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Twitter Should Shut Me Down

edu.mkrecny.com

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Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#121

Post by pdeuchler »

tomkarlo wrote: post #111
pdeuchler wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

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…

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) Note: "indiscriminately"

I wasn't aware of the emails, I haven't received one and I've been favorited before.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#122

Post by scrabble »

wpietri wrote: post #90
scrabble wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

People do need to learn that their actions can have negative outcomes as well as positive.

This is also not something that is just happening to these people. They are taking an active part by deciding to follow someone.

I certainly don't belong to the school of thought that says you should never experience a negative outcome.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#123

Post by TylerE »

lucaspiller wrote: post #105
TylerE wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For $20/month they'd probably spend more on the accounting infrastructure and payment gateway than they'd generate. It's like (snail) mailing someone a bill for $0.25.

Amazon seem quite happy to charge me $0.50 a month, and they seem to be doing alright.

Yes, but that's Amazon's core business. It's not Twitter's core business.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#124

Post by darkarmani »

unreal37 wrote: post #67

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 to fake a human interaction (favorite) in order to get my attention and get me to follow you. It doesn't matter that it's more effective than "Twitter Ads". Twitter Ads are marked as Ads, your favorites are not. I really do hope Twitter shuts you down, as well…

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.

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....

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#125

Post by PaulHoule »

kmfrk wrote: post #27
PaulHoule wrote: post #7

Yeah, it's really hard to get in touch with anybody at Twitter. My account has been hosed for two weeks, I log in and just get an error message -- once I log in I can't even view the help page. And of course, there's no option on their forms for the problem I'm actually having. I've been thinking about sending a fax to their number for law enforcement queries since somebody might at least see it before they throw it…

Even the AP Twitter accounts are taking eons to bring back from suspension. Twitter haven't exactly streamlined that process, to say the least.

Honestly I don't know if I'm suspended or not.

I'm certainly not getting a message saying that I am, but I could be hellbanned in some special way.

It definitely makes me question if Twitter is going to be part of my life and the web sites I make in the future though.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#126

Post by moskie »

scrabble wrote: post #72
unreal37 wrote: post #67

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 to fake a human interaction (favorite) in order to get my attention and get me to follow you. It doesn't matter that it's more effective than "Twitter Ads". Twitter Ads are marked as Ads, your favorites are not. I really do hope Twitter shuts you down, as well…

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.

"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.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#127

Post by orangethirty »

Yeah, this sort of thing isn't new. You just never hear about it due to how well it works. The OP has actually made a lot of people angry by making this public (not me, though). There are other ways to game these platforms. Twitter is actually quite susceptible in other ways (not telling). Anyhow, next time be smart about posting stuff like this. There are quite a lot of bad people gaming these platforms. A mistake and you could be on the cross hairs of a botnet.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#128

Post by smtddr »

mkrecny wrote: post #96
unreal37 wrote: post #67

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 to fake a human interaction (favorite) in order to get my attention and get me to follow you. It doesn't matter that it's more effective than "Twitter Ads". Twitter Ads are marked as Ads, your favorites are not. I really do hope Twitter shuts you down, as well…

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.

I respect you because you admit that you're probably violating Twitter's TOS and you even posted to HN about it so you're not trying to be sneaky like click-fraud schemes. If Twitter doesn't shut you down after this, you deserve every penny you make. Just make sure you save that money, don't go buying a bunch of stuff you don't need.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#129

Post by tomkarlo »

pdeuchler wrote: post #121
tomkarlo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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) Note: "indiscriminately" I wasn't aware of the emails, I haven't received one and I've been favorited before.

No, not "or ads on Gmail". Gmail doesn't create ads that pretend to be email messages.

The whole point here is that it's a mis-use of a messaging channel - they are leveraging the fact that users _don't_ expect favoriting to be a form of advertising, they expect it to be a message from an actual human being that has favorited their post because they like it. (Similar to the problems with follower spam.)

(I'd also point out that ads on web sites at least help subsidize user's free usage of those web sites, so there is an indirect benefit to the user that isn't there in the case of spam.)

You may have your Twitter notices already turned off - I get emails from them when someone favorites or replies to my tweets, as well as notifications from their app.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#130

Post by alphakappa »

MartinCron wrote: post #117
mkrecny wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I agree - It degrades the experience of the product (in this case, Twitter) for the users.

There are versions of this approach all over Instagram too - I 'll wake up to a large number of favorites, only to find out that most of them were bots. (Although, with the OP's approach, the accounts that are favoriting this are real accounts, so I wouldn't be able to tell easily by going to their profile)

If I get a favorites notification, I want to go go their profile and find out if they share similar tastes. If it's just an automated system, they have ruined this for me by lowering the signal-to-noise ratio.

Regardless of how innovative this is, Twitter shouldn't get any flak if they decide to shut him down.

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