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Comment by drp | Hacker News Reader

Please stop doing that. It's bad for the world.

Please stop caring. Its bad for your blood pressure.

Seriously, it's only Twitter. Conflict, famine, and poverty are bad for the world, but Twitter doesn't matter.

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.

Destroying communities for your own personal gain is a problem that extends much beyond Twitter.

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Why?

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"

Hey! Viagra makes life worth living for a lot of people... so I've heard.

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.

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.

you are in favour of startups being actively ruined because you dont personally find them useful?

In general, no.

You should be angry at twitter. They have made a spammers paradise. Any blame should rest with them IMHO.

Families of murder victims should be angry at gun companies. They make murder weapons. Any blame should rest with them IMHO.

Dude, the ad hominem is really out of line.

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.

We're trying to keep the level of discourse high, here, remember? Especially since we're defenders of HN. :)

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

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. :)

That's true. You make a good point.

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.

You're killing the signal-to-noise ratio.

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