

Twitter Should Shut Me Down - mkrecny
http://edu.mkrecny.com/thoughts/twitter-should-shut-me-down
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======
unreal37
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.

~~~
scrabble
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.

~~~
wpietri
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.

~~~
mindcrime
_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?

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

~~~
mindcrime
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".

~~~
rxantos
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.

~~~
mindcrime
_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.

------
macspoofing
It's amazing how much devs want to build on top of Twitter. There's got to be
an opportunity for Twitter to monetize that instead of fighting it and pissing
everyone off. Why can't they just have some reasonable fees for API access?

~~~
Finster
If they put a paywall on their IP, then they'd be bound to have a reasonable
support structure in place.

No one in their right mind would want to support the Twitter or Facebook
API's...

~~~
mootothemax
_No one in their right mind would want to support the Twitter or Facebook
API's..._

This could be done sensibly though: limit the number of emails per month; or
only include support in higher-priced plans.

eBay's API can be pretty tricky at times, and if you want any help that
doesn't involve using their forums, it costs $75/hour:

<http://developer.ebay.com/join/pricing/>

------
bradleyjoyce
I'm (somewhat) surprised by the lashing out and negativity towards the service
in many of the comments.

Any product or service can be used for evil by evil people.

I've used Myles' service. It works amazingly well. So well, in fact, we looked
at using his API to integrate the functionality into Socialyzer. We ended up
not coming to terms and we built some scripts to do this for ourselves
internally.

We use this functionality to build a very targeted following of people who may
find our service (<http://www.rewardrkt.com>) useful . Our conversation rates
from favorite, to follow, to registration on our site are extremely high. The
people we auto-favorite are finding value in what we offer.

Favoriting their tweets is an efficient way to "introduce" yourself to someone
without being super pushy.

After Twitter shutting down Flattr I reached out to Myles again to see if he'd
seen the news. Of course he had, and I see his blog post as a bold move. Why
wait around for doomsday if you can either (1) make it go away or (2) bring it
about faster and move on to the next thing afterward.

~~~
Caligula
So you spam favorite twitter too? You know you are breaking twitters tos just
like the op and degrading the value of twitter the same way an email spammer
degrades email?

~~~
bradleyjoyce
De-valuing it for whom, exactly? Given the number of people who are following
us back and registering for a service that is extremely relevant/important to
them, it's hard to see how there is any degradation of value for anyone
involved.

In fact, they are gaining value out of it.

~~~
MartinCron
That sounds exactly like the rationalization any spammer would make. After
all, some people want an online pharmacy, right?

~~~
bradleyjoyce
You can say any rationalization would be exactly like the rationalization a
spammer would make.

Who's spamming and who is not?

I would argue that the way we're doing this is not spam, as it is clear the
people we favorite are getting value by virtue of the fact that they are
following us, registering for our service, etc.

~~~
MartinCron
Some serious questions:

What percentage of people who you auto-favorite follow you back and/or
register for your service? What threshold do you consider appropriate.

Do you have any visibility into the people who are annoyed by seeing your
robot interaction in a place that they feel should be reserved for human
interactions?

How would you feel if every single service provider interested in finding you
were to favorite all of your tweets to get your attention?

~~~
waylonflinn
I'd like to tweak your final question (with the assumption that this sort of
thing could, someday, provide value).

"How would you feel if every single service provider _you were interested in
finding_ were to favorite all of your tweets to get your attention."

I'm not suggesting that the technology is there yet, but the future is a big
place.

~~~
MartinCron
That premise is entirely backwards.

Anyone I'm _interested in finding_ I'll _go searching for_. They don't need to
inject themselves into my interactions list just because they might trick me
into getting my attention.

Do you want to get my attention? Great. There are plenty of well understood
and well established ways of doing that. Place an ad in my favorite magazine,
sponsor a podcast, create something so great that people can't resist telling
me about it. Just don't spam me and pretend you're doing me a favor.

------
adventured
The problem with the approach of wanting to get caught, is the assumption that
Twitter is going to care whether your approach is superior to their Twitter
Ads approach. They will not care, judging by their past history. They'll most
likely shut you down and go about their business with Twitter Ads. These days
Twitter is an extraordinarily rigid company when it comes to anything outside
their borders.

