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Comment by unreal37 | Hacker News Reader

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 as those follow bots that follow me 10 times a day and unfollow me the next day.

Sadly, Twitter doesn't do much to combat spam so they likely will not. But don't fool yourself into thinking you are going to partner or be acquired by Twitter.

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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 reach out to people who happen to fall into a statistical category. It's also important to remember that follow bots make it easy to follow-back via the "follow" link in notification emails. On an iPhone, to follow the account of someone who favorites my tweet I would 1) see the notification, 2) open the app, 3) select the interaction 4) select the user 5) follow the user (I count 3 interactions using the web app, already having the page loaded). If it truly is spam I can just ignore the notification, as opposed to having to block and report a follow bot.

Rather ingenious, if I do say so myself. The favorite interaction has become increasingly important over the past year or so... I know friends (non-technical friends) who joined twitter recently who would rather get a favorite than a retweet, as a favorite feels more personal. This opposed to a retweet, which seem to be given out much more frequently than a year ago. It would also be pretty cool to be favorited by a recognizable name. Now that I think about it... could be a pretty useful recruiting tool, if targeted properly.

It's an abuse of a messaging channel that degrades it for everyone to benefit a small number of parties. Similar to spam or telemarketing or chain mail. (Or, say, pollution. There's a mismatch between who the benefits accrue to, and who pays for it.)

It's also leveraging the fact that twitter (for now) emails the original user to tell them their tweet was favorited. So it's essentially spamming by proxy.

(Also, we've seen this before. It's just follower spam.)

Or ads on GMail? Seems like with that definition you can define any sort of advertisement on a communication medium "spam".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic) Note: "indiscriminately"

I wasn't aware of the emails, I haven't received one and I've been favorited before.

No, not "or ads on Gmail". Gmail doesn't create ads that pretend to be email messages.

The whole point here is that it's a mis-use of a messaging channel - they are leveraging the fact that users _don't_ expect favoriting to be a form of advertising, they expect it to be a message from an actual human being that has favorited their post because they like it. (Similar to the problems with follower spam.)

(I'd also point out that ads on web sites at least help subsidize user's free usage of those web sites, so there is an indirect benefit to the user that isn't there in the case of spam.)

You may have your Twitter notices already turned off - I get emails from them when someone favorites or replies to my tweets, as well as notifications from their app.

Two small points. First, you can't define anything as anything, stick with your gut on that one. If you could, the word define could have no definition, and the entire concept of definitions would be invalid. Someone getting sloppy with their definitions doesn't change the generally agreed upon meaning of concepts. I can call a rock a bird, but that doesn't actually make it so. There's a pretty reasonable definition of spam at this point.

Second, the advertising on Gmail (or Yahoo mail etc) isn't an indirect benefit, it's an exceptionally direct benefit. I've gotten to use a truly great, fast, reliable email service - Gmail - for a decade, with gigabytes of storage, and all they've done is run ads on the right side that I've never once clicked on and they never get in my way. Talk about a helluva deal. You're completely correct in the fact that Gmail ads are nothing like spam.

I misspoke. The slop was in the interpretation of the definition, not the definition itself.

Personally, I mostly use favouriting tweets for my own personal needs only - to bookmark some things. My behaviour would be unchanged if favouriting became private and no one was notified that I favourited their tweet.

Sometimes, if I really like a tweet, I'll favourite it because I have no other way to say +1 (other than replying to it). But I must like it enough to want to sacrifice the integrity of my bookmarks.

Based on what I'm reading here, it seems that people have wildly varying ways in which they use favouriting.

Agreed. I wish Twitter would change "favorite" to "like" or "star" so that people could essentially +1 other tweets with out the severity that "favorite" implies.

No, this is nothing like a targeted ad. One part of the service "favorites" tweets that you may never have seen or read. It would be more like Facebook selling a service that likes popular user's posts. It's like Amazon writing a useful review for a product you never bought.

Twitter would look horrible by partnering with an automated service of any sort.

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.

No.

OP here.

Ultimately I want access to the Twitter Ads API, at which point I'll switch from favorites to serving promoted tweets/accounts. I think I've innovated on the Ads UX and the form which the impression takes is secondary. This is a surrogate impression. It has allowed me to build an Ads product and an Ads customer base in anticipation of Ads API access.

I think I've innovated on the Ads UX

What you've done is move ads from the place where they're supposed to be (promoted tweets) to the place where they're not supposed to be (your interactions). Innovative spam is still spam.

I agree - It degrades the experience of the product (in this case, Twitter) for the users.

There are versions of this approach all over Instagram too - I 'll wake up to a large number of favorites, only to find out that most of them were bots. (Although, with the OP's approach, the accounts that are favoriting this are real accounts, so I wouldn't be able to tell easily by going to their profile)

If I get a favorites notification, I want to go go their profile and find out if they share similar tastes. If it's just an automated system, they have ruined this for me by lowering the signal-to-noise ratio.

Regardless of how innovative this is, Twitter shouldn't get any flak if they decide to shut him down.

