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Twitter Should Shut Me Down

edu.mkrecny.com

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Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#171

Post by some1else »

pdeuchler wrote: post #98
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…

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…

No.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#172

Post by swanson »

So I tried out the service (followgen.com) today - targeting "#ruby", "software craftsmanship", "hacker news" and "software near MY_GEO_IP_THING" - because I was curious. It would be nice to have a bit more exposure to developers for things like technical blog posts and new projects, so why not?

It favorite'd several hundred tweets for me today (btw twitter makes it very hard to mass unfavorite, I had to write a bit of javascript). I got one new follower: a recruiter. Given the sub-one percent "conversion rate", I turned it off.

I'm not sure if I picked bad targets, or if more technical users are less likely to "follow-back". But, those were my results, do with them what you will!

edit: I'll add there were quite a few "misfires" that led me to favorite some rather strange tweets - particularly #ruby which I favorited several tweets about people's young children or pets named Ruby.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#173

Post by some1else »

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.

"You get what you deserve"

Please don't use that rationale. Lots of people never get what they deserve, and pretty much nobody deserves the shit some people have to go through.

Either way, there are some people who don't just follow back, so they don't deserve the spam even by your definition. Most people here can automate follows, favorites and similar interactions, but don't. Some of us would like to keep those meaningful.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#174

Post by zem »

catshirt wrote: post #106
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. You shouldn't have existed (or been allowed to) in the fist place.

did you read the article? or even the title for that matter? seems like what you are saying is crystal clear to OP.

yes, but the OP thinks he should have been barred on the grounds of cannibalising twitter's ad revenue, not on the grounds of spamming people's favourite notifications.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#176

Post by bradleyjoyce »

Caligula wrote: post #153
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…

So you spam favorite twitter too? You know you are breaking twitters tos just like the op and degrading the value of twitter the same way an email spammer degrades email?

De-valuing it for whom, exactly? Given the number of people who are following us back and registering for a service that is extremely relevant/important to them, it's hard to see how there is any degradation of value for anyone involved.

In fact, they are gaining value out of it.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#177

Post by bradleyjoyce »

unreal37 wrote: post #165
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.

To be honest I never even thought of the service as spammy, which is why I was surprised to read so much of that in the comments here.

If people are upset/annoyed that is was automated.. fine.. do it manually.. the fact remains that it is a very effective method to build your audience in a targeted fashion.

Maybe Myles should just "pivot" to compete with Little Bird and focus on just surfacing the data on who you SHOULD be engaging with.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#178

Post by anthonys »

mseebach wrote: post #53

There is another flaw in the business model: It feeds off the assumption that when someone favourites one of your tweets, it's because a person liked it, not a bot trolling for followers. I suspect the reason Twitter Ads is 20x more expensive for a follower is that it explicitly states that it's a "promoted tweet" and that throws up all kinds of guards. Once that cat is out of the bag, the cost to acquire a follower…

I don't know what % of Twitter users i'd be bucketed with for this comment but I think Twitter "Promoted Tweets" are probably the ad I most prefer to view. I'd hesitate a guess at how many i've clicked on (Probably 20%) but they have always been the most relevant to what I am interested in at a given time, compared to re-targeting/ad-words which aren't necessarily relevant to what I am interested in but are more point-in-time associated.

Presumably Twitter achieve this based on stats like who I follow (including who i've followed recently) and i'd guess search activity etc. but hey, works for me.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#179

Post by A1kmm »

mrmaddog wrote: post #118

Are there any legal implications about publicly admitting that you are knowingly violating a site's Terms of Use? It is surprisingly hard to search for existing precedents if you don't already have a decent knowledge of legalese.

Disclaimer: IANAL, talk to a lawyer if this is more than a hypothetical question.

Under US law, the 9th circuit held in a criminal case that an employee who violates employer computer access policies with intent to defraud and by that action furthers the intended fraud and obtains something of value. http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/10-...

The 1st Circuit held in a civil case found grounds to uphold an injunction against someone redistributing data obtained from a scraper on the grounds that scraping public data in the circumstances exceeded authorised access, and that the data was something of value that would harm the target website. http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/318/...

I don't think these laws are a good thing, but the reality is that US courts have found that accessing websites for purposes beyond the terms of services with 'intent to defraud' violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Defrauding could potentially mean misleading people into following you on Twitter if having Twitter followers is valuable for marketing.

The OP's post could be introduced as evidence by Twitter that he intended to exceed authorised access, that he had intent to defraud, and that he knew his actions were harming Twitter. I think the OP would be well advised to take legal advice on whether to shut down the site now and / or retract the blog post (although it might be too late to suppress it now, given how many people have seen it and possibly archived it).

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#180

Post by GigabyteCoin »

catshirt wrote: post #106
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. You shouldn't have existed (or been allowed to) in the fist place.

did you read the article? or even the title for that matter? seems like what you are saying is crystal clear to OP.

Yes, as a matter of fact I read it in it's entirety. Did you read the article?
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