~~~
Odin9
He knows he will be shut down with or without this blog post. Twitter already
knows about him.

The purpose of this blog post is to save what little of his reputation is left
by making it seem like he's redeeming himself. He isn't. He's waiting for
Twitter to shut him down while he keeps making money as a spammer.

------
biznickman
I'm confused. Why would someone who's running a profitable business, that
works, expose their techniques at the risk of killing the business? You know
it may be shut down at some point, so print cash until that point arrives. Not
sure why someone would sabotage their own business this way. Is the appeal of
recognition that significant?

~~~
mrilhan
Short term: wants a meeting, and this should probably do the trick. Long term:
doesn't want get killed, prefers to partner with Twitter and sustain a lesser
profit margin for a longer period of time.

I say a slow clap is in order here, no matter what his true intentions are,
only if for being so focused on what he wants from Twitter Inc.

~~~
scarmig
Almost certainly will be nuked before the end of week, perhaps by end of day.

There goes $50/month/customer, for someone with supposedly hundreds of
customers. He probably could have gotten at least a couple months more without
being shut down and some free publicity on Hacker News afterwards complaining
about being shut down, but he traded that for a maybe 1% chance at some kind
of introduction.

And, I guess, a HN post in a couple hours complaining about being ingloriously
shuttered.

~~~
AznHisoka
maybe even a couple of years if he keeps it under the radar and don't grow too
much.

------
jonsterling
You're a bad citizen, mate. Not of Twitter, but of the Internet. The things
you are doing are helpful to shitty people who want to get followers
artificially, and obnoxious to good people.

~~~
WiseWeasel
No, if he were a bad citizen, he wouldn't have written this post. He's a
morally ambiguous citizen at worst. He's drawing attention to this kind of
abuse, so maybe Twitter will do something about it before it starts pissing
everyone off and driving them away from the service.

~~~
jonsterling
No, it's an obvious plea for attention. He wants to get bought or hired; or
perhaps he wants to trade in his business for notoriety. Obnoxious either way.

------
johndavidback
My first thought is: This is a great way to get their attention. If you've
been surreptitiously flying under the radar up until now, I think that stage
is long gone.

On the flip side, maybe instead of shutting you down, they should acquire you
and then shut you down. That's a win-win, right?

~~~
niggler
Why would they acquire him when they could shut him down and replicate the
service? It's not like they have much of a reputation to maintain. He doesn't
have extremely significant traction (otherwise they would have done something
by now) and AFAICT he doesn't hold any patents.

To clarify: I don't mean to disparage him, but acquisitions have to bring some
sort of value to the acquirer.

~~~
jonknee
He is monetizing Twitter in a way that advertisers like better than what
Twitter's own advertising department came up with. That has to be worth
something to a company desperate for revenue.

~~~
adventured
Given the small scale of the data points in question, there's no way to make
the claim that advertisers in general like his product more than Twitter's.
Even if I find that entirely plausible, I have to disagree with making such a
dramatic statement without much larger scale testing.

Even in the case of this all being true, the real problem is the ability of
in-house people to ignore reality and refuse to favor a not-made-here product.
Always difficult to tell which way the wind will blow on that. Companies make
really stupid decisions all the time.

------
mseebach
There is another flaw in the business model: It feeds off the assumption that
when someone favourites one of your tweets, it's because a person liked it,
not a bot trolling for followers. I suspect the reason Twitter Ads is 20x more
expensive for a follower is that it explicitly states that it's a "promoted
tweet" and that throws up all kinds of guards. Once that cat is out of the
bag, the cost to acquire a follower using the favourite-method is going to go
up.

~~~
anthonys
I don't know what % of Twitter users i'd be bucketed with for this comment but
I think Twitter "Promoted Tweets" are probably the ad I most prefer to view.
I'd hesitate a guess at how many i've clicked on (Probably 20%) but they have
always been the most relevant to what I am interested in at a given time,
compared to re-targeting/ad-words which aren't necessarily relevant to what I
am interested in but are more point-in-time associated.

Presumably Twitter achieve this based on stats like who I follow (including
who i've followed recently) and i'd guess search activity etc. but hey, works
for me.

------
PaulHoule
Yeah, it's really hard to get in touch with anybody at Twitter.

My account has been hosed for two weeks, I log in and just get an error
message -- once I log in I can't even view the help page. And of course,
there's no option on their forms for the problem I'm actually having. I've
been thinking about sending a fax to their number for law enforcement queries
since somebody might at least see it before they throw it away.

