Hi akkartik,

You make a good point, however Twitter's ToS was quite different back then. Their current TOS was updated: September 18, 2009 (this date can be found at the bottom of today's TOS)

That's around the same time my bot was suspended and Twitter's spam rates started to drop from ~10% to 1%

Hmm, so they made their ToS looser around the time they booted you? That doesn't make sense..

I'm not sure there's any disagreement here. I'm just saying: I think what you did would require human judgement to kick no matter how they write their ToS.

It's not just that they changed their TOS. They also started to take a stronger stance against spam. In addition to publicly announcing "we WILL actively suspend the accounts of spammers" they followed through and probably beefed up their anti-spam staff.

His posts were unsolicited, bulk advertising. How well they were targeted doesn't really matter.

You seem certain of your views and I won't try to convince you. I just want to explain why I and perhaps others aren't 'speaking out against it.' We're entrepreneurs here, and we're trying to learn from each other about what works, especially what's in the grey areas. When you're little you need every little advantage you can get.

Every major piece of social software got off the ground by "spamming a bunch of people." But it was different spam. And the gradations do matter because they're orders of magnitude better and orders of magnitude less load on the system.

>We're entrepreneurs here, and we're trying to learn from each other about what works, especially what's in the grey areas.

speak for yourself. I really have no wish to play in spamish "grey areas"

Being an Entrepreneur does not mean you need to abandon your sense of right and wrong, or your respect for your fellow man. I don't know about you, but this isn't the first company I've started, and it won't be the last. Damaging my own personal reputation in exchange for some more success at this one business is probably a bad idea, long term, especially when the business is one that only works as long as you stay 'under the radar' (meaning, it doesn't scale, because the facebook spam people would stop you.)

You recognise the difference between trying to build a start up, and spamming affiliate links about to make a quick buck though right?

There's spamming affiliate links, and then there's testing if the quality of my recommendations is good enough to create a steady long-term stream of revenue. It's the difference between a quick buck and a buck.