Show HN: Perks - Twitter on Autopilot

This sounds really spammy. Automatically generating tweets? Ugh. Who would want to read those tweets? And automatically unfollowing people that don't follow back is a clear violation of twitter's TOS.

https://support.twitter.com/entries/76915-automation-rules-a...

Wow, this takes me back a few years when I was heavy into Twitter API apps development. Websites like the OP's that automated Twitter activity were pretty numerous and this one is run-of-the-mill from what I can tell. It's unique in that I didn't think anybody was actually still seriously developing Twitter apps these days after they harshed on the dev community so badly in recent years. It certainly made me move on.

That said, I echo some of the concerns mentioned in other comments on this thread. A lot of the features are really spammy, and I've always personally taken issue with the practice of auto-following people back. It destroys the very nature of Twitter which is to follow people you're actually interested in, not simply to reciprocate the social connection. Auto-following will destroy your Twitter newsfeed by filling it with garbage from random people's content (provided you haven't already let your following count get out of hand).

My prediction is due to the fact that some of the features in this app violate Twitter's ever tightening TOS this app will not stick around in its current form long enough to justify the purchase of one month of service, let alone an entire year.

In the end, there's simply no substitute for, y'know, actually being interesting.

Hi All, Im the dev behind the site and I thought I would clear up a couple of common questions/misconceptions about Perks.

1.When dont bulk follow and unfollow, we try to pick out users who are related to you and have a high likely hood of following back.

2.I can assure you we dont just have an army of bots just following each other, in a giant follow train / ponzi follower scheme.

3.When were generating tweets for users, its based around the users interests and (hopefully) recent relevant news on that topic.

4.We've had alot of people mention not liking to enter a CC for the trail, and were looking into changing that in the near future.

If anyone is curious why we made Perks, it was because we hated all those 'GET FOLLOWERS FAST', or 'THOUSANDS OF NEW FOLLOWERS A DAY' services, they're sleazy and amazingly spammy, and bad for the entire Twitter community. So were trying to create a tool that automates alot of the tasks that a small business would common have to spend alot of time on, and try to provide real growth and interaction for those businesses, and not sketchy follow trains.

Wants credit card info for free trial? Instant browser shutdown.

My synopsis on this:

+ Even if it generates tweets on the basis of somebody's interests, and does so in an intelligent manner, doesn't that kill the purpose of twitter? I, for one, don't want to read computer generated tweets even if they talk about something I like. I want to read opinions of people I follow, they're experiences, and what they like/dislike — not a random fact generated by a bot.

+ It violates Twitter's ToS. That itself makes it a short-lived venture. I mean no discouragement to the dev team, but I always emphasize on conducting thorough research before embarking on such ventures which are somewhere in the shady areas of policies and rules. Especially when your product is build over an existing product, in this case, twitter. And if twitter decides to get a mood swing, and this product is denied access to their API, I don't want to be left with 500 new followers in my list, while being followed only by my mom.

+ It makes good, and goes on to a becoming a successful product, I think — and again, going back to my first point — it reciprocates being interesting with just getting followers. It makes socialization a formality with the end-goal being to have a greater number of followers than anyone else. That is more harmful to the twitter community than those sleazy services ("GET THOUSAND FOLLOWERS REAL QUICK!!")

+ Needing a credit card for the free trial? Ain't nobody got time for that. Plus those "sleazy" services are free, while this one charges $7/month (A little too much, because this is just a gamble. You have no assurance that you will get a significant number of followers in a given time.)

+ How long before they make revenue out of tweeting ads and sponsored tweets from your account?

This is a great idea, but does it violate Twitter's ToS? How is this different than tweetadder?

I didn't sign up, because it wouldn't let me w/o a creditcard on file. I guess this probably converts more than emailing someone a reminder to signup towards the end of the trial period.

The product seems interesting though. It essentially eliminates the need to use twitter, while making you a appear as a regular twitter user. Hence the automation I guess. How exactly are you generating tweets for the user? Are you sourcing content from a pre-populated list of interesting blogs/media sites? Good Luck.

Signed up, looked to me like it's a Ponzi scheme. I automatically follow some Perks users, they automatically follow me, we all win, somehow?

I tried this. Overnight my feed became unrecognizable — full of posts by bots and (subjectively, of course) awful people. There was no detectable rhyme or reason to the user selection, and the service doesn't appear to employ even basic heuristics to weed out obvious spam. On the bright side, I was able to report more abusive Twitter accounts than I normally do in a month.

I foresee you guys having a real hard time reaching critical mass with requiring users to sign up with a credit card.

Why not just shut off the account after the 14 day trial instead of forcing me to go through more work to sign up?

Just to let you know, there's a typo under the "Tweet Generation" category. Should be too not "to". Good luck and thanks for sharing!

how does it compare to https://plugg.io/?

How do you make sure it's not just bot accounts interacting with other bots?