
Followr, Twitter Bots, and Ethical Considerations - ztratar
http://zachtratar.com/followr.html
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tptacek
The whole mentality that newcomers to Twitter are at a disadvantage is batshit
crazy. I follow newcomers on Twitter all the time. @hashbreaker has been on
Twitter for less than a year, has 5000+ followers (all interesting) and
follows _ten people_. Why? Because people want to hear what Dan Bernstein has
to say.

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.

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ztratar
I'm sorry you cannot understand this very real issue -- maybe it's because
you're biased? People follow Dan Bernstein because he already has a large
following in a well recognized field, and even so, 37% of his followers are
inactive and 8% are fake [source: statuspeople.com]

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.

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tptacek
It's full potential for what? I disagree that this is a real issue. I think
it's a fake issue, a way of riling people up about a perceived injustice that
is totally artificial.

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.

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ISeemToBeAVerb
I think what he's getting at is the initial difficulty inherent in the process
of building a reputation for your personal brand or business when you don't
have any preexisting reputation to leverage. There's a tough issue of gaining
the momentum to make Twitter a viable marketing channel. When you're just
getting started it's difficult to know who to target and where to begin. I see
this bot as a relatively harmless way of getting that ball rolling. I agree
with you that no one is entitled to followers, but even people with a lot of
value to offer can still have a tough time getting those first followers.

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tptacek
Sure, I grant you that the former problem is hard. But the idea that gaming
Twitter is a good way to solve it (or that solving it has anything to do with
Twitter) is crazy.

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mvc
I challenge the assertion that you must you have followers for twitter to be
useful? I get plenty of utility from following my favorite comedians, notable
developers, companies of interest regardless of whether they follow me back or
not.

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ztratar
I can see that. What about the assertion that you're not getting as much
utility out of Twitter as you could be? For me, Twitter's true power doesn't
lie in purely consumption -- it lies in decentralized idenitity + boundless
conversation.

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saraid216
I find Twitter useless the moment people start having a conversation. It's
impossible to follow unless you happen to be following all of the
participants.

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canterburry
eh...installed it, tried it and uninstalled in within 60 seconds..

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.

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ztratar
Awesome feedback -- this is definitely the current problem with the v1. It
needs to be more transparent about exactly what it's doing.

I'll be making these changes within the next day or two. Thanks again.

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canterburry
Hey, you don't have any direct contact details in your profile.

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ztratar
fix'd

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jv22222
Good luck investing your time and building on the Twitter platform... ;)

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tod222
> _Followr can’t do some basic things, like…check if you’re already followed
> by a user it’s favoriting._

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](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.

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highace
I've already tried something like this. I found that Twitter suspend the
account incredibly fast if you interact with the website automatically. They
can tell it's not natural. I switched to the API which is much more lenient.

~~~
ztratar
Can you go into more detail? What kind of numbers are we talking about?

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.

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lalos
The thing is that they have the data of tons of users and their behaviour, the
time it takes between different actions and most importantly the time they
spend on the site itself. A bot would be using for way longer times twitter
instead of the 1-2 minutes the normal user spends on his twitter feed. Anyway
interesting project, I like the idea of a not so spammy bot for getting more
followers.

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vostrocity
It could be useful as a tool for new Twitter users, but it doesn't seem
revolutionary. If you up the limit to 2000 favorites an hour, then it's
suddenly not different from any other bot, despite good intentions.

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.

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ztratar
Hahaha. Yea this isn't my ode-to-joy... just a small side project ^_^

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shaaaaawn
Might be worth mentioning to reload the browser tab once installing the
plugin. The new window didn't work as designed when I clicked Save and Run the
first time. Worked fine when I opened a new tab to
[https://twitter.com/?followr=true](https://twitter.com/?followr=true)

Interesting concept and I appreciate the idea of finding a more intelligent,
less spammy way to use bots.

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ericmsimons
I've been thinking about building a twitter bot for many of the reasons
outlined in this post. I worry about the detrimental effect that this could
have on the twitter ecosystem though; it will be difficult for twitter to
block chrome extensions. There is obviously a lot of potential if done
correctly, and it seems that followr is moving in a non-malicious direction.

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mountaineer
Thanks for open-sourcing. I just released a Chrome Extension for Twitter this
weekend, to make building Twitter lists easier[1]. It's handy to compare
approaches.

[1] [https://github.com/ryanwi/listbuilder-
ext](https://github.com/ryanwi/listbuilder-ext)

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instakill
How does this work? I've installed it and configured it but it doesn't require
me to oauth the extension on Twitter.

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.

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ztratar
Exactly. It runs through your native logged in Twitter webpage.

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! ;]

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ztratar
Already getting great feedback -- thanks guys!

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.

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bmelton
I know you mentioned it elsewhere, but you should also have the '30 minute'
message on that same screen, or preceding it.

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.

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matznerd
You may want to add a scheduler so that it isn't running in the middle of the
night. I hate when I get a notification in the middle of the night, and
implement this on my bots...

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jmhamel
Hey! Do I have to "save and run" each time I want to favorite more tweets?

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ztratar
Nope -- I should make that more clear. Followr will run on 30 minute intervals
when your browser is open.

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zipop
I like this idea. You can learn a ton about behavior with a little traction.

