Followr, Twitter Bots, and Ethical Considerations

I'm sorry you cannot understand this very real issue -- maybe it's because you're biased? People follow Dan Bernstein because he already has a large following in a well recognized field, and even so, 37% of his followers are inactive and 8% are fake [source: statuspeople.com]

Dan Bernstein is by no means the average user. He is also not the type of people Twitter has to retain in order for Twitter to grow into its full potential.

You're talking about gaining followers assuming you are already using Twitter. That's not what this is about. This is about helping newcomers who don't have followers. The average user is NOT retained on Twitter. They leave. The numbers don't lie.

What are you waiting for me to say about that? I see no conflict between my point and Gary McGraw's follower count.

I think what he's getting at is the initial difficulty inherent in the process of building a reputation for your personal brand or business when you don't have any preexisting reputation to leverage. There's a tough issue of gaining the momentum to make Twitter a viable marketing channel. When you're just getting started it's difficult to know who to target and where to begin. I see this bot as a relatively harmless way of getting that ball rolling. I agree with you that no one is entitled to followers, but even people with a lot of value to offer can still have a tough time getting those first followers.

> Followr can’t do some basic things, like…check if you’re already followed by a user it’s favoriting.

Why should it need to do this?

If it's so you can avoid "wasting" one of the bot's few favorites on someone already following you, either you think it's ethical to withhold the value of the bot's favorite from someone you potentially duped into following you or you don't understand how Twitter works. Favorites add value to their recipients. Getting favorited helps a user get their tweets into the "Top" results for a search, rather than just hidden in "All." Don't people who've followed you as a result of the bot's action deserve compensation from your bot?

It's not the bot that's harmful to the community as much as it's your seeming lack of concern for the other people in it. For example, you are trying to have the bot benefit only its users, but this creates two classes of people, one of bot users and the other of normal users who end up at a relative disadvantage because they don't use the bot. This is the fundamental problem that no bot which attempts to benefit its owner can escape.

The only bots that benefit the community are those that benefit everyone equally. Infobots are in this category, and there are several which Tweet stories as they appear here on HN (e.g. https://twitter.com/newsycombinator). Query/response bots which respond in useful or amusing ways also benefit the community equally.

Finally, I'm astonished that you say that your bot "can’t be shut down with ease" and then post the code to github, blog it, and post it to HN. This strikes me as akin to when someone used to smack someone else in the face with a glove to signal a challenge to a duel. Actually, given Twitter's size and market cap, it's more like waving a red flag at an angry bull. If you're lucky you'll only gain the attention of a crack developer looking to prove you wrong about being shut down, which would be preferable over being contacted by someone from the legal team.