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Twitter Should Shut Me Down

edu.mkrecny.com

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Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#191

Post by greyman »

mrilhan wrote: post #77
biznickman wrote: post #70

I'm confused. Why would someone who's running a profitable business, that works, expose their techniques at the risk of killing the business? You know it may be shut down at some point, so print cash until that point arrives. Not sure why someone would sabotage their own business this way. Is the appeal of recognition that significant?

Short term: wants a meeting, and this should probably do the trick. Long term: doesn't want get killed, prefers to partner with Twitter and sustain a lesser profit margin for a longer period of time. I say a slow clap is in order here, no matter what his true intentions are, only if for being so focused on what he wants from Twitter Inc.

But why would Twitter want to partner with him?

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#192

Post by greyman »

AznHisoka wrote: post #25
k-mcgrady wrote: post #6

Even before Twitter's recent aggressive behavior towards developers I would have expected this to get shut down. If this became something widely used Twitter value to me would decline. The entire favorite feature would just start to be ignored by a majority of users.

I don't think the feature itself would be ignored. His service doesn't destroy the usefulness of favoriting itself. It would however cause users to start ignoring Twitter messages/notifications. People are already ignoring responses from people they don't know, and it can get even worse if we think most people interacting with us are just bots.

> His service doesn't destroy the usefulness of favoriting itself.

On the contrary - it does. Because the point of "favoriting" is that when my tweet is favorited, I expect that the other party liked it. Now that's not true anymore, since it could have just been a bot who performed that action based on keyword-targeting me, not by judging that the tweet has a value to be favorited.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#193

Post by greyman »

lnanek2 wrote: post #151

This isn't really anything new. Countless people and companies do follows, favorites, etc. just to send that notification and get some eyeballs. Props to him for automating it and monetizing it, though.

Countless people and companies do emailing others to send them something. If you automate and monetize it, it is a spamming.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#194

Post by raylu »

mixedbit wrote: post #41
nwh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely doubt they would use their external JS to take down competitors websites. They would instantly lose any trust across the whole internet.

Of course it would be a completely stupid thing for Twitter to do (unless they get hacked). Just saying that technically it is possible.

A completely stupid thing for Twitter to do, like writing a post about their 12 hours of downtime ending in rollback by

1. starting the post with 5 paragraphs and a list of all the virtues of Twitter's engineering

2. spin the fact that, after a simple DB screw-up in production it took them about 6 hours to decide to just rollback from a backup

3. end the "postmortem" (which is, by the way, completely devoid of apology) by trying to hire

all the while talking about how working at Twitter is like building a rocket mid-flight (so, just like every other company)?

http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/twitter-performance-u...

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#195

Post by raylu »

SurfScore wrote: post #73
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would surprise me if this was new. I bet this kind of thing has happened for as long as business has happened, but the owned-resource being built on was more likely real estate, whether it was some lord who could kick a peasant off his land or some industrialist who could shut down a shop owner in the town he built for his factory. If anything, we might be less susceptible to it now. It would make a fascinating st…

The thing is that the instead of it being real estate with maybe 1,000 tenants, its a service that has hundreds of millions of users. Facebook has over a billion. I don't know if anyone has had the power to shut off access to that many people before.

Yeah, but there's a big difference between shutting off my Twitter access and literally removing me from the land I live on.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#196

Post by downandout »

greyman wrote: post #189
downandout wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

> Favorite counts are posted publicly, which at least theoretically adds to the user's credibility. Yes, but that's exactly the reason why OP's behavior can be labeled as spamming. You "theoretically" adds to the user's credibility, but by automated means, so the added credibility is actually artificial, which then diminish the value of "credibility by the number of favorites" for everyone.

I'm not sure it's possible to diminish the value of credibility on Twitter.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#197

Post by Stealth- »

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…

This is definitely the farthest thing from "rather ingenious".

There are countless bots out there already abusing this idea with followers, and pushing it into favourites isn't making it any better. All it does is add pointless noise to the twitter network and unethically take advantage of the fact that they can't catch all of the spammers at once.

Of course you can make money when you violate the rules, but that doesn't mean doing things like that are an ingenious or stable business model.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#198

Post by jasonlotito »

sbov wrote: post #132
darkarmani wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

What's your point? That he worked at a company whose standard practice was to have developers run code in development against the production database? Without backups. Of course something is going to go wrong. IIRC this was already discussed on HN.

> That he worked at a company whose standard practice was to have developers run code in development against the production database?

His point is probably that professionals don't do that. It's not the companies fault he was working directly on the production database.

Re: Twitter Should Shut Me Down

#199

Post by papsosouid »

evan_ wrote: post #68
stefan_kendall wrote: post #26

This is an incredible idea, and it looks like you executed your design well, and even had the gusto to put school aside to go 100%. If anyone deserves to succeed, it's you man. I hope twitter comes around for you.

Really? He just came up with a different way to spam people and you're wishing him well? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

This is HN. Anything is awesome as long as you quit school to make a startup out of it. People here would congratulate a startup selling people as slaves as long as their domain ended in .io or .ly
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