
Organically Increase Your Followers With the Twitter API and a Little Python - jwmoz
http://blog.jmoz.co.uk/increase-your-twitter-followers/
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swanson
This is basically what FollowGen[1] does. HN discussion of when the guy that
built FollowGen wrote about how Twitter should shutdown his app:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5607186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5607186)

[1]: [https://followgen.com/](https://followgen.com/)

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GauntletWizard
Anytime I notice this going on, I report the account as a spammer, and you
should too.

~~~
jamesbritt
Tweet-favoriting is an insidious form of twitter spam.

What's weird is that almost all favoriting done by someone I don't recognize
is done on a tweet that is many weeks old. It's always bullshit.

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pieterhg
I've tested this before and while it works incredibly well, essentially it's
just gaming the system by spamming favorites. If everyone would do this (and
they will when more services start popping up that offer to automate this),
everyone's Twitter notifications would turn into a spamhaven of fake
favorites.

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BigBalli
you can do the same thing within your browser. simply open the desired search
on twitter.com (such as
[https://twitter.com/search?q=giacomoballi.com](https://twitter.com/search?q=giacomoballi.com))
and then paste the following in the address bar:

javascript:allFavs=document.getElementsByClassName("favorite");for(var
a=0;a<allFavs.length;a++){allFavs[a].click();}

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kevinconroy
Auto-Favorite Tweets to Trigger Automated Emails to Thousands of Twitter Users
and Hope Lots of them Follow You

~~~
jere
It does seem kind of spammy, but to play devil's advocate:

1) At least the favorites are _related_ to the account. I get favorites from
spam bots all the time with seemingly no connection to anything.

2) I might be wrong, but I believe by default emails are only sent if the
favorites come from people you already follow. So it clogs up your "Connect"
tab, but not your inbox.

~~~
jamesbritt
"I might be wrong, but I believe by default emails are only sent if the
favorites come from people you already follow. So it clogs up your "Connect"
tab, but not your inbox."

The thing is, I'm more interested in knowing about new people who favorite a
tweet of mine than people I already follow. So I've set the notifications to
'Anyone'.

Sadly, this has become largely spam, i.e. useless.

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omershapira
I, uh, one question please.

How is making something that farms humans for time and influence – while
deceiving them into believing they're interacting with a human – sit with you
morally?

Is it part of any future you'd like to imagine, on the receiving side?

~~~
jwmoz
It's hardly preventing me from sleeping at night.

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cruise02
This seems to be _farming_ of a sort, but I don't know if I would call it
_organic_.

~~~
jwmoz
Automatically organic.

~~~
cruise02
Is that a thing? I think _organic_ in this context implies that a person is in
the loop taking an action somewhere.

Don't get me wrong. I can think of a couple of legitimate uses for this, so I
don't think it's a 100% scammy tactic. I just wouldn't call it organic.

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jmduke
I think the best analogy for something like this is getting
coupons/ads/"special offers" in the mail. They aren't sent out _completely_
indiscriminately (good distro strategies will use a fair amount of
segmentation), but they're not exactly bespoke. You're basically shoving your
content into a traditionally high-signal-to-noise ratio arena, hoping that the
mismatch works in your favor.

Still, there's nothing incredibly malicious about it besides the fact that its
annoying and is a signal that you're a low-value brand. Besides, some people
really like leafing through a valpak; similarly, if a customer sees your
favorite, clicks on your handle and decides you're worth the follow, what's
the harm?

If you're a company or startup seriously considering doing this, consider two
things:

1\. Think about the mechanics behind a drip campaign. You don't want to
inundate your users; you don't want to annoy them; you don't want to
overgeneralize them. One of the difficulties of these auto-favoriting
campaigns is that a favorite is a very low-value, low-information interaction;
have you thought about creating multiple accounts and working on a reply queue
system (just as one would create multiple email campaigns to target different
consumer segments?)

2\. What would the potential consequences be if someone posted a blog post
about you using these tactics, and that post got a lot of coverage? Would it
be worth the extra few hundred followers? (Honestly, in some cases, yes! But
in other cases -- particularly if you're targeting developers -- probably
not.)

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antoinec
Use the streaming api, instead of the search, and favorite every targeted
tweet with a 20s-60s delay, that's incredibly efficient.

~~~
jwmoz
Nice.

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aleprok
If you want bots and some real people to follow you who are trying the same.
Join twiends.com it's a follower exchange and you get 10 credits per day for
visiting the site which equals 5 twitter followers. If you want to play ugly
actually use the exchange and few weeks later some mass unfollow tool. This is
pretty damn ugly way to get followers and I know it because I did it almost
two years ago and in a month gained around 10k followers, afterwards I stopped
doing it and the follower count has slowly been degrading.

Though if you want actual followers who discuss with you. Follow those tags
and reply on their tweets. Some might actually enjoy that you replied to them
even though you are not following them and start following you.

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dohertyjf
I still find it amazing that people respond with a "thanks for favoriting"
tweet. I get it when someone shares out your link, but favoriting? Who really
knows why someone has favorited - it could be so that they remember it later,
so that it pushes to their Pocket or Instapaper account (via IFTTT), or a
multitude of other reasons.

And yes, I agree with @ultimoo that Twitter needs to do something about this.

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shrikant
Unfortunately, the spammers have already figured this one out before James.
Nearly every tweet of mine that has certain product or service keywords gets
favourited by a spambot or two attempting to grab eyeballs.

(I also vaguely recall a front-page article about this on HN a year or so
back..)

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ultimoo
It's about time that Twitter did something about this 'favorite-spam' problem.

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hippich
just tried for fun this technique (with node.js + twit + 7 lines of code). My
account was suspended within an hour. Probably i choose too popular words or
something, but Twitter do stop this type of interaction.

