Rather ingenious, if I do say so myself. The favorite interaction has become increasingly important over the past year or so... I know friends (non-technical friends) who joined twitter recently who would rather get a favorite than a retweet, as a favorite feels more personal. This opposed to a retweet, which seem to be given out much more frequently than a year ago. It would also be pretty cool to be favorited by a recognizable name. Now that I think about it... could be a pretty useful recruiting tool, if targeted properly.

It's also leveraging the fact that twitter (for now) emails the original user to tell them their tweet was favorited. So it's essentially spamming by proxy.

(Also, we've seen this before. It's just follower spam.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic) Note: "indiscriminately"

I wasn't aware of the emails, I haven't received one and I've been favorited before.

The whole point here is that it's a mis-use of a messaging channel - they are leveraging the fact that users _don't_ expect favoriting to be a form of advertising, they expect it to be a message from an actual human being that has favorited their post because they like it. (Similar to the problems with follower spam.)

(I'd also point out that ads on web sites at least help subsidize user's free usage of those web sites, so there is an indirect benefit to the user that isn't there in the case of spam.)

You may have your Twitter notices already turned off - I get emails from them when someone favorites or replies to my tweets, as well as notifications from their app.

Second, the advertising on Gmail (or Yahoo mail etc) isn't an indirect benefit, it's an exceptionally direct benefit. I've gotten to use a truly great, fast, reliable email service - Gmail - for a decade, with gigabytes of storage, and all they've done is run ads on the right side that I've never once clicked on and they never get in my way. Talk about a helluva deal. You're completely correct in the fact that Gmail ads are nothing like spam.

Sometimes, if I really like a tweet, I'll favourite it because I have no other way to say +1 (other than replying to it). But I must like it enough to want to sacrifice the integrity of my bookmarks.

Based on what I'm reading here, it seems that people have wildly varying ways in which they use favouriting.

Twitter would look horrible by partnering with an automated service of any sort.

There are countless bots out there already abusing this idea with followers, and pushing it into favourites isn't making it any better. All it does is add pointless noise to the twitter network and unethically take advantage of the fact that they can't catch all of the spammers at once.

Of course you can make money when you violate the rules, but that doesn't mean doing things like that are an ingenious or stable business model.

Ultimately I want access to the Twitter Ads API, at which point I'll switch from favorites to serving promoted tweets/accounts. I think I've innovated on the Ads UX and the form which the impression takes is secondary. This is a surrogate impression. It has allowed me to build an Ads product and an Ads customer base in anticipation of Ads API access.

What you've done is move ads from the place where they're supposed to be (promoted tweets) to the place where they're not supposed to be (your interactions). Innovative spam is still spam.

There are versions of this approach all over Instagram too - I 'll wake up to a large number of favorites, only to find out that most of them were bots. (Although, with the OP's approach, the accounts that are favoriting this are real accounts, so I wouldn't be able to tell easily by going to their profile)

If I get a favorites notification, I want to go go their profile and find out if they share similar tastes. If it's just an automated system, they have ruined this for me by lowering the signal-to-noise ratio.

Regardless of how innovative this is, Twitter shouldn't get any flak if they decide to shut him down.

The distinction for me isn't between marketing/non-marketing but between humans and robots. If a human representing some business favorites my tweet because they feel that it's worth favoriting, that's great. In fact, it makes me feel good that some human at an organization is reading and caring about what I have to say. Wonderful, I write things so people can read them.

Robots just going out and marking things as favorites just to get attention and followers? That's the kind of spam actively undermines the value of the example above.

Yes, your customer list may be useful to Twitter - as a list of accounts to suspend for violating their ToS, devaluing favorites, and hurting any legitimacy Twitter had.

You shouldn't have existed (or been allowed to) in the fist place.

The meat of the story starts with this sentence:

> One of the peculiarities of my development environment was that I ran all my code against the production database....

Of course something is going to go wrong. IIRC this was already discussed on HN.

His point is probably that professionals don't do that. It's not the companies fault he was working directly on the production database.

