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Followr, Twitter Bots, and Ethical Considerations

zachtratar.com

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Re: Followr, Twitter Bots, and Ethical Considerations

#21

Post by canterburry »

ztratar wrote: post #8
canterburry wrote: post #7

eh...installed it, tried it and uninstalled in within 60 seconds.. 1. Some automagical signin process happens so fast I don't even know what happened or which twitter account I even got signed into 2. I press the run button and... nothing. What the hell did I just do to my account? what is being Favorited? Sorry, I simply don't trust your algorithm out of the box and right off the bat to just blindly let you favorite…

Awesome feedback -- this is definitely the current problem with the v1. It needs to be more transparent about exactly what it's doing. I'll be making these changes within the next day or two. Thanks again.

Hey, you don't have any direct contact details in your profile.

Re: Followr, Twitter Bots, and Ethical Considerations

#22

Post by saraid216 »

ztratar wrote: post #6
mvc wrote: post #5

I challenge the assertion that you must you have followers for twitter to be useful? I get plenty of utility from following my favorite comedians, notable developers, companies of interest regardless of whether they follow me back or not.

I can see that. What about the assertion that you're not getting as much utility out of Twitter as you could be? For me, Twitter's true power doesn't lie in purely consumption -- it lies in decentralized idenitity + boundless conversation.

I find Twitter useless the moment people start having a conversation. It's impossible to follow unless you happen to be following all of the participants.

Re: Followr, Twitter Bots, and Ethical Considerations

#23

Post by lalos »

ztratar wrote: post #18
highace wrote: post #15

I've already tried something like this. I found that Twitter suspend the account incredibly fast if you interact with the website automatically. They can tell it's not natural. I switched to the API which is much more lenient.

Can you go into more detail? What kind of numbers are we talking about? My goal here isn't to hurt Twitter, so by limiting any sort of automtation and choosing selectively, I think this is a win for them. Not to mention I want to avoid getting people in any sort of trouble at all. If spaced out properly, this bot should, theoretically, be nearly impossible to detect.

The thing is that they have the data of tons of users and their behaviour, the time it takes between different actions and most importantly the time they spend on the site itself. A bot would be using for way longer times twitter instead of the 1-2 minutes the normal user spends on his twitter feed. Anyway interesting project, I like the idea of a not so spammy bot for getting more followers.

Re: Followr, Twitter Bots, and Ethical Considerations

#24

Post by ztratar »

canterburry wrote: post #21
ztratar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome feedback -- this is definitely the current problem with the v1. It needs to be more transparent about exactly what it's doing. I'll be making these changes within the next day or two. Thanks again.

Hey, you don't have any direct contact details in your profile.

fix'd

Re: Followr, Twitter Bots, and Ethical Considerations

#26

Post by tptacek »

The whole mentality that newcomers to Twitter are at a disadvantage is batshit crazy. I follow newcomers on Twitter all the time. @hashbreaker has been on Twitter for less than a year, has 5000+ followers (all interesting) and follows ten people. Why? Because people want to hear what Dan Bernstein has to say.

Every other day, I get a Twitter alert on my phone that a bunch of people on Twitter are suddenly following some new account. I click on that account and, lo, it's someone I'm probably interested in following. How did that happen? Because a bunch of people were interested in what that person had to say; I didn't even need to know I was interested because Twitter went out of its way to make that happen.

If you want people to listen to you, join conversations. Or, better yet, build or write things and then link to them in conversations. People will follow you if you add value. I don't believe anyone that anyone cares about looks at Twitter profiles to count followers before making that decision.

Also, bot-favoriting things is extremely annoying. Don't.

Re: Followr, Twitter Bots, and Ethical Considerations

#29

Post by shaaaaawn »

Might be worth mentioning to reload the browser tab once installing the plugin. The new window didn't work as designed when I clicked Save and Run the first time. Worked fine when I opened a new tab to https://twitter.com/?followr=true

Interesting concept and I appreciate the idea of finding a more intelligent, less spammy way to use bots.

Re: Followr, Twitter Bots, and Ethical Considerations

#30

Post by BasicBlock »

tptacek wrote: post #26

The whole mentality that newcomers to Twitter are at a disadvantage is batshit crazy. I follow newcomers on Twitter all the time. @hashbreaker has been on Twitter for less than a year, has 5000+ followers (all interesting) and follows ten people . Why? Because people want to hear what Dan Bernstein has to say. Every other day, I get a Twitter alert on my phone that a bunch of people on Twitter are suddenly following…

Not true. Case in point: Gary McGraw only has 623 followers.
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