Why should this be banned? It's not the same as spam, since you have to subscribe to someone to see their tweets.

These tweets leak into search results. Or, maybe you want to think of it as "Twitter allows them to leak into search results."

Not a Twitter user but: if you wanted to disrupt or derail ongoing conversations, couldn't that be done programmatically too? Or harass people?

Yes, but that's a different subject entirely. This article is just describing someone queueing up general political tweets.

>and “.@realDonaldTrump” in hopes of getting the attention of Trump or those who track messages to him.

He mentions Trump by username in some tweets at least, so that could be considered "harassing" (depending on scale though).

Not if they @ you, which is what these bots do--which also triggers a notification if you have them turned on.

"If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator"

The one time I found twitter to be far superior is when I heard gunshots outside my apartment and found the location and a pretty good understanding of what happened within a few minutes.

As someone who barely uses Twitter, how did you find the information? I'm sure there is good info out there, but it's impossible to find unless you've already subscribed to follow people.

It was 2010, I don't quite remember how I did it, but it was super easy at the time. Had something to do with location searching. It was the "Buffalo City Grill Shooting". At the time I was a heavy twitter user and it was immediately obvious how I could query the app to figure out what just happened. Now I don't even have an account so I'm not sure it's still possible.

Twitter apps on mobile devices can surface near-to-you Tweets. This is incredibly helpful in emergency situations.

A couple years back there were, literally, a dozen police cars on my street and traffic blocked in all directions. I discovered on Twitter searching Tweets near to me that a man had barricaded himself in an apartment around the corner. He had a hostage and when he started lighting the apartment on fire, the SF SWAT team killed him. [0]

More info on event from The SFist. [1]

[0] https://twitter.com/galactic/status/200451986838138880

[1] http://sfist.com/2012/05/09/homicide_suspect_has_standoff_wi...

EDIT: Link layout. Spelling. Reduce number of single-sentence paragraphs. Reword fourth sentence.

My community Facebook group does a fantastic job at answering the regular "gunshots vs. fireworks" debate.

Is this really a regular debate in the US? I've never heard a gunshot in my life in Germany.

> I wonder why Twitter is so popular.

I don't have an account but it is very useful if I want to see is a program updated to a new version, how a politician feels about a recent event (or wants us to think they feel), or live updates to current events. All that may be possible with Facebook, but since I don't want to always be logged on, I have a huge pop up and annoying captcha

I've found Twitter feeds more timely than status-light dashboards for various online services. Partly because the users start to scream before the SREs update their blinken lights.

I was vaguely interested in it (Twitter) when the Iranian purple revolution was going on, but that passed, and after that version of tweetdeck did as well, I've never been able to track topics well enough to make it more worth-while (to me) than a meme-tracker.

Other than that, I haven't found much use of it. I'm guessing that puts me in the dissenting position, but this isn't the first time that's happened.

Yeah, some online services are tardy as hell when it comes to updating their service status pages, a quick Twitter search is a great canary for any problems.

There are limits already:

>Tweets: 2,400 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as Tweets.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/15364

One tweet per 30 seconds is a 'limit'?

> wonder why Twitter is so popular

Anecdotally, I've found several useful tidbits on twitter that are less than newsworthy (maybe because they are not interesting to a large subset of people) but that never popped up other places- I'm probably not using it correctly though.

Everyone I know that enjoys twitter (I never got into it) uses it to interact with an extended group of people that they aren't friends with but have similar interests to -- including minor celebrities in their area.

From the article it sounds like a very large percent of their power users use tools like this. So if they banned it, many of their best users would quit.