Bad Bot
Bots that are no smarter than the people who program them
twitter fail blog
sharing the good, and exposing the best of the worst on twitter
There is no “try”
…there is only follow and not follow. Even so, there are people who just can’t make up their mind.
When both Thubten Comerford and Chris Husong followed us again, we thought we’d check and see who else couldn’t commit to following us full-time. We found lots of two-timers, hat tricks, quartets and quintuples (okay, what would you call them??) so we thought we’d just give you a lineup of the ones who are the most prolific in the follow/unfollow/refollow game.
@ericleebow starts off our list with 7 follows, and is joined by @mcfixit:
Slightly more ambitious: @BstTwt, and @pattishock have each followed us 8 times. Perhaps decision-making isn’t their strong suit.
The highest achievement award for #followerwhoring goes to @SteveKayser, who makes all the other contenders look like slackers by following us a total of 15 times.
Why would people waste their time following and unfollowing so much? Don’t be silly, they aren’t doing it themselves. They have a bot doing the heavy lifting for them. If you check the twitter page of each of these users, you’ll see they either follow and are followed by a ton of people, or have lots more followers than they are following. The use the bot to follow people just so they can grow their follower numbers when those people auto-follow them back. And when people don’t follow them, they unfollow and move on to the next sucker. But these bots are pretty stupid, like some people we know (Hi Marcia!), so they end up following a bunch of people again and again because they can’t remember where they’ve been.
This is a popular activity for “social media experts/strategists/mavericks/consultants/marketer/gurus” because big numbers of followers gives the appearance of influence and authority to people who don’t know any better.
It’s much easier for these posers to use a robot to get mindless followers who don’t care what they have to say than to suffer under the weight of actually being interesting and providing valuable content. The end result is no different than whispering to a packed auditorium. A few people may hear what you have to say. The rest won’t even notice you’re on the stage.
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Send in the Twitter Fail Bird! |
Robo Lawyer
We have this friend who happens to be a personal injury lawyer (yes, we’ll make friends with just about anyone) who asks us to keep a stack of his cards in our car, so the next time we see an auto accident, we can go up-wind and toss them into the air. He figures at least one of them will land in the hands of someone who can use it. We think he’s joking, but he is an attorney, so you never really know for sure.
While we’re doing his ambulance chasing for him, at least one attorney has taken to twitter to drum up some business.
(All the blurry stuff is called “redacting.” That’s code for “please don’t sue us.”)
It looks like @B—-ellyLawyer is using a bot to manage his account. We think a robot lawyer is even creepier than the real kind, and @d0pes1ck agrees with us.
We were going to ask whether @B—-ellyLawyer was following @Ambulance, but that’s a cheap joke. This one is much better:
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A lawyer is standing at the gate to Heaven and St. Peter is listing his sins:
- Defending a large corporation in a pollution suit where he knew they were guilty.
- Defending an obviously guilty murderer because the fee was high.
- Overcharging fees to many clients.
- Prosecuting an innocent woman because a scapegoat was needed in a controversial case.
And the list goes on for quite awhile….
A lawyer objects and begins to argue his case. He admits all these things, but argues, “Wait, I’ve done some charity in my life also.” St. Peter looks in his book and says,”Yes, I see. Once you gave a dime to a panhandler and once you gave an extra nickel to the shoeshine boy, correct?” The lawyer gets a smug look on his face and replies, “Yes.” St. Peter turns to the angel next to him and says, “Give this guy 15 cents and tell him to go to hell.”
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Ditto.
Do you have a favorite lawyer joke? Share it in the comments.
Cause and Effect
Every Sunday, we compile a list of the latest people we’re not following, and share that bit of info in our twitter stream. Today’s list included this tweet:
This happened just a few moments later:
How many people think Smokey’s bot needs a little fine tuning? Just saying.
Celebrity bots work just about as well as spammer bots, and auto-tweet bots. Information isn’t good, or bad, it’s just data. So, the bots that are programmed to look for the mention of a name just automatically follow the person who tweeted. You know what they say in Hollywood; it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, publicity is publicity. And a mention is just a mention. And a bot is still just a bot.
When we mentioned @craigyferg, the Craig Ferguson autofollowbot couldn’t help but follow us. The human programmer discovered the error of the bot’s ways, and unfollowed us shortly after. Smokey’s handlers will certainly do the same.
Neither @lipsynchingscot nor @smokey_robinson followed us because they found us interesting. Their bots just couldn’t help themselves. We’re not going to let the temporary pseudo-friendship to go to our heads. No celebrity in their right mind (is there such a thing?) would follow us on purpose.
Besides, the original Superstar, Jesus Christ, beat them all to it, and we never mentioned his name, ever.
There’s something creepy about being followed by the Son of God. Like every celebrity since, though, he’s unfollowed us, so we’re left to wonder whether we are harmless, boring, or like the Mary Magdalene in our high school (Hi Marcia!), just beyond help.
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Send in the Twitter Fail Bird! |
How’s That Working For You?
We say it all the time, but does anyone listen? No. Okay maybe a little. Not as much as we’d like, though, because we keep finding helpful people like this:
Isn’t this a great idea? How fun! Make friends by never actually talking to anyone. Granted, there are people we’d hate less if they would just stop talking altogether (Hi Marcia!), but that doesn’t make them our friend. And that’s not what this tweep is talking about.
The beauty in their plan is to get a whole passel of random people to follow you, forcefeed them a bunch of tweets you don’t write (and probably never read before they are posted), and your twitter account will just run itself. Sounds like a party in the making. It’s the social equivalent of feeding the hungry by tossing menus at panhandlers. Or, actually, getting someone else to throw the menus for you.
Don’t do this. We can’t believe we had to tell you that.
The wonderful part of social media is the social part. Interacting with other people. Making connections. All the stuff we harp on and on about. Advertising isn’t social. Using automated systems to flood twitter with a bunch of crap is absolutely anti-social.
We especially hate bots because they are a big reason why twitter gets overloaded. The next time you’re forced to hit “refresh” until twitter comes back up, blame a bot for your feelings of isolation and abandonment.
That’s why we’re amused when a bot goes bad, as many of them do. When they just endlessly loop the same broken link and error message, it’s as if twitter is fighting back.
How do you fight the bots? Don’t follow them back. Pay no attention to what they have to say. Refuse to click their links. When their account doesn’t get any results, the bot-sters will lose interest and jump on the next big thing. If we all ignore them, they may just buzz away.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
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