

The Increasingly Prevalent Auto-Follow Trick - biznickman
http://nickoneill.com/the-increasingly-prevalent-auto-follow-trick-2011-11/

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patio11
Given two competing startups, one which starts users with a blank slate and
one which a) gives them instant content when they sign up and b) manipulates
them into continuing to use the application via using social proof and peer
pressure, it is highly likely that only one of them will survive long enough
to get geeks complaining about it. I know which one I'm betting on.

Consider it from this angle: you can undo this default for _exactly the same
amount of work you're proposing to subject everyone to_ : for each friend,
manually select your desired state of followed or unfollowed. You're not going
to actually _do_ that, because it's a stupid amount of work and despite being
motivated enough to write a blog post you're just not that into this app. To a
close approximation, only freaks and geeks care enough about software to go
through a multi-hour setting tweaking session prior to actually receiving
value.

You can test this if you have an application you don't care about destroying
user growth for: have them do lots of pointless work on the first user
experience. See what it does to activation rates. A/B test "Do lots of
gruntwork" versus "App does the pointless makework for you" if you want some
statistical rigor.

P.S. If having one's monkey brain hacked on disconcerts you, stay far away
from social software, because that is the _whole game plan_.

~~~
fredBuddemeyer
given two competing anythings the one that plays most aggressively wins in the
short run (see ww2) but these tactics usually turn out to be short lived
crutches. the path of user choice and openness (which starts with emptiness)
is not going to win an a/b test but in the long run is likely to win the war.
and its going to force you to come up with something genuinely compelling.

~~~
viscanti
At the end of the day a web app can do one of three things. It can delight
it's users, it can exist and nobody cares or it can annoy it's users.

It's helpful for companies to think before they act. Is this action going to
delight, annoy or have no impact? The companies that choose to delight their
users will win over time. Delighted users tell their friends, which is the
biggest form of social proof. Too many companies choose perceived short-term
gains at the cost of annoying their users. That's not a long-term winning
strategy.

~~~
tptacek
This comment appears to be orthogonal to the discussion, which is rooted in a
comment that says aggressive auto-follow (EAFP) is likely to outperform asking
permission (LBYL).

Facebook is not an LBYL company, nor is Google, and Facebook and Google are
crushing the social space.

What may be the case is that normal people are in fact delighted by the EAFP
approach, and that the opinions of nerds are irrelevant.

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Zak
I feel like the startup community has skipped the conversation about using
facebook or twitter for login and gone straight to this. There are a lot of
apps now that aren't particularly social outside of interactions within the
app[0] and require me to use facebook or twitter to log in. I don't want
either of those to be my identity on other sites.

[0] And those interactions don't depend on an outside social graph at all. I'm
thinking of Anyasq in particular here.

~~~
alexchamberlain
Using Facebook/Twitter/Any-Other-Existing-Login is a good way to speed up the
experience for new users, however, this should then create a new profile and
always give the users a choice on how they login/maintain their profile with
you.

~~~
Zak
I _fully_ understand providing the option. "Create an account, or just log in
with Facebook" is good for the user. My objection is when the "create an
account" option isn't there and I can _only_ use the site by logging in
through a third party.

Anyasq is an example of this; you can only log in with facebook or twitter.

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callmeed
I really wonder if this falls under the category of _"things hacker
dislike/complain about but regular people don't care/mind"_

I think Pinterest does this too. I'd guess most users think its a byproduct of
Facebook connect and don't care. If I had a mass-market/consumer site, I'd
consider doing it.

~~~
jschuur
Heck, I'm a hacker and even I like the feature. Why else would I even connect
my Facebook account in the first place, if not to use my established social
circle there? You can join without Twitter or Facebook.

