can use it to accept people who haven't asked to follow you. Similarly, OK buttons in dialogs are not a bug, but it would be a bug if they all had the same effect as the OK button in the dialog "Are you sure you want to erase your boot drive?"

I still don't understand what you're saying.

It's obviously not a bug. It's a hidden feature. An easter egg. A floor in their design.

They didn't "accidentally" make a special command in tweets that can cause others to follow you. They specifically intended for it to be that way.

Suggesting it's a "bug" is silly. Suggesting they "fixed the bug" is misleading.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#126

Post by 146 »

tibbon wrote: post #18

Wondering if there will be repercussions for people using this, or if they are able to track it? They aren't able to keep a lot of logs due to the volume.

> They aren't able to keep a lot of logs due to the volume.

That's pretty much untrue.

Anyway, I don't imagine it's too hard to grep the logs for the last day's worth of POST and 'accept .*' and undo all the follows constructed from that.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#127

Post by ohashi »

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…

You're not the first or last, I know I used scripts like this in the past (smaller scale). There were even services built around it back a while ago... the names elude me but they offered 10 or 20 new followers per day based on keyword. It was a good way to add relevant people as you used it.

FYI: twitter did fix this problem somewhat. After 2000 following you need to have a ratio within 10%. So following 2001 (or was it 2002) requires 1800 followers. This strategy only works for the first 2000. Presumably, he's got to clean up quite a few times before breaking past this, an easier solution would be drop it down to 1000 or even 500, something no normal person would add in a day (but even I have found cases where I add more than this in a day legitimately - within a small niche I do business, to add everyone relevant it's around 700-900 I think).

Finally, how do you find the traffic quality? From what I've seen it's crap. I've pushed ~1 million clicks in the last 2 months or so and it's pretty worthless in my experience. I think are a lot of bots and stat services just hitting it, definitely not real traffic.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#128

Post by senko »

axod wrote: post #125
chc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that writing "accept [username]" is a bug — the bug is that you can use it to accept people who haven't asked to follow you. Similarly, OK buttons in dialogs are not a bug, but it would be a bug if they all had the same effect as the OK button in the dialog "Are you sure you want to erase your boot drive?"

I still don't understand what you're saying. It's obviously not a bug. It's a hidden feature. An easter egg. A floor in their design. They didn't "accidentally" make a special command in tweets that can cause others to follow you. They specifically intended for it to be that way. Suggesting it's a "bug" is silly. Suggesting they "fixed the bug" is misleading.

Except if in fact it's an artifact of their SMS interface, which somehow got exposed, or was forgotten and not removed when needed. In which case I'd consider it a bug, not an bad but intentional decision.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#129

Post by gigantosaurus »

axod wrote: post #125
chc wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that writing "accept [username]" is a bug — the bug is that you can use it to accept people who haven't asked to follow you. Similarly, OK buttons in dialogs are not a bug, but it would be a bug if they all had the same effect as the OK button in the dialog "Are you sure you want to erase your boot drive?"

I still don't understand what you're saying. It's obviously not a bug. It's a hidden feature. An easter egg. A floor in their design. They didn't "accidentally" make a special command in tweets that can cause others to follow you. They specifically intended for it to be that way. Suggesting it's a "bug" is silly. Suggesting they "fixed the bug" is misleading.

They specifically made a feature that allows you to respond to follow requests by tweeting "accept username". The bug is not checking that the person has actually requested to follow you when processing that response.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#130

Post by ErrantX »

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…

Please feel free to post your Twitter account here so we can, um, "follow" you ;)
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