If you follow someone without looking into their profile and deciding if you are interested in their content then you get what you deserve.

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.

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?

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.

Nobody said it did, and that example is nothing like what we're talking about here.

This is also not something that is just happening to these people. They are taking an active part by deciding to follow someone.

I certainly don't belong to the school of thought that says you should never experience a negative outcome.

The key difference being that in the prior example the negative impact is you follow someone that may not be of interest to you, in which case you can always un-follow. While a nerd or the poor will find they can't literally click a button to undo the "damage" that was done.

I get what you are trying to say, I disagree that you can apply that to this specific example. It would be better aimed at a rich person who literally thinks everyone on food stamps is a lazy bum.

So, spam works. It still doesn't make it morally right to trick people into following you.

Favoriting a tweet has no connection with "Hey, I tweet about stuff that you are interested in so you should follow me." It's not even a request for someone to follow you.

I think this is incorrect. The intended purpose of "Favorites" is to communicate that a living, breathing person (as opposed to an "account," as you describe) saw my tweet, enjoyed it, and liked it enough to Favorite it.

The OP's product fraudulently claims to Twitter users that the customers of this product are engaging in that action.

edit: The main point being that the intended purpose is to communicate that an actual person actively read the tweet, and for whatever their reasons, actively decided to favorite the tweet.

Please don't use that rationale. Lots of people never get what they deserve, and pretty much nobody deserves the shit some people have to go through.

Either way, there are some people who don't just follow back, so they don't deserve the spam even by your definition. Most people here can automate follows, favorites and similar interactions, but don't. Some of us would like to keep those meaningful.

If a service simply pulled a list of tweets from users that you might be interested in there's nothing wrong with that, correct? It's just curating a list of tweets for you. There's also nothing stopping you from favoriting them all to get the most attention from those users.

But when the human act is entirely faked it's spam. And I agree. But it's also a pretty slight distinction we're making since humans can easily choose to behave like bots.

Twitter may: 1. shut you down 2. offer you a job 3. give you nothing 4. see no benefit in letting you use their API. But depends on whether your idea for it adds value.

OP: 1. is innovative 2. probably didn't expect it to work so well 3. realizes as soon as they notice, he is toast 4. is trying to offer an olive branch 5. is likely doing some good, despite the deception

My advice to OP: 1. Use your innovation to subvert something that harms the public good, thereby making the world a better place. If you are really clever, you will figure out how to do this and make money too. 2. Keep thinking about this problem, and how you can do it in a honest way, which won't lead to abuse or dilute the value of the platform (any platform, not just Twitter).

"I publicly acknowledge I'm wrong. I'm letting Twitter know they should shut me down, but I'm just going to keep riding while the money is hot. Everyone will think I'm a great guy because of this post and my reputation will be salvaged after I'm shut down."

Spammers are the lowest. If the OP has any shred of dignity left he would shut down before Twitter can do that for him.

Given these facts, I'm not sure how many Twitter users actually care if the favorites they receive are genuine or not. The reality is that few users on Twitter are real anyway. We once paid thousands of dollars for a tweet to go out to millions of followers of a celebrity. The cost wound up being about $207 per collected email address for a free newsletter that was highly targeted to that celebrity's followers. We got tons of hits to the link, but approximately 94% of the traffic to the link posted was bot traffic. This was a celebrity that the ad network we used to purchase the tweet had rated as having extremely high follower engagement metrics - apparently they didn't bother checking user agents when determining this. If you want actual users listening to you, don't go to Twitter.

Yes, but that's exactly the reason why OP's behavior can be labeled as spamming. You "theoretically" adds to the user's credibility, but by automated means, so the added credibility is actually artificial, which then diminish the value of "credibility by the number of favorites" for everyone.

Um, no they won't. Things you favorite don't show up to others unless they specifically go and look at things you have favorited.

Their actually doing a pretty good job for the amount of spam they actually have to deal with. Once they figure out that people have started to use favorites to spam, they'll start killing those kind of spammers too.