Followr, Twitter Bots, and Ethical Considerations
zachtratar.com
zachtratar.com
Every other day, I get a Twitter alert on my phone that a bunch of people on Twitter are suddenly following some new account. I click on that account and, lo, it's someone I'm probably interested in following. How did that happen? Because a bunch of people were interested in what that person had to say; I didn't even need to know I was interested because Twitter went out of its way to make that happen.
If you want people to listen to you, join conversations. Or, better yet, build or write things and then link to them in conversations. People will follow you if you add value. I don't believe anyone that anyone cares about looks at Twitter profiles to count followers before making that decision.
Also, bot-favoriting things is extremely annoying. Don't.
Dan Bernstein is by no means the average user. He is also not the type of people Twitter has to retain in order for Twitter to grow into its full potential.
You're talking about gaining followers assuming you are already using Twitter. That's not what this is about. This is about helping newcomers who don't have followers. The average user is NOT retained on Twitter. They leave. The numbers don't lie.
You seem to be arguing that the "average Twitter user" is entitled to followers. Why on earth would that be? The average person doesn't in fact have a lot to say publicly.
I follow CNBC to keep track of business developments. They don't need to follow me; they don't need to know when I'm shopping at the mall. :)
1. Some automagical signin process happens so fast I don't even know what happened or which twitter account I even got signed into 2. I press the run button and... nothing. What the hell did I just do to my account? what is being Favorited? Sorry, I simply don't trust your algorithm out of the box and right off the bat to just blindly let you favorite things without me seeing it...not in the beginning! If I am trying something for the first time, I need to know exactly what's going on. 3. How do I stop this thing once it's running?! No clue...uninstall.
On a more positive note, I just recently started thinking about my own twitter automation and think there is great value here. I love the idea and I'd love to see how you solve it. My most important criteria is to build a relevant and targeted following, who are relevant to me and to whom I am relevant. That is how I believe I can best promote my business.
I'll be making these changes within the next day or two. Thanks again.
Why should it need to do this?
If it's so you can avoid "wasting" one of the bot's few favorites on someone already following you, either you think it's ethical to withhold the value of the bot's favorite from someone you potentially duped into following you or you don't understand how Twitter works. Favorites add value to their recipients. Getting favorited helps a user get their tweets into the "Top" results for a search, rather than just hidden in "All." Don't people who've followed you as a result of the bot's action deserve compensation from your bot?
It's not the bot that's harmful to the community as much as it's your seeming lack of concern for the other people in it. For example, you are trying to have the bot benefit only its users, but this creates two classes of people, one of bot users and the other of normal users who end up at a relative disadvantage because they don't use the bot. This is the fundamental problem that no bot which attempts to benefit its owner can escape.
The only bots that benefit the community are those that benefit everyone equally. Infobots are in this category, and there are several which Tweet stories as they appear here on HN (e.g. https://twitter.com/newsycombinator). Query/response bots which respond in useful or amusing ways also benefit the community equally.
Finally, I'm astonished that you say that your bot "can’t be shut down with ease" and then post the code to github, blog it, and post it to HN. This strikes me as akin to when someone used to smack someone else in the face with a glove to signal a challenge to a duel. Actually, given Twitter's size and market cap, it's more like waving a red flag at an angry bull. If you're lucky you'll only gain the attention of a crack developer looking to prove you wrong about being shut down, which would be preferable over being contacted by someone from the legal team.
My goal here isn't to hurt Twitter, so by limiting any sort of automtation and choosing selectively, I think this is a win for them.
Not to mention I want to avoid getting people in any sort of trouble at all. If spaced out properly, this bot should, theoretically, be nearly impossible to detect.
Again, I can see it being useful for a new Twitter user (if you manage to get it in front of them), but it's not going to solve the grander problems of Twitter sociability.
It also ruins Twitter favoriting as read-it-later (through IFTTT or otherwise) for people who use it that way (me). Perhaps I'm in the minority though.
Interesting concept and I appreciate the idea of finding a more intelligent, less spammy way to use bots.
Some notes for consideration:
- Adding customization for number of favorites per hour (i.e. maybe someone wants 2 per hour max).
- Not favoriting someone if you already follow them.
Agree on the customization. I will glady allow a throttle on tweets, but don't want people to set to 200 tweets every hour for obvious reasons.
I mention intelligent tweet selection at the end of the blog post. I could use some help here! ;]
I'll be changing the "Save" button in the options to something more like "Save and run", with a message that states the tool will begin automatically favoriting tweets.
I started using the plugin, freaked out a little bit when it opened a new tab and was doing stuff, and then freaked out a lot more when I realized it was going to do that every 30 minutes.
For the market you're looking at most intently; Those people with brands that they're trying to build, but that are new, the idea that their Twitter account could get blocked is probably extra scarier than for the average user.