~~~
kmfrk
Even the AP Twitter accounts are taking eons to bring back from suspension.
Twitter haven't exactly streamlined that process, to say the least.

~~~
PaulHoule
Honestly I don't know if I'm suspended or not.

I'm certainly not getting a message saying that I am, but I could be
hellbanned in some special way.

It definitely makes me question if Twitter is going to be part of my life and
the web sites I make in the future though.

------
denzil_correa
I receive an Internal Server Error. Here's a link to the cache -
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fedu.mkrecny.com%2Fthoughts%2Ftwitter-
should-shut-me-
down&aq=f&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fedu.mkrecny.com%2Fthoughts%2Ftwitter-should-
shut-me-down&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

~~~
jwr
Twitter listened.

~~~
fusiongyro
How could Twitter shut down his blog?

~~~
mixedbit
From a purely technical perspective they could using
platform.twitter.com/widgets.js that the blog includes.

~~~
nwh
I sincerely doubt they would use their external JS to take down competitors
websites. They would instantly lose any trust across the whole internet.

~~~
mixedbit
Of course it would be a completely stupid thing for Twitter to do (unless they
get hacked). Just saying that technically it is possible.

~~~
raylu
A completely stupid thing for Twitter to do, like writing a post about their
12 hours of downtime ending in rollback by

1\. starting the post with 5 paragraphs and a list of all the virtues of
Twitter's engineering

2\. spin the fact that, after a simple DB screw-up in production it took them
about 6 hours to decide to just rollback from a backup

3\. end the "postmortem" (which is, by the way, completely devoid of apology)
by trying to hire

all the while talking about how working at Twitter is like building a rocket
mid-flight (so, just like every other company)?

[http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/twitter-
performance-u...](http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/twitter-performance-
update.html)

------
k-mcgrady
Even before Twitter's recent aggressive behavior towards developers I would
have expected this to get shut down. If this became something widely used
Twitter value to me would decline. The entire favorite feature would just
start to be ignored by a majority of users.

~~~
AznHisoka
I don't think the feature itself would be ignored. His service doesn't destroy
the usefulness of favoriting itself.

It would however cause users to start ignoring Twitter messages/notifications.
People are already ignoring responses from people they don't know, and it can
get even worse if we think most people interacting with us are just bots.

~~~
wpietri
Favoriting is now a misnomer. In practice, its value is as Facebook's "like"
button on a post. That is, to signal to the other person. So yes, it destroys
the usefulness of favoriting.

------
phpdude1912
Having signed up myself out of curiosity, I can't actually find any method of
paying for the service, which I find strange as you mention you're making a
lot of money from this venture.

For me, it just sounds like this project is merely a throwaway project and the
aim is to get banned, at least then to get onto the Ads API where they may
have another concept, but couldn't get on it any other way.

Might be me, might just be extra dubious, but it doesn't look right to me.

~~~
jsleuth
The whole story smacks of a PR stunt to me.

My guess is he's really looking for a job. Or testing the hack-ability of
ycombinator (and non-researched news aggregators in general).

------
SurfScore
I don't like this trend with services being shut down by the big guys in the
industry. You see what happened with AppGratis, and now this. I understand the
whole TOS violation thing, but when a big company can shut down a _successful_
startup just because they don't like what they're doing, it doesn't jive with
that whole capitalism thing.

Is there anything we can do about this, or is it just a product of building on
someone else's platform? Obviously, this has happened throughout history, but
on a much smaller scale. I can't recall something as prevalent and simply
integral to most people's everyday lives as Twitter/Facebook/the App Store
where this sort of heavy-handedness could happen. Even when Windows was in its
prime, people could pretty much build anything they wanted for it (for better
or for worse).

~~~
SoftwareMaven
It would surprise me if this was new. I bet this kind of thing has happened
for as long as business has happened, but the owned-resource being built on
was more likely real estate, whether it was some lord who could kick a peasant
off his land or some industrialist who could shut down a shop owner in the
town he built for his factory.

If anything, we might be less susceptible to it now. It would make a
fascinating study, anyway.

