

Hacking Twitter and being suspended in less than 2 days and 300 tweets - lordkada
http://blog.opinionage.com/hacking-twitter-and-be-suspended-in-less-than

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driverdan
This is textbook spam and I'm glad they were banned. It doesn't matter how
engaging or targeted your content is, sending automated, unsolicited messages
to someone through any medium is spam.

Also, the headline is pure linkbait. There was no hacking of Twitter. Simple
standard search and tweet API calls are not hacking.

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lordkada
Driverdan, maybe you're right... but what about the "featured tweets" from
Twitter? They are bulk, unsolicited and adv messages... You're a spammer if
you don't pay? Otherwise if you're Twitter you can do everything? Just to
understand...

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jrockway
Spam has to be unsolicited. But when you use Twitter, you agree that Twitter
may send you messages at any time. Therefore, not spam.

You seem surprised that a company treats itself differently than random users
of its service. I'm surprised that you're surprised.

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lordkada
Spam should be defined from the point of view of the user, not the company! I
understand you, but I disagree... ;-)

~~~
jrockway
If users don't like Twitter's monetization strategy, they can use an some
other microblog or social networking service.

It's kind of like saying "I don't like paying for coffee, so it's OK for me to
break into Starbucks at night and steal some." It's not, because the terms of
the transaction aren't that. They're "if you give me money, I will give you
coffee" and you can agree and trade money for coffee or disagree in entirety
and go without the coffee. You aren't allowed to walk in, take the coffee, and
quip "I'm altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further."

~~~
Dylanlacey
Well, it's more like taking free coffee Starbucks are offering, then having
them start putting it in cups with an advertising message on them and bitching
that now you're getting gypped.

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syl
We did something similar for our site <http://jokels.com>. We'd search Twitter
every 5 minutes for the phrase "Tell me a joke" and reply to people with a
random joke from our site. It was (usually) very well received by the random
people we tweeted at. We found out pretty quickly that when people say "tell
me a joke," they're feeling blue. It looked like we cheered a lot of people
up.

Twitter banned us after a few days.

We tried our best to make the tweets not spammy (i.e. no links, the jokes fit,
only show 'clean' jokes), but it wasn't good enough. Twitter never responded
to us about our questions. They just reinstated our account. It was a fun few
days, though.

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gall
Why didn't you guys resume after your account was reinstated? It sounds like
an automatic suspension kicked in until someone on staff had a chance to
manually check things out and make the determination that it was okay.

~~~
lordkada
Btw also our account was reinstated...

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flavien_bessede
Try to understand what triggered the spam detection bot. Maybe it's the
interval between two mentions that was too short? A solution would be to never
do a tweet/mention more than every 10s or so. Maybe it's a matter of ratio,
normal tweets vs mentions?

Your user acquisition rates are great, persevere.

~~~
lordkada
Anyway I submitted an inquiry to Twitter, but I don't think they will reply...
They told too many mentions.. but I don't think that 300 mentions in 2 days
with other tweets in the between are too much.. really... (I don't think I'm
the top mentioner guy...)

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hcho
Try just mentioning instead of replying. Reply triggers the spam filter
straight away, as you've experienced yourself.

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protomyth
So, he wrote Eliza for twitter as an advertising tool?

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lordkada
that is high praise!

~~~
protomyth
No disrespect intended. It is a neat use for that type of program, but it does
make me wonder what other A.I. experiments are out there on twitter.

~~~
lordkada
Don't worry, I got it.. Btw I'm an AI experiment too... :-D

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darkstalker
Advertising in twitter is annoying, please stop it.

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lucamartinetti
Very cool. Too bad they got you

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bagini
I've heard the unofficial limit is 250 dm's a day.

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flavien_bessede
These weren't DMs but replies.