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jeromeparadis
If it's to automatically follow people in your Facebook (or Twitter) account
when you link your account - and, big and - if they are already using the app,
then I have nothing against it. I'm personally sick of having to do the grunt
work of mirroring manually and micromanaging my social networks for each new
app. In these apps, if I find later on athat a few connections don't publish
stuff I like, I unfollow them.

~~~
DanBC
Giving you the option to allow the app to do the grunt work is fine.

But just doing it, without asking, (and without an option to turn it off?) is
just slimey and stupid.

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nbauman
Compare this to Batch. Batch uses Facebook exclusively and doesn't communicate
that people are "following" you when they sign up (or to use Facebook terms,
they don't indicate that people have become your friend either, they simply
say they've joined Batch). They just assume that you have a relationship
because you authenticate with a platform that already says you do. Very
straight forward.

This is very similar to Oink's behavior, but far far less presumptuous in the
way it communicates. Personally, I was thankful that Batch saved me the work
of curating my network. But if you use Oink's language/behavior you have an
app that says I followed someone when all I did was sign up? They almost
immediately lose my trust. Not a good way to start the relationship with me.

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vecter
This happened when I joined Quora recently. I honestly felt _embarrassed_ that
I had "followed" 100+ at once, especially since I haven't been in touch with
many of those people recently.

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bane
We bounced around on this for a long time with eggtweeter and came up with
this compromise:

When a user creates an account (via Twitter), the KyMaLabs account is
automatically followed. If they choose to unfollow after that, we have nothing
to say about it. Other than that, we're not manipulating their follow lists in
any particular way because we felt it would be either undesirable or slimy.

We decided to do an auto-follow for a few reasons:

a) It connects us with our userbase so if we Tweet information or updates,
they'll see them.

b) It helps us quickly gauge new user signup at a glance. Sure we do this on
the back-side with some reporting tools, but its nice for us to see our follow
count go up as well.

c) We're providing a free and valuable service (while in openbeta) without ads
or other junk, we think of this as the "cost" of the service.

d) We don't ask for unnecessary information from the user, we get their
Twitter id and we ask them for an email address on signup and that's pretty
much it. (Once we move to some paid services it'll have to change somewhat,
but we chose to keep it simple during the beta period).

And that's it. So far _most_ people don't unfollow (our metric for "didn't
like it"), and the ones that do haven't complained directly yet (our metric
for "hated it") so we think we've kept successfully on the side of the line of
ethical use of an auto-follow.

~~~
rkudeshi
Wait, when someone signs up, you silently have their Twitter account follow
your Twitter account? That's pretty egregious in my book and would merit an
instant account deletion.

By logging in with or connecting my Twitter account to any service, I want
some of the value I've put into curating my Twitter account to carry over to
my new account on your website/app/whatever (as Oink appears to be doing
here).

I __NEVER __want you to go back and mess with my Twitter experience. It's a
violation of the implied trust I'm giving you by creating an account in the
first place.

What's wrong with giving people an _option_ to follow you on Twitter? A simple
checkbox when registering would suffice. Sure, your follower count won't be as
big, but it's also the only ethical option of the two, in my book.

PS. I went to your website and clicked on "What is eggtweeter?" on the
homepage. The resulting page left me utterly confused about what you do. It
seems like a list of what the site _can_ do, but not what it actually does.
Then I went to your FAQ and the first question immediately and succinctly
explained it. You should think about moving that description to the about
page, or even better yet, the home page (right now, neither page has the words
"scheduled tweets" anywhere).

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hswolff
I thought I saw on Oink's signup a toggle that let you opt-in to auto-
following other users. I was surprised to see that as usually it's opt-out (if
at all). What this seems like to me is a glitch on Oink's end - not following
their own preference options they expose to their users.

edit: I definitely didn't mark down to auto follow my friends. I just got the
pig sound notification and it scared me half to death. Oooh boy my heart is
racing.

~~~
jschuur
There's an option to disable auto-syncing as they call it, and it's on by
default. Interestingly enough, when I went to check out the settings area just
now, I saw several Twitter friends who I wasn't friends with yet, despite
having auto-syncing turned on, so this looks like a bug on their end. I got an
error when I tried to check my Facebook friends' status as well.

There's also an option to toggle being notified when a friend joins
(presumably this refers to auto-syncing), which is on by default too.

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yosho
I get how some people might feel like it's annoying to auto follow, but the
reality is that most people don't care / notice that they're now following all
of their friends. And at the end of the day, having friends using the same app
as you does provide a better user experience which is why this trend has
emerged.

~~~
biznickman
You have a valid point about having friends in the app. However I'd imagine
that there's a more elegant way of accomplishing this. I realize I'm a rare
use case but I have thousands of Facebook friends many of which I don't want
to know everything they're up to. I'd imagine many other people don't want to
know everything all of their Facebook friends are doing. Perhaps someone
should complete a more detailed study on this :)

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snorkel
Unfortunately rude and aggressive "social" apps build the largest audiences by
those same tactics. Remember how MySpace took off: the sign up process
included "Enter your Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail/Outlook login info here" which it
then used to spam all of your email contacts, a blatant privacy violation
which millions of users gladly participated in.

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tensafefrogs
I've noticed this new iPhone app "The Eatery" doing this. It's fairly
annoying, but as long as I keep my facebook friends list trimmed to "actual
friends" then I don't mind so much.

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drivebyacct2
Frankly, it seems "dumb". Foursquare suggests friends to me that it thinks it
has connected via Facebook and Twitter (which I opted into it doing). The
suggestions are easy to ignore and dismiss. It seems obvious to me. I guess
this just feels like a cheap slimy way to be connections in the social graph,
but I think in the process of doing so, they devalue the value of connections
that people put effort into establishing.

If I were following all of my Facebook friends on Twitter, then it would just
be Facebook. Do you really want to rush to build the next generic, mass-appeal
social network where the content is low quality drivel?

~~~
biznickman
Couldn't have said it better.