~~~
SurfScore
The thing is that the instead of it being real estate with maybe 1,000
tenants, its a service that has hundreds of millions of users. Facebook has
over a billion. I don't know if anyone has had the power to shut off access to
that many people before.

~~~
raylu
Yeah, but there's a big difference between shutting off my Twitter access and
literally removing me from the land I live on.

------
bluepill
Even though, Im not a fan of your "spam" approach (and the fact that you're
still a kid taking people for total idiots) I must admit the idea and
especially what it lead to is a success, at least for you.

My opinion, is that ads suck, most of them do (except the ones that make you
laugh and remain classics which in that case fall into another category, and
as far as I'm concerned that only happened with TV commercials and a very few
"internet" ones) ... and being spammed even though it's becoming a habbit with
all the interwebs bullshit we've been and have to digest everyday is more than
annoying.

You seem to be smart and you should definetly put your talent in something
else.

------
mrmaddog
Are there any legal implications about publicly admitting that you are
knowingly violating a site's Terms of Use? It is surprisingly hard to search
for existing precedents if you don't already have a decent knowledge of
legalese.

~~~
A1kmm
Disclaimer: IANAL, talk to a lawyer if this is more than a hypothetical
question.

Under US law, the 9th circuit held in a criminal case that an employee who
violates employer computer access policies with intent to defraud and by that
action furthers the intended fraud and obtains something of value.
[http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-
courts/ca9/10-...](http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-
courts/ca9/10-10038/10-10038-2011-04-28.html)

The 1st Circuit held in a civil case found grounds to uphold an injunction
against someone redistributing data obtained from a scraper on the grounds
that scraping public data in the circumstances exceeded authorised access, and
that the data was something of value that would harm the target website.
[http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-
courts/F3/318/...](http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-
courts/F3/318/58/608331/)

I don't think these laws are a good thing, but the reality is that US courts
have found that accessing websites for purposes beyond the terms of services
with 'intent to defraud' violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Defrauding could potentially mean misleading people into following you on
Twitter if having Twitter followers is valuable for marketing.

The OP's post could be introduced as evidence by Twitter that he intended to
exceed authorised access, that he had intent to defraud, and that he knew his
actions were harming Twitter. I think the OP would be well advised to take
legal advice on whether to shut down the site now and / or retract the blog
post (although it might be too late to suppress it now, given how many people
have seen it and possibly archived it).

------
orangethirty
Yeah, this sort of thing isn't new. You just never hear about it due to how
well it works. The OP has actually made a lot of people angry by making this
public (not me, though). There are other ways to game these platforms. Twitter
is actually quite susceptible in other ways (not telling). Anyhow, next time
be smart about posting stuff like this. There are quite a lot of bad people
gaming these platforms. A mistake and you could be on the cross hairs of a
botnet.

------
swanson
So I tried out the service (followgen.com) today - targeting "#ruby",
"software craftsmanship", "hacker news" and "software near MY_GEO_IP_THING" -
because I was curious. It would be nice to have a bit more exposure to
developers for things like technical blog posts and new projects, so why not?

It favorite'd several hundred tweets for me today (btw twitter makes it very
hard to mass unfavorite, I had to write a bit of javascript). I got one new
follower: a recruiter. Given the sub-one percent "conversion rate", I turned
it off.

I'm not sure if I picked bad targets, or if more technical users are less
likely to "follow-back". But, those were my results, do with them what you
will!

edit: I'll add there were quite a few "misfires" that led me to favorite some
rather strange tweets - particularly #ruby which I favorited several tweets
about people's young children or pets named Ruby.

------
ComputerScience
The "plea for public support" blog post is getting old and frankly immature.

You knew Twitter's TOS & you broke them. That's okay if you're willing to put
up with the business risk that--if you gain scale--Twitter may be forced to
buy you (eBay/Paypal, Photobucket/Myspace) or at least work with you.

