Is it ethical to purchase Twitter Followers?

It's come to my attention that more and more people are buying Twitter followers from internet companies to boost their own ego and reputation.

Unfortunately this is becoming more and more prevalent in the poker community.

Daniel Negraneau used to call people out on this, but I wonder how others view this.


Poker's champion narcissist, @ADZIZZY, has now decided that his ego needs to be stroked even more than usual, and hope that none of his followers are smart enough to see through the b.s.


Here are a few tweets from yesterday...

@Adzizzy
I just woke up to 4500 new follower requests, a random girl, and a bad stomach ache. Well... I don't know... #dizzyzizzy

@Adzizzy
It is physically impossible for me to sit here and click accept on all these requests. Well maybe not, but it would take me hours. Wtf?

‏@Adzizzy
Tonight/this morning was insane. #orangecounty #5000followerrequests #vegasartistbid



While Matt is certainly not the only person in poker to do this, I am curious as to what you think about this.

Is this ethical/ridiculous/narcissistic or no big deal at all?

He is clearly bragging about followers that are BOTS, not real people, with FAKE accounts that are purchased on the internet, for his gratification of his massive ego.

I know his account is "private", but for those that have access, you can clearly see thousands of these FAKE follower accounts once you click on them.

FWIW, he had roughly 1,100 followers 3 months ago, according to twitter.

He'll have 10,000 as soon as he accepts the new ones when he gets around to them.

For a guy who has shown little respect for others, ironically on twitter, it amazes me that he wants respect for something that is clearly a fraud.


Any thoughts????

His followers may be completely legit, that Lauren Kling twitter tilt was retweeted and talked about a ton and everyone was curious.. I started following him because of it, but his twitter is kinda stupid now

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Originally Posted by Jasep

His followers may be completely legit, that Lauren Kling twitter tilt was retweeted and talked about a ton and everyone was curious.. I started following him because of it, but his twitter is kinda stupid now

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Most are not legit at all if you look.

If you click on any of his individual follower profiles, most are bots.

No tweets, no followers at all.

Like I said, Negraneau used to call people out on this big-time.


Again, I was just asking if it is an ethical thing to do.

With social media, people are paid for their mentions based on the # of followers.

Restaurants do this all the time, and I'm convinced that's why he drops the name of 3 restaurants a day.

He probably gets compensated more for the amount of followers the restaurant thinks they're reaching.

And IMO, under false pretenses.


If it is ethical, just asking why everyone doesn't go out tonight and buy tens thousands of followers since they're so cheap?

I guess they are cheaper than a penis enlargement.

Twitter is a fucking joke in my opinion. I can't believe it hasn't crashed by now or the next evolution in Social Media hasn't come out yet. It's the Digg of 2012 in that it's a total tit for tat affair where everything is manipulated by the users

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Originally Posted by Steve-O

Twitter is a fucking joke in my opinion.

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I think its by far the most useful and customizable of all the social media sites. It is currently the only one I use with any regularity. There are so many interesting people and things on there, I'm curious what you mean by "its a joke." People always talk about the silliness of "I don't care what so and so had for lunch", or those types of complaints, because you only see those things if you active selected to see them. Don't follow boring or misinformed idiots, and don't blame the medium for some of the idiot messages on it. Twitter is a rather incredible communication platform, and the next logical development of IM systems in general.

Twitter is the greatest message board of all time.

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Originally Posted by Crowe Diddly

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Steve-O

Twitter is a fucking joke in my opinion.

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I think its by far the most useful and customizable of all the social media sites. It is currently the only one I use with any regularity. There are so many interesting people and things on there, I'm curious what you mean by "its a joke." People always talk about the silliness of "I don't care what so and so had for lunch", or those types of complaints, because you only see those things if you active selected to see them. Don't follow boring or misinformed idiots, and don't blame the medium for some of the idiot messages on it. Twitter is a rather incredible communication platform, and the next logical development of IM systems in general.

Twitter is the greatest message board of all time.

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I'm not talking about the stupid "eating Sushi @xxxx" messages; what I mean is that the whole premise is being manipulated by the the top-level users. Tweets are bought and sold; followers (the dick-measuring aspect of Twitter) are bought and sold. To me it looks like Digg where "Super-Users" (pardon the choice of words) basically control who is important and what content gets out.

Basically Twitter tells you, your "worth" is based on the number of followers you have; sure some people use it to be entertaining, but even then the hidden motive is to monetize themselves or their Twitter feed, or to shill their projects. And all the while this "worth" is being manipulated just like the Digg "you pat my back I'll pat yours" from 4 years ago

Finally, the idea of corresponding in 140 characters... I'll leave that for a separate debate

It may be something, but it isn't unethical.

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Originally Posted by Steve-O

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Originally Posted by Crowe Diddly

I think its by far the most useful and customizable of all the social media sites. It is currently the only one I use with any regularity. There are so many interesting people and things on there, I'm curious what you mean by "its a joke." People always talk about the silliness of "I don't care what so and so had for lunch", or those types of complaints, because you only see those things if you active selected to see them. Don't follow boring or misinformed idiots, and don't blame the medium for some of the idiot messages on it. Twitter is a rather incredible communication platform, and the next logical development of IM systems in general.

Twitter is the greatest message board of all time.

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I'm not talking about the stupid "eating Sushi @xxxx" messages; what I mean is that the whole premise is being manipulated by the the top-level users. Tweets are bought and sold; followers (the dick-measuring aspect of Twitter) are bought and sold. To me it looks like Digg where "Super-Users" (pardon the choice of words) basically control who is important and what content gets out.

Basically Twitter tells you, your "worth" is based on the number of followers you have; sure some people use it to be entertaining, but even then the hidden motive is to monetize themselves or their Twitter feed, or to shill their projects. And all the while this "worth" is being manipulated just like the Digg "you pat my back I'll pat yours" from 4 years ago

Finally, the idea of corresponding in 140 characters... I'll leave that for a separate debate

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Twitter doesn't tell you anything about your "worth." If you derive worth from the number of followers you have, that isn't a problem with twitter. I'll agree about top-level users having advantages/undue influence, but you choose who you follow so, once again, it isn't the fault of twitter, but the sheeple that use it. Those that purchase followers, who cares, they are just wasting their own money because there is zero value in having a bunch of bots/aspiring musicians/marketers outside of social proof (people are more likely to follow you if you have at least X followers).

Basically what Crowe Diddly said, twitter is the best.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Steve-O

I'm not talking about the stupid "eating Sushi @xxxx" messages; what I mean is that the whole premise is being manipulated by the the top-level users. Tweets are bought and sold; followers (the dick-measuring aspect of Twitter) are bought and sold. To me it looks like Digg where "Super-Users" (pardon the choice of words) basically control who is important and what content gets out.

Basically Twitter tells you, your "worth" is based on the number of followers you have; sure some people use it to be entertaining, but even then the hidden motive is to monetize themselves or their Twitter feed, or to shill their projects. And all the while this "worth" is being manipulated just like the Digg "you pat my back I'll pat yours" from 4 years ago

Finally, the idea of corresponding in 140 characters... I'll leave that for a separate debate

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See, to me, you are not talking about using the twitter service so much as how you perceive people being manipulated by twitter, or even klout, going by your description. You get to choose who you follow, so if you are net savvy at all, which I like to think I am and I'd imagine you are as well, you can just avoid all the bullshit. If you want to see what someone tweets but not their idiot retweets, you can shut that part off quite easily. You can get and give info to/from sources that you'd normally not have immediate access to, no matter how far away they are or how seemingly unimportant your info/question may be. As far as the Digg super-user type effect, that doesn't exist on twitter like it does on digg. If info is worthwhile, it gets out, fast, on twitter, and it gets fact-checked even faster, when enough eyes see it. You could submit the best fucking article in the world on digg, but if you didn't have a small army of people pushing it up for you, nobody ever would see it. You post something informative or newsworthy on twitter and people find that shit pretty fast, provided that you have anybody at all listening to you, or you know how to use hashtags.

People who pay attention don't base worth on followers, just as people who critically watch tv don't judge quality by viewer count or ratings. They may make the most money, but there's plenty of other value out there besides money. Some of the very best twitter accts I follow only have 5-10K followers or less, but they break stories, shape people's opinions, and generally affect a lot more people than just the raw amount of followers they have, because those followers pass along the important stuff. Info gets out, and it ends with the million+ follower accounts, but it usually doesn't start with them.

As for the 140 character limit, that's a bit of false complaint IMO. Yeah, obv tweets have a hard character limit, but the tweets themselves can contain endless types of info. Twitlonger has been available since like the day after twitter was invented, and there are plenty of similar services, all which are free and require no registration or any info at all from the person reading your tweet. They click the link, and your 140 character limit is now gone completely. I've sent 3-4 paragraph tweets via twitlonger before, usually via DM. Easier than email, gets read faster, private if I want it to be, or open and out there just like a blog post. THere are any number of pic, video, or audio services that work with twitter, and pretty much everything on the web has integrated twitter in some way, so unless you are accessing twitter via an older cell phone, the 140 character limit is inconsequential.

I used to check a bunch of different web pages daily for commentary on economic and political type stuff, and they had a lot of overlap, a lot of bullshit, and a lot of stuff I just never read. Now, the single most interesting and consistent source for that kind of stuff for me is shizzmoney's twitter.

Tonight's UFC will be one of the few where I won't be at a friend's house watching, I'll be at home. I use twitter lists to basically have a streaming commentary from interesting and smart people running through the fights. If I miss something or if something crazy happens or there's confusion about what happened, that's where the info's gonna appear first, just about every time. (If you want to see what the rabble thinks, you can just do the simple realtime search on a word or hashtag, but if something's worthwhile, it'll make it into my list's feed pretty much immediately anyway, so there's no need to.)

I only have about 180 followers, I cut a lot of the spam out, and I follow between 100-140 at any given time. With public and private lists, I have a bunch of different topics and a few thousand people accounts covered, which I only see when I want to. People who have millions of followers but offer nothing real quickly find that the economics of twitter have nothing to do with just the number of followers you have. People who have an actual message to offer, or a product to put out there, or artists who want a better lifeline to their fans (and a direct way to sell to them), those people are the ones who find endless value in twitter.

Through twitter, I've been able to meet people, go places, and do things that I wouldn't have otherwise, because of the open, immediate, and equal access all users have to one another (other than @WSOPTD, that cunty little fuck). That ain't nothing like digg, facebook, myspace, or any of those. Maybe a chan of some crazy sort. Like the rest of the web/internet/crazy world we live in, the better you learn to navigate it, the more you get out of it.

How would buying twitter followers be unethical? You could say doing so is a lot of things, but I don't see how it is unethical. Also, I doubt adz gets paid by the restaurants he tweets about. More likely imo they are probably 5 star vegas restaurants and he is tweeting about them to brag. 5000 or so followers probably isn't enough for a restaurant to pay him to tweet about it. I would think the only way he could make money tweeting about a product is if it were a poker related product since nearly all of his followers are poker people.

How does paying for followers work anyway? Does one person control a bunch of active twitter accounts, and if you pay him he has all of his accounts follow your account?