I want to take a few minutes to explain something that’s been going on over at Twitter. It started slowly, but seems to grow daily, and I figured I’d spend a few irritated, aggravated words on it as a form of therapy.
There was a time when you could spot the fake, spam accounts on Twitter pretty easily. They usually had a garbled sequence of letters for a username followed by a slash and a real name, like KRBYSRLY / Kelly – and they had only one or two posts – a link to how to make BIG $$$ on line or win a free laptop. You learn to hit block and move on.
Now the system has been gamed at a higher level, and if you look at the (NOT) Million people following Ashton Kutcher and company, you’ll see what I mean. There are services now, one of them calls itself the TWITTER MACHINE, that allow people to create an account, a “real” seeming profile, and that then generate content for the account automatically. It follows people. It posts links to articles or blogs. It even Retweets posts by others and copies real posts that it repeats as if they were its own. It’s insidious, and it really does grow your account up into the tens of thousands of followers very quickly – though I’m convinced that the majority of those are other fake accounts doing the same thing.
Why would they do this, you might ask. I know the answer to that too. In the midst of all of those fake tweets that mean nothing and clog the system, there are links you’ll see repeated. These are links to the affiliate products that the idiots behind these accounts are trying to sell. They are for e-books, courses on everything from making easy Internet money to free laptop links that lead you down eighty pages of links to find out it’s only free if you buy a big screen TV. The purpose is to get you to click.
If an account has 16,000 followers, and they manage to sell two e-courses, or an e-book on marketing, or a seminar, or get you to click their pay-per-click account a hundred and fifty times, then they have won. Once they set up these accounts, they walk away. A few are savvy enough to drop in once every few days and talk to someone for a few minutes, but don’t be fooled. These are clueless dillweeds, and they have to be stopped somehow. I’m not sure how, but I know it’s driving me freaking batty. Seriously.
This morning I woke up to nine new followers. Of those, seven were auto-generated crap accounts that I had to block. I’d hate to guess how many of Ashton Kutcher’s followers don’t exist…but that fits right in with the relevance of what he did. Twitter is about two way communications…it’s nice to see the media big boys drawing notice to the service, but all they use it for is another bulletin board for their egos, and over half of those they bring in will never post again – they just want to be part of the million dillweed march.
This is a call out to my friends on Twitter. Watch for these auto-generated accounts. BLOCK them. Their numbers help you in no way at all. This is also a call out to Twitter – help us find a way to put a stop to this crap…it’s slowing the system, and it’s irritating enough to drive people away. Same with the various sites that help people find new people to follow, like Mr. Tweet, Twitter Grader, and Twitseek – helps us weed the dill, you know? I checked the twitter elite in a couple of cities last night on Grader and found out that half the top ten weren’t even real people. Can I get an ARGH?
End rant. Please return to your normally scheduled day. Please block Twitter Machine accounts and all self-perpetuating spam accounts.
Written by David Wilson - Visit WebsiteFollow me on Twitter
Taken to its logical extreme: Imagine Twitter populated entirely by robot created and robot managed accounts, all competing viciously for each other's follows, all posting links that will rarely, if ever, be clicked.
Oh wait. Maybe we are there already?
We are certainly gathered in the middle of exactly such a storm. I still want to know if the Twitter Machine people are charging for their service. If so, they are #dillweeds of the first order….dillweeds of the second order, instead of researching and checking twitter out, jump on the SUPER TRAFFIC IN TEN EASY MINUTES bandwagon and never really get on the bus at all.
It's a crying shame, and could bring down Twitter in the end. I think the attraction to Twitter is it's very simplicity and the beauty of being able to talk with a wide variety of people. I try and avoid the abusers and bots but it's seriously not always easy to tell the difference. Thanks for bringing more attention to the issue.
Yes, and they key would be TALKING. These non-extant accounts inflate numbers, throw off metrics – feh.
[...] The Twitter Machine & The Fake Accounts – Really? [...]
Bring down Twitter? That's what they said about MySpace and FaceBook. These things are FREEE, right? You guys are all the same everywhere you go. You go get what is free and then take ownership of it and try to rule who should be there or not. You are the same people that want porn out of the internet; although 80% of internet traffic searches are for (you guessed it) porn!
Why can't you just let people get what they want? If they believe that spamming an affiliate link is a usefull thing and they make $50 when they loose $100 let them. Is it too much of trouble for you to block them from your FREEE Twitter account?
Do you have some self-righteous drive to make everything pure everywhere you go?
Wake up! The reason why Twitter allows this is because they do it too! Where do you think they get the money to pay for their datacenter and their salaries? Do you think they feed 50,000,000 account owner's need to tweet with donated equipment?
Let the world be dude.
You know, what I was REALLY hoping this morning was to wake up and find a dillweed in my comments section; there you are… you do realize you're commenting on a post made, what, a year ago? In any case, by your own thinking, I can use my free account (and my blog) any way I like, so … have a nice day. And no, I am not one of those trying to take anything over…I'd just like to see it used as designed. It does hurt everyone if there are a million "non" accounts that aren't really people peppering Twitter with affiliate tweets, it crashes the system, makes it slow, and generally makes the entire thing less enjoyable.
My opinion.
Yours, apparently, is that the Internet should be so full of crap no one wants to go there at all… um…. whatever.