That said, your service as others acknowledge below is akin to spamming. This
is not a service that is for the betterment of Twitter users AND advertisers.
It merely betters your company's coiffeurs and advertisers who are getting "a
deal."

You want to win Twitter over? Make it painfully obvious to customers what is
occurring. Disclose your business metrics. Put out case studies that show how
both users AND advertisers benefit.

The appeal for public support/disclosure is old hat.

------
amanvir_sangha
Interesting read, but I'm kinda confused. Some questions:

\- Why does the application have to be web based? Why don't you build a
desktop application where the user has to use their own API key? This will
also help bypass the IP limit.

\- Aren't you already breaking their terms? [1]

"Using [third party applications to “Get More Followers Fast!”] is not allowed
according to the Twitter Rules."

\- How many favorites can an account do every day? Is it unlimited?

[1] [https://support.twitter.com/articles/68916-following-
rules-a...](https://support.twitter.com/articles/68916-following-rules-and-
best-practices)

~~~
lucaspiller
I think the difference with this is he isn't following users, he is getting
users to follow him.

------
abductee
you don't need more vms to get around their rate limit, you just need to query
their api using a clientside language like javascript, that way the ip twitter
gets is the ip of the user, not your servers. The company I work at has
awesome search, so I have a tool which grabs tweets from individual user's
streams (if a customer has an issue with my product and tweets about it I like
to search their public twitter stream to see if they've mentioned us or our
competitors lately). My script is a python one using httplib, but I realized
that I could just as easily make these queries using jquery and send them
anywhere I like. This moves the rate limit from your server's ip to the user's
ip. If a bunch of people are using your product from the same office it could
be a bit of an issue but you could probably detect that (with their 420 chill
out code) and use one of your vms ips until that office's ip cools off again.
That'd probably make your overhead quite a bit cheaper I'd imagine.

~~~
abductee
obviously the users would have to be logged in for this to work, which in your
case might not be the desired use. Still, this could be an optimization step
that could save you some cash down the road.

------
gavinlynch
I'm not quite sure I understand the point of this post. If you see spamming as
an amoral activity, either shut it down yourself, or continue knowing that you
are profiting from amoral activity.

If you don't, then please continue spamming. I think that would make you a
pretty big a-hole, but it's your life. _shrugs_

------
Myrth
Shameless plug.

One of the ways to start thwarting this spammy behavior is counter-network of
twitter accounts, randomly inter-followed for further legitimacy.

Once a follower is identified as a spam, it's being mass followed. It would
skew conversion rates and perhaps force clients to pay for fake followers,
which they won't appreciate.

------
FramesPerSushi
That's interesting... <http://i.imgur.com/Idie3In.jpg>

------
AznHisoka
"My data showed the cost of a real, targeted follower on my platform was about
12 cents, versus $2.50 on Twitter Ads"

The cost is lower, but can someone do studies on the lifetime REVENUE of a
real, targeted follower? It might all be meaningless if that number is 0.01
cents.

~~~
mhaymo
That people are willing to pay $2.50 implies that the value is at least $2.50.
Of course it depends on how effective you are at getting value from your
followers, so for many, the answer is close to 0 cents.

~~~
corin_
No, they could be completely different demographics. I'm personally much more
likely to follow a twitter account I see in an advert (if it interests me)
than a random account that favorites a tweet (which I will 100% ignore). There
may also be people out there who are happy to follow anyone who favorites
their tweet, but aren't at all desirable to advertisers and don't get shown
that many adverts.

This isn't exclusive to Twitter. Not every person is worth the same value to
advertisers. I advertise on platforms ranging between $0.20/click to
$1.50/click, and different platforms offer different value per click.

------
arbuge
I'm guessing they'll move fast to do exactly that now that you've waved the
red rag in their face.

This part won't make them any happier:

>> I started renting a large cluster of virtual machines to scale the service
while staying within Twitter's 'per IP address' rate limits.

------
tanepiper
There is another company that does this - I forget it's name, but they didn't
explain what they did - just that they had a model to 'find quality followers'

Quickly I got sick of the number of favourites it did - it was really spammy.
I am not a fan of this model.