I'll play devil's advocate to this one... you're saying "interactions" are places where ads aren't supposed to be? Isn't any interaction between a business and individuals on Twitter really marketing?

Arguably, but there are social bounds to what's considered acceptable, as well as bounds enforced by Twitter to prevent abuse of the medium. Any phone conversation B2C is similar, but in general, we don't like businesses calling us on a false pretext just to get our attention. It's like those annoying snail mail envelopes designed to look like a federal government notice so you'll open them.

Even if all business->individual interactions are marketing, that doesn't mean that all marketing is spam. Marketing and customer engagement is fine. Spam isn't.

The distinction for me isn't between marketing/non-marketing but between humans and robots. If a human representing some business favorites my tweet because they feel that it's worth favoriting, that's great. In fact, it makes me feel good that some human at an organization is reading and caring about what I have to say. Wonderful, I write things so people can read them.

Robots just going out and marking things as favorites just to get attention and followers? That's the kind of spam actively undermines the value of the example above.

That's a non-sequitur: marketing and advertising are not the same thing.

Can you provide a definition of either that excludes the other?

Easy. Advertising is a subset of marketing. Marketing also includes product design, customer service, research, etc.

Your customer base? You mean the people who "favorite" stuff they may not have read, in hopes of manipulating people into thinking they care? The people who want more followers at any cost?

Yes, your customer list may be useful to Twitter - as a list of accounts to suspend for violating their ToS, devaluing favorites, and hurting any legitimacy Twitter had.

You're missing the point.

You shouldn't have existed (or been allowed to) in the fist place.

did you read the article? or even the title for that matter? seems like what you are saying is crystal clear to OP.

yes, but the OP thinks he should have been barred on the grounds of cannibalising twitter's ad revenue, not on the grounds of spamming people's favourite notifications.

Yes, as a matter of fact I read it in it's entirety. Did you read the article?

I respect you because you admit that you're probably violating Twitter's TOS and you even posted to HN about it so you're not trying to be sneaky like click-fraud schemes. If Twitter doesn't shut you down after this, you deserve every penny you make. Just make sure you save that money, don't go buying a bunch of stuff you don't need.

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.

I disagree. These are people who are following accounts because the accounts favorite a tweet of theirs.

If you follow someone without looking into their profile and deciding if you are interested in their content then you get what you deserve.

Ah, the "if the victim is that dumb, they deserve it" school of thought.

Note that you can substitute all sorts of adjectives for "dumb".

E.g., "those nerds are so unpopular they deserve to get beaten up". Or, "those people are poor enough that they deserve to live next to a toxic waste dump".

Basically, it's a way of taking whatever characteristic you pride yourself on and then making yourself feel even better about it by enjoying when shitty things happen to other people.

Ah, the "if the victim is that dumb, they deserve it" school of thought.

No, the "take responsibility for the outcome of your own actions" school of thought. Or do you think one should be able to wander through life, doing and saying anything one pleases, completely oblivious to your environment, and not expect bad things to happen sometimes?

If the only thing you could imagine someone meaning is something obviously idiotic, you probably aren't imagining hard enough.

I could imagine a lot of things. I'm just trying to point out that you can't just absolve individuals from being responsible for the outcomes of their decisions. And that's not the same thing as saying "The victim was dumb, they got what they had coming to them".

Bad judgement on one individual doesn't justify bad actions of another individual.

A woman might choose to wear clothes that make her look sexy. But that doesn't justify a guy raping her.

I agree that people act dumb. But that doesn't justify predatory behaviour.

A woman might choose to wear clothes that make her look sexy. But that doesn't justify a guy raping her.

Nobody said it did, and that example is nothing like what we're talking about here.

People do need to learn that their actions can have negative outcomes as well as positive.

This is also not something that is just happening to these people. They are taking an active part by deciding to follow someone.

I certainly don't belong to the school of thought that says you should never experience a negative outcome.

It takes a special kind of leap to go from "Socially engineered into doing something" to "deserves physical violence because of unpopularity" or "financially unable to get out of an unhealthy situation so isn't deserving of a better situation".

The key difference being that in the prior example the negative impact is you follow someone that may not be of interest to you, in which case you can always un-follow. While a nerd or the poor will find they can't literally click a button to undo the "damage" that was done.

I get what you are trying to say, I disagree that you can apply that to this specific example. It would be better aimed at a rich person who literally thinks everyone on food stamps is a lazy bum.

Just as if you click a link in an email without understanding who it's really from, you get what you deserve.

So, spam works. It still doesn't make it morally right to trick people into following you.

So by your logic, you have no problem with email spammers because the people who fall for their spam get what they deserve?

There's a big difference between being notified that someone favorited a tweet and an email spammer that is attempting to replicate an official email or is lying about a situation.

Favoriting a tweet has no connection with "Hey, I tweet about stuff that you are interested in so you should follow me." It's not even a request for someone to follow you.

Is there a difference between a bot favoriting your tweet, and spam that claims to saw your facebook profile, and wanting to sell you something? Both are lies, and intended to get your attention.

