To be fair, if you post a question on twitter you can hardly call it spam if someone answers it, even if it's with their own product

I think the question is, how spammy would you think if 1000 other people would do the same? How relevant would the answers be if every answer would have 100s of answers from bots that are advertising their service?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. "What if everybody did that?" is a great framework for considering the effects of novel behaviors.

literally is just Kantian ethics

I agree with the sentiment that this is borderline unethical, but I think that it's probably okay as long as there's a human in the loop presumably spending as much time/effort verifying the usefulness of the tweet before sending it as it costs the end user to read the tweet and decide if it's worthwhile.

That's ridiculous.

People often write about making web stuff here. And their email addresses are often easy to find. Does that mean that we're all asking for outsourcing firms to send us "manual, personal" form emails via a 99.8% automated process, even if a marketroid blesses each one?

Of course not. That's spam. Similarly, if I post a question on Twitter, I'm asking my followers. If some random jackass butts in because it's profitable for them, that's spam too.

There's a difference between holding up a 1x1 foot sign at a gathering of friends and planting a 1x1 foot sign on your lawn.

Are you expecting your tweets to be private or public?

If you publicly announce a problem, (and asking for public comments back.. ) then it is not spam if you get a relevant and appropriate message sent to you.

Scaping usernames here however is not comparable to the blog post's example

edit: misrepresentation as 'just another follower' is what i am against here.

My tweets are public. As are my posts here. From both, I am easily contactable. But if you are doing it in bulk to push your product, it is spam.

we're on a free internet (sort of)... for the good AND the bad ;)

A question of ethics. I could have written it to be as flexible with its replies as possible but I didn't want it to look like spam. Even now the odd tweet gets passed but it occasionally makes for a laugh as the replies I'm giving make no sense based on the question.

If this is the tweet you blanked out in the article: https://twitter.com/DeasesRuthann/status/464740467213496320

I'm interested in how that works. Is it a realistic-looking spam account you can hire? (Not judging - genuinely interested.)

Whatever it is, it's replying to tweets that have nothing to do with their spammy service:

https://twitter.com/DeasesRuthann/status/464387770178215936

https://twitter.com/DeasesRuthann/status/464082317913243648

https://twitter.com/DeasesRuthann/status/463863787963949056

She or he is supposedly in the UK and they "know a few places in Monroe"?

Some of their "tweets":

"About ready to knock doc the fuck out if if he keeps fuckin with these grades""

"Boost Male fertility http://bit.ly/aA4gur"

"I can never use anyone either I got it or ima wait on it frfr and that's that I really don't need nobody for shit"

"Miley Cyrus USED to be fucking stunning"

"Them was some good ass fights people who was there got the best view we just tried to include the outsiders and yall being ungrateful he'll"

Congrats on being a worthless spammer.

We have a few realistic accounts which we maintain. During office hours we manually reply to the tweets but we can't, unfortunately, be up 24/7.

To me, this is a big no-no. If you're answering someone who posted a question and it's clear that you're the business behind the product/answer that's okay with me. But if you're using a personal profile (real? fake?) to push traffic to your website, you're actively misleading people.

How is answering a question asking in a public forum spam?