------
anonymole
Make as much $ from this effort and move on. Who gives a shit about what
Twitter does or does not do. It's all just blather and nonsense anyway. If
Twitter was shutdown tomorrow - would anyone care - hell no.

------
lnanek2
This isn't really anything new. Countless people and companies do follows,
favorites, etc. just to send that notification and get some eyeballs. Props to
him for automating it and monetizing it, though.

~~~
greyman
Countless people and companies do emailing others to send them something. If
you automate and monetize it, it is a spamming.

------
icedchai
So specifically what "Terms of Service" is he violating? I looked through it
and couldn't find anything specific that addresses automated "favoriting".
There was some vague stuff about spam.

------
mihok
I couldn't find a link to your startup anywhere, do you have a link?

~~~
mathiasben
<https://followgen.com/>

~~~
niggler
SSL cert issues (according to chrome for ipad)

~~~
Anderkent
Chrome on linux is happy with it.

------
tehwebguy
This is cool!

An option that is probably more likely to be API TOS friendly is to show the
user relevant tweets and suggest that they favorite, rather than auto-
favoriting them.

------
jacquesm
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

------
idrisser
What grade did your professor give you for this project? Wasn't there any
other interesting behaviour changing project from your class?

------
futhey
This is part of the reason I stopped using twitter and haven't looked back. It
detracts from the overall UX.

------
Swizec
This is just an amazing story. Love it.

------
hkmurakami
Why do I feel like this is thinly veiled way of saying "Twitter should acquire
me / hire me"?

------
dannielo2
I don't get email notifications if someone I don't follow favorites me.

------
AznHisoka
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this service automates the process of favoriting
someone's tweet? What was the conversion rate in terms of someone following
you back if you favorited their tweet?

~~~
fudged71
Yes, that's what the service does. He claims that it worked really well and
people were willing to pay $50/month for it, so there must have been a decent
conversion.

------
dsjoerg
Agreed, twitter should shut you down.

------
stefan_kendall
This is an incredible idea, and it looks like you executed your design well,
and even had the gusto to put school aside to go 100%.

If anyone deserves to succeed, it's you man. I hope twitter comes around for
you.

~~~
evan_
Really? He just came up with a different way to spam people and you're wishing
him well? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

~~~
waylonflinn
I think that part of the problem here is a perspective created by the previous
abuses of an activity. That activity is advertising. It isn't inherently bad
to attempt to reach out to someone with something they might think is cool.
The problem is, historically, the things advertisements show us suck. Because
of this, we automatically associate attempts to connect a person with
something they might be interested in to be bad _if the attempt is initiated
by the producer of the good or service_.

There are good reasons for this, but it it's still a generalization. Like all
generalizations, it isn't always true. It might be the case that this service
actually provides value to both parties: the person with the good or service
initiating the activity _and the person who is made aware of it_. This is the
definition of a win-win interaction. The only real way to determine the
quality of this service is to try to measure whether value is being created on
both sides.

~~~
evan_
I was walking down the street and a guy was waving a sword around with his
eyes closed. Before I could react, he thrust the sword deep into my chest.
Through some miracle, he avoided every vital organ and, stuck to the end of
the sword as it burst through the back of my ribcage, was a huge cancerous
tumor. That guy saved my life!

^^^^ this COULD MAYBE happen. I still don't want people to stab me with a
sword.

I could MAYBE get spam that has something I want to buy. I still don't want to
get spam.

When someone fav's one of my tweets, I get a notification. I like this because
it tells me that someone liked something I said. It makes me happy. This
reduces the value of these notifications and, if it becomes widespread, will
probably make me turn off notifications, which will make me sad. Don't you see
how this is producing negative value?

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bengrunfeld
As the saying goes, "Where there's profit, there's a way". If you feel that
being in breach of Twitter's terms of service will get you shut down, you need
to devote everything you've got to finding a solution where they don't can
you, but you keep your revenue model. Maybe it's hard to hear, but I'd suggest
trying harder to get a meeting with them, or hiring someone as a go-between to
set up a meeting. Also, a technique that a friend taught me is to connect with
the person below your actual target in the company, and build a relationship
with them. Then they will help you set up a meeting with the person you
actually need to talk to. (btw, they call this the Cheerleader tactic.) Good
luck!

