Hacking Twitter and being suspended in less than 2 days and 300 tweets | Hacker News Reader

Hacking Twitter and being suspended in less than 2 days and 300 tweets

blog.opinionage.com

32 pointslordkada25 comments

This is textbook spam and I'm glad they were banned. It doesn't matter how engaging or targeted your content is, sending automated, unsolicited messages to someone through any medium is spam.

Also, the headline is pure linkbait. There was no hacking of Twitter. Simple standard search and tweet API calls are not hacking.

Driverdan, maybe you're right... but what about the "featured tweets" from Twitter? They are bulk, unsolicited and adv messages... You're a spammer if you don't pay? Otherwise if you're Twitter you can do everything? Just to understand...

Spam has to be unsolicited. But when you use Twitter, you agree that Twitter may send you messages at any time. Therefore, not spam.

You seem surprised that a company treats itself differently than random users of its service. I'm surprised that you're surprised.

Spam should be defined from the point of view of the user, not the company! I understand you, but I disagree... ;-)

From the point of view of the user they opted in to twitter sending them sponsored messages and never opted in to your bulk unsolicited messages.

It's pretty cut and dry.

If users don't like Twitter's monetization strategy, they can use an some other microblog or social networking service.

It's kind of like saying "I don't like paying for coffee, so it's OK for me to break into Starbucks at night and steal some." It's not, because the terms of the transaction aren't that. They're "if you give me money, I will give you coffee" and you can agree and trade money for coffee or disagree in entirety and go without the coffee. You aren't allowed to walk in, take the coffee, and quip "I'm altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further."

Well, it's more like taking free coffee Starbucks are offering, then having them start putting it in cups with an advertising message on them and bitching that now you're getting gypped.

Featured Tweets are just a form of advertising. By using Twitter you accept that advertising is a part of their service. Google has ads in search results that are relevant to your search. Those aren't spam either, they're ads that are part of using their service.

Couldn't agree more. Whats the difference between advertising your site or advertising your "Win a free iPad" referral link? Go tweet anything with the word "iPad" in it then reread this article and see how you feel.

We did something similar for our site http://jokels.com. We'd search Twitter every 5 minutes for the phrase "Tell me a joke" and reply to people with a random joke from our site. It was (usually) very well received by the random people we tweeted at. We found out pretty quickly that when people say "tell me a joke," they're feeling blue. It looked like we cheered a lot of people up.

Twitter banned us after a few days.

We tried our best to make the tweets not spammy (i.e. no links, the jokes fit, only show 'clean' jokes), but it wasn't good enough. Twitter never responded to us about our questions. They just reinstated our account. It was a fun few days, though.

That's different from this article though. You fit all your content into the tweet, didn't link, responded to an open request, and required nothing else from the targeted user. I'd say you were doing it right, while these guys did it wrong.

Why didn't you guys resume after your account was reinstated? It sounds like an automatic suspension kicked in until someone on staff had a chance to manually check things out and make the determination that it was okay.

Btw also our account was reinstated...

Try to understand what triggered the spam detection bot. Maybe it's the interval between two mentions that was too short? A solution would be to never do a tweet/mention more than every 10s or so. Maybe it's a matter of ratio, normal tweets vs mentions?

Your user acquisition rates are great, persevere.

I did a tweet every 10 min in average.. The ratio were not so bad... (thanks for your support! ;-)

Anyway I submitted an inquiry to Twitter, but I don't think they will reply... They told too many mentions.. but I don't think that 300 mentions in 2 days with other tweets in the between are too much.. really... (I don't think I'm the top mentioner guy...)

Try just mentioning instead of replying. Reply triggers the spam filter straight away, as you've experienced yourself.

So, he wrote Eliza for twitter as an advertising tool?

that is high praise!

No disrespect intended. It is a neat use for that type of program, but it does make me wonder what other A.I. experiments are out there on twitter.

Don't worry, I got it.. Btw I'm an AI experiment too... :-D

Advertising in twitter is annoying, please stop it.

Very cool. Too bad they got you

I've heard the unofficial limit is 250 dm's a day.

These weren't DMs but replies.

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