Or, is there anybody whose career took off due to this bug? For example, a musician who got signed primarily because all of the top 50 music producers were following him on twitter.
I have written a script to follow 1000 users on my niche every day. I find that around 15% of users follow me back. In the next couple of days, I remove the rest 85%. I have been doing this for a few months now and I have a few thousand followers on a few twitter accounts.
I have set up websites for each of those niches and get decent amount of traffic though twitter.
Been banned the first few times, but I have found my ways around it (mostly).
Twitter is not a community. Twitter is a tool. A community can use Twitter, but I think describing spamming Twitter as destroying a community is disingenuous. The success of email, usenet and blogs/microblogs etc depend on their openness and easy access to all. Which also means people can and will spam them. So spam on twitter should be seen as a natural and nessecary side-effect, not the end of twitter. Berating the spammers will only increase your blood pressure - the spammers, tweeters and Twitter itself will continue as always.
I disagree with the "it's only Twitter" because Twitter is becoming increasingly important to me, but yeah, not worth getting angry about. At least that's what I tell myself.
If they are providing actual value, and people care enough to follow them back - where's the bad for the world part? Unless it's just selling vi4gr4, then perhaps. But they're not actively spamming people (unless they follow them back, in which case they opted in.)
I'd actually love being marketed to this way, and I think it is a viable way of allowing the marketing you want into your life. As opposed to "hot girls are waiting for you on Zoosk"
Instead of manually finding interesting people on my niche, I set my criteria and let my program do the dirty work for me. What's wrong with it?
I don't even spam people. I send one link to my site per every 5 witty and inspirational quotes. A few people that I met over there have contributed to my site as guest bloggers.
I am not doing anything evil - just automating something that I would hate to do manually.
You're a waste of space. I hope your accounts all get suspended. Witty and inspirational quotes? Wow, I guess your followers should feel blessed to find themselves at the receiving end of your awesome RSS'ed wisdom.
Spammers like you end up making people judge Twitter as "more spam" and giving it up before they've really tried it properly.
Your followers are probably more likely than normal users to give up Twitter because it's just pointless noise.
Simple utilitarian argument against what you're doing: if 10% of the Twitter population did what you do, Twitter would become mostly useless.
I really hope they write scripts to detect and ban you.
An ad hominem, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument toward the person" or "argument against the person"), is an attempt to persuade which links the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise. The ad hominem is a classic logical fallacy.
It's not an ad hominem, it's an outright insult. I am not attacking his character to win an unrelated argument. I am just attacking his character.
I'd suggest vigorously arguing his ideas, not his character. I'd actually be really interested in reading a vigorous discussion of "To bot or not to bot" as it relates to twitter, Facebook and Buzz.
I think discussing where the line is between automating specific marketing tasks and spamming lies is a really interesting question. I'd really enjoy reading both of you vigorously defend your oppposing points of view.
But, this discussion has now degenerated into insults which robs me of the potential insights that both of you might have on the situation.
I feel that posting insults also communicates to noob HN readers that insults are okay in this community, when in fact, it's not. One of the reasons that people like you and I have felt compelled to heavily invest our time here over the years is because we've generally managed to keep insulting comments at bay. :)
Ok, I'll avoid devolving to insults in the future (though for this specific conversation it's a bit late). Thanks for taking the time to make that point.
For the sake of pointing out the obvious, Twitter already is mostly useless. Anything the previous poster can do to destroy the remainder, I'm all in favor of.
I've often wondered how much influence one really gains doing the follow/unfollow method. I mean, I suspect most of these types are just "social media coaches" following other "social media coaches". I suspect most accounts that have roughly the same number of followers and following above 500 are like this. I'd be interested in seeing a CTR for links published like this (though, not so interested that I'd do this scummy thing). Really if you're following over a thousand people, are you really paying attention to any?
This is very annoying. If I didn't knew some one and he/she was following me I just blocked them. I just left Twitter some time ago (feeds are better) and I am glad I did.
You're not the first or last, I know I used scripts like this in the past (smaller scale). There were even services built around it back a while ago... the names elude me but they offered 10 or 20 new followers per day based on keyword. It was a good way to add relevant people as you used it.
FYI: twitter did fix this problem somewhat. After 2000 following you need to have a ratio within 10%. So following 2001 (or was it 2002) requires 1800 followers. This strategy only works for the first 2000. Presumably, he's got to clean up quite a few times before breaking past this, an easier solution would be drop it down to 1000 or even 500, something no normal person would add in a day (but even I have found cases where I add more than this in a day legitimately - within a small niche I do business, to add everyone relevant it's around 700-900 I think).
Finally, how do you find the traffic quality? From what I've seen it's crap. I've pushed ~1 million clicks in the last 2 months or so and it's pretty worthless in my experience. I think are a lot of bots and stat services just hitting it, definitely not real traffic.