Not quite. Following people is always opt-in.

So is clicking on an email link.

which are decidedly different things. By definition, the bigger problem with spam is receiving it, not clicking on it.

"because the accounts favorite a tweet of theirs."

I think this is incorrect. The intended purpose of "Favorites" is to communicate that a living, breathing person (as opposed to an "account," as you describe) saw my tweet, enjoyed it, and liked it enough to Favorite it.

The OP's product fraudulently claims to Twitter users that the customers of this product are engaging in that action.

I use the favorites to mark something to read later, it means that I'm interested in some link that was posted but I wasn't in conditions to read at that time. The OP service is spammy but no one told me that the favorites should only be used in the way you describe.

The scenario you described sounds like exactly what I said, with different words. You, a living, breathing person, saw the tweet, enjoyed it to the point where you said you want to check it out later, enough such that you decided to favorite it.

edit: The main point being that the intended purpose is to communicate that an actual person actively read the tweet, and for whatever their reasons, actively decided to favorite the tweet.

But the act of "looking into their profile" is valuable to the spammer. You get an ad when you do that. So, it doesn't matter if you follow them or not. If you do follow them, of course, it means they have direct access to send you ads. If you don't because you viewed their profile, you at least saw one of their ads.

"You get what you deserve"

Please don't use that rationale. Lots of people never get what they deserve, and pretty much nobody deserves the shit some people have to go through.

Either way, there are some people who don't just follow back, so they don't deserve the spam even by your definition. Most people here can automate follows, favorites and similar interactions, but don't. Some of us would like to keep those meaningful.

I see where you're coming from but let's put this another way:

If a service simply pulled a list of tweets from users that you might be interested in there's nothing wrong with that, correct? It's just curating a list of tweets for you. There's also nothing stopping you from favoriting them all to get the most attention from those users.

But when the human act is entirely faked it's spam. And I agree. But it's also a pretty slight distinction we're making since humans can easily choose to behave like bots.

I wouldn't say it's a slight distinction. Humans may be able to behave like bots by mass-favoriting tweets, but they will never be able to achieve the volume that bots do.

This is: 1. spam, albeit targeted 2. intentionally deceptive 3. effective (because of #2 though)

Twitter may: 1. shut you down 2. offer you a job 3. give you nothing 4. see no benefit in letting you use their API. But depends on whether your idea for it adds value.

OP: 1. is innovative 2. probably didn't expect it to work so well 3. realizes as soon as they notice, he is toast 4. is trying to offer an olive branch 5. is likely doing some good, despite the deception

My advice to OP: 1. Use your innovation to subvert something that harms the public good, thereby making the world a better place. If you are really clever, you will figure out how to do this and make money too. 2. Keep thinking about this problem, and how you can do it in a honest way, which won't lead to abuse or dilute the value of the platform (any platform, not just Twitter).

If they algorithmically narrowed it down to a list of tweets that the brand should favorite, and someone on the other end picked one, is that spam? What if they narrow it down to one, and the human just clicks every single suggestion? How much human do you have to cut out for it to be spam?

This is detestable. I hope everyone can translate this blog post accordingly. If not, here it is:

"I publicly acknowledge I'm wrong. I'm letting Twitter know they should shut me down, but I'm just going to keep riding while the money is hot. Everyone will think I'm a great guy because of this post and my reputation will be salvaged after I'm shut down."

Spammers are the lowest. If the OP has any shred of dignity left he would shut down before Twitter can do that for him.

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 many Twitter users actually care if the favorites they receive are genuine or not. The reality is that few users on Twitter are real anyway. We once paid thousands of dollars for a tweet to go out to millions of followers of a celebrity. The cost wound up being about $207 per collected email address for a free newsletter that was highly targeted to that celebrity's followers. We got tons of hits to the link, but approximately 94% of the traffic to the link posted was bot traffic. This was a celebrity that the ad network we used to purchase the tweet had rated as having extremely high follower engagement metrics - apparently they didn't bother checking user agents when determining this. If you want actual users listening to you, don't go to Twitter.

> 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.

> those followers will see the favorite and might retweet or favorite it themselves

Um, no they won't. Things you favorite don't show up to others unless they specifically go and look at things you have favorited.

Twitter actually has an entire team dedicated to killing spam.

Their actually doing a pretty good job for the amount of spam they actually have to deal with. Once they figure out that people have started to use favorites to spam, they'll start killing those kind of spammers too.

Much respect to people fighting spam. It's one of the greatest challenges of the Internet age.

I agree. The OP foolishly brought Twitter's attention to his schemes. They will probably shut it down due to the spammy nature, not because it competes with their ads.

I think he wants to be shut down because he feels guilty about being the last one standing despite being in clear violation of the TOS ( I suppose, though I haven't read the TOS and I'm not sure the author has either - can he point to which clause he is in violation of? )

If he wanted to be shut down over guilty feelings, he could, you know, just stop. So that's probably not it.

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