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Twitter Should Shut Me Down

edu.mkrecny.com

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Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#161

Post by Odin9 »

adventured wrote: post #59

The problem with the approach of wanting to get caught, is the assumption that Twitter is going to care whether your approach is superior to their Twitter Ads approach. They will not care, judging by their past history. They'll most likely shut you down and go about their business with Twitter Ads. These days Twitter is an extraordinarily rigid company when it comes to anything outside their borders.

He knows he will be shut down with or without this blog post. Twitter already knows about him.

The purpose of this blog post is to save what little of his reputation is left by making it seem like he's redeeming himself. He isn't. He's waiting for Twitter to shut him down while he keeps making money as a spammer.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#162

Post by AznHisoka »

scrabble wrote: post #119
AznHisoka wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So by your logic, you have no problem with email spammers because the people who fall for their spam get what they deserve?

There's a big difference between being notified that someone favorited a tweet and an email spammer that is attempting to replicate an official email or is lying about a situation. Favoriting a tweet has no connection with "Hey, I tweet about stuff that you are interested in so you should follow me." It's not even a request for someone to follow you.

Is there a difference between a bot favoriting your tweet, and spam that claims to saw your facebook profile, and wanting to sell you something? Both are lies, and intended to get your attention.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#163

Post by samweinberg »

ritchiea wrote: post #108
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 see where you're coming from but let's put this another way: If a service simply pulled a list of tweets from users that you might be interested in there's nothing wrong with that, correct? It's just curating a list of tweets for you. There's also nothing stopping you from favoriting them all to get the most attention from those users. But when the human act is entirely faked it's spam. And I agree. But it's also a…

I wouldn't say it's a slight distinction. Humans may be able to behave like bots by mass-favoriting tweets, but they will never be able to achieve the volume that bots do.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#164

Post by samweinberg »

ritchiea wrote: post #108
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 see where you're coming from but let's put this another way: If a service simply pulled a list of tweets from users that you might be interested in there's nothing wrong with that, correct? It's just curating a list of tweets for you. There's also nothing stopping you from favoriting them all to get the most attention from those users. But when the human act is entirely faked it's spam. And I agree. But it's also a…

I wouldn't say it's a slight distinction. Humans may be able to behave like bots by mass-favoriting tweets, but they will never be able to achieve the volume that bots do.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#165

Post by unreal37 »

bradleyjoyce wrote: post #100

I'm (somewhat) surprised by the lashing out and negativity towards the service in many of the comments. Any product or service can be used for evil by evil people. I've used Myles' service. It works amazingly well. So well, in fact, we looked at using his API to integrate the functionality into Socialyzer. We ended up not coming to terms and we built some scripts to do this for ourselves internally. We use this funct…

Does (somewhat) surprised mean that you know it's kinda spammy and are willing to ride that grey area til it gets shut down?

Or you think it's just a super clever (and cheap) way to get around actually paying Twitter to promote your posts?

How effective it is doesn't enter into the equation really.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#166

Post by unreal37 »

jonknee wrote: post #50
niggler wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they acquire him when they could shut him down and replicate the service? It's not like they have much of a reputation to maintain. He doesn't have extremely significant traction (otherwise they would have done something by now) and AFAICT he doesn't hold any patents. To clarify: I don't mean to disparage him, but acquisitions have to bring some sort of value to the acquirer.

He is monetizing Twitter in a way that advertisers like better than what Twitter's own advertising department came up with. That has to be worth something to a company desperate for revenue.

Forget ads, advertisers would love to be able to pay to increase their follower counts. Like a force follow feature.

Make it $1 for every follower, straight-up no ads or nothing. For $100,000 I can get 100,000 more real human followers on my account. Advertisers would love that better than promoted tweets or bot favorites.

But is that good for the users?

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#167

Post by shurcooL »

tomkarlo wrote: post #129
pdeuchler wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poi…

Personally, I mostly use favouriting tweets for my own personal needs only - to bookmark some things. My behaviour would be unchanged if favouriting became private and no one was notified that I favourited their tweet.

Sometimes, if I really like a tweet, I'll favourite it because I have no other way to say +1 (other than replying to it). But I must like it enough to want to sacrifice the integrity of my bookmarks.

Based on what I'm reading here, it seems that people have wildly varying ways in which they use favouriting.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#168

Post by downandout »

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…

He's not a spammer, and the service actually benefits the tweet authors to some degree which cannot be said for spam. Favorite counts are posted publicly, which at least theoretically adds to the user's credibility. Additionally, the accounts doing the favoriting will have some real followers, and those followers will see the favorite and might retweet or favorite it themselves.

Given these facts, I'm not sure how many Twitter users actually care if the favorites they receive are genuine or not. The reality is that few users on Twitter are real anyway. We once paid thousands of dollars for a tweet to go out to millions of followers of a celebrity. The cost wound up being about $207 per collected email address for a free newsletter that was highly targeted to that celebrity's followers. We got tons of hits to the link, but approximately 94% of the traffic to the link posted was bot traffic. This was a celebrity that the ad network we used to purchase the tweet had rated as having extremely high follower engagement metrics - apparently they didn't bother checking user agents when determining this. If you want actual users listening to you, don't go to Twitter.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#169

Post by jdrobins2000 »

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…

This is: 1. spam, albeit targeted 2. intentionally deceptive 3. effective (because of #2 though)

Twitter may: 1. shut you down 2. offer you a job 3. give you nothing 4. see no benefit in letting you use their API. But depends on whether your idea for it adds value.

OP: 1. is innovative 2. probably didn't expect it to work so well 3. realizes as soon as they notice, he is toast 4. is trying to offer an olive branch 5. is likely doing some good, despite the deception

My advice to OP: 1. Use your innovation to subvert something that harms the public good, thereby making the world a better place. If you are really clever, you will figure out how to do this and make money too. 2. Keep thinking about this problem, and how you can do it in a honest way, which won't lead to abuse or dilute the value of the platform (any platform, not just Twitter).

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