If you read this blog or follow me on twitter, you might know that a few weeks ago I wrote a script that queries the twitter search API for instances of the words Barnet, Hackney and Medway and retweets the original message.
I have had mixed feelings about these bots since setting them up, but it has been interesting watching them grow organically. I have never actively promoted any of these twitter accounts and currently their follower count is:
medway_tweet – 99
hackney_tweet – 172
barnet_tweet – 23
Last week I had, what I described as a “fruity” comment left on my blog about these bots. So I asked whether people thought I should kill these bots. The responses that came back both on my blog and over twitter were all in favour of keeping these bots. So I decided to keep them running.
Given the number of followers on each account, clearly people see the value in using twitter as a local conversation tool. These accounts were not setup as a spam mechanism, but a way of building a local community over twitter and promoting local conversation.
This morning I have had a heated exchange over twitter about these bots again. I can appreciate why they might annoy some people and I have always been sensitive to this. Also, the last thing I want to do is to get up in the morning and have to deal with this type of conversation. It’s not why I get up.
So for that reason, I am stopping @medway_tweet, @hackney_tweet and @barnet_tweet for the moment. As these bots also use backstage.bbc.co.uk API for local news, I will figure a way of incorporating other news sourses. Perhaps the bots should only retweet messages from followers – if you follow, you don’t mind being retweeted?
I am interested to hear peoples opinions on this and possible ideas to avoid annoying people.
22 Comments
I think this is a real shame, but I understand why you feel the need to turn them off. I’ve found them really useful.
Not sure just RT’ing followers would make them as useful as they wouldn’t capture the full range of conversations about a place.
How about doing what they do now, but now putting the @ in front the name of the message originator, as then it wouldn’t show up in the @replies for the originator (I’m assuming that’s the issue?)
If you use Twitter, or any other social media, you put your content out into the public domain, you can’t then expect to control what happens with it.
I understand why you’re putting the bots on hold, but I don’t necessarily agree with it. I like the opt-in approach, but I don’t think it would work in the long term. Maybe an opt-out approach would work. If people don’t want their local tweets to be aggregated, then they could instruct the bot to ignore them. Another approach would be to use hash tags.
If people want to control how their tweets are consumed, then they should protect their updates. That is the purpose of that particular Twitter feature.
My response to your bots represent the views of several users that have contacted me directly about them.
Although Tweets are in the public domain a Tweet between two people is thought of as a ‘private’ conversation. Joining in this conversation is somewhat like “butting in”. But then taking it one step further and Retweeting it to all and sundry is viewed as an invasion of ‘privacy’ and is somewhat annoying. Although not commercial in nature people treat unwanted bot messages like these as SPAM
If your bots only retweeted tweets that were not between two people, i.e. no @ in the content, then that would be perfectly acceptable as the original sender would have been broadcasting in general anyway.
Replies between tweeters that are public does not constitute a private conversation. Anyone can see them if they so wish to. If you want a private conversation, then use direct messages.
That said, filtering tweets that are between users is a good idea. A blank exclusion of all tweets with ‘@’ is not. For example, “In Medway with @yellowpark” would be filtered using your suggest, but I think that would be acceptable to retweet. In other words, only filter tweets that *start with* ‘@’.
Martin, what you say would make perfect sense – if you were talking about “d ” direct messages. If you want to have a private conversation on Twitter that’s how to do it. @username messages are simply a way to hook a thread of conversation together – in fact, they’re more useful to people *not* originally in the conversation. Following other people’s @replies is a large part of how I keep track of what’s going on – how else would I have noticed this post?
One thing I guess could be annoying is Twitter’s change to honouring eg @dave anywhere in a tweet. This would mean that Dave sees two replies – the original and the retweeted – where he wouldn’t have done before. Perhaps Chris needs to tweak his script so that it replaces @ in the retweeted message with something else. Then people not following @medway or whatever will never see it.
Let me try using a non twitter scenario to help explain peoples negative reaction.
You are on a busy bus and you overhear two people talking; yes, their conversation is in a public place but do you stand up and broadcast their conversation to the rest of the bus? If you did you would probably get a fist in your face!
Direct messages would avoid this retweet issue but if you want your followers to be a part of the conversation (as most people do) then a DM is not an option.
I understand your analogy, but I don’t think it’s close enough to draw conclusions from. Twitter isn’t the same thing as a real-world conversation.
I must disagree with you I’m afraid. Why should repeating a part of a conversation electronically be any different from that in my analogy above?
The bot is still taking a part of somebody’s conversation and repeating it without permission. Of course it is going to upset people.
The only difference is that on Twitter the offended parties can’t actually punch the offender in the chops!
Extending your analogy and mapping it back to how Twitter operates, you’re saying you’re fine with having a private conversation in public and it being recorded so anyone can go find it and listen to it later, but should someone broadcast that recorded conversation, you’d have an issue with it.
Surely, by agreeing to have the conversation in public and it being recorded, you give up the right to complain when it’s used in a way you don’t necessarily agree with.
No, sorry but that’s not what I am saying.
I am saying that if I send a Tweet in general (with no @ ..name..) then it is a broadcast of general interest – in which case yes this kind of bot retweet is acceptable.
However when chatting with somebody on Twitter it is unnaceptable to retweet the conversation. Bad manners is the simplest definition that comes to mind.
The people that have DM’d me to complain about this include a columninst for the Guardian newspaper and a TV personality – both very intelligent people.
If the scripts were written, as mentioned by contributors above, to exclude tweets with @ ..name.. in them (ie a general non-targeted tweet) then they could be no objection as in fact the bot would be helping further spread the message.
As an aside, Martin, I’m somewhat curious why people have been contacting *you* to complain about Chris’s bots.
I also don’t think any of the “contributors above” is mentioning filtering out tweets with @name in them. Neil gets closest by suggesting excluding ones that *start with* @, but he explicitly states that he’s *not* suggesting ignoring anything that contains @name at all. I suggested replacing the @ with some other symbol, so as not to double-post for people seeing the original directly, but that does nothing for your somewhat odd desire for privacy in a public medium.
Finally, I’m afraid that from my point of view your “appeal to authority” of journalists and television presenters doesn’t add anything in particular to your argument.
One question here is what the bot is actually doing?
Technically it’s publishing the results of an RSS feed of a twitter search. Something that anyone could set up easily using twitter feed or add to a website. This ability has been available on twitter for as long as I’m aware of, and there are a large number of bots which use this process for various keywords.
Replying to a message on twitter is not private. Anyone who follows both the sender and the receiver will see the message.
Twitter provides users the ability to send a message privately using DM. Twitter also provides users the ability to stop their tweets being visible to anyone not approved by allowing users to protect their tweets.
So, if a user does not protect their updates, and does not use a DM to reply, then they should have the expectation that they may be read by someone.
What the bots do is make this obvious, and serves as a reminder that twitter is open and not private. If people see that their tweet has been RT’d then that may cause them to be more cautious in future about how they reply and/or how they use twitter.
There’s a lot of value in these bots, making twitter and the internet more geographically relevent, allowing news to spread quickly, and helping people find other people worth following. I think it’s a shame that the complaints of a few have shut these bots down.
Pete: The problem with replacing the @ char with something else is that Twitter, and most of the clients, use the @ char to identify Twitter users and hyperlink to their profile. Replacing the @ char will break that incredibly useful feature.
Robert: You hit the nail on the head. All that the bots do is add a layer of abstraction, automating a task that *anyone* can perform.
Robert: “Anyone who follows both the sender and the receiver will see the message.”
Actually, you only need to follow the sender (this might be an optional setting; can’t remember). Quite a number of those I follow (and whose tweets I welcome) I only found via @ replies from those I was already reading.
Neil: That’s true. But including the @ means, IIUC, the retweet showing up in the timelines of those people, for an annoying second time, even if they have no interest in the bot whatsoever. Its annoyingness has been empirically proven: Martin seems pretty annoyed.
This will be my final update on the subject as I have said all that needs to be said from this side. As to how you decide to proceed with the bot is your decision, I just needed to register the feelings of those who don’t appreciate it.
To answer Pete’s question, the reason people are contacting me about it is because I run http://celebsthattwitter.com and have, by the nature of my real job (IT Support), become a technical reference for several of the celebs and many ‘normal’ people on Twitter.
I have bookmarked this page and will pop back in a day or two to see what decisions have been made.
Thanks for all of your input.
Pete: You’re right. being able to see @replies is a setting under ‘notices’. Options are:
-@replies to the people I’m following
-All @replies
-No @replies
Pete:
As Twitter stands today, if someone manually retweets something I’ve tweeted, I get to see it twice. Whether it’s another person or a bot doing the retweeting, the result is the same.
If folks find that behaviour annoying, then they should lobby Twitter to provide a way to let users control whether they see only replies or all mentions.
Neil: Yep, I guess that’s true. Maybe the difference is that when someone manually retweets what I say, that person must have been following me. Since I follow most people who follow me, I’d have seen their tweet regardless. Whereas the barnetbot will grab and retweet posts from people who’ve never heard of it, don’t want to hear from it, and were talking about haircuts rather than boroughs anyway
Martin: It’s interesting that your site itself contains a Flash widget showing your recent tweets. Most of them, right now, are @replies. I thought they were private – why are you publishing them to the Web at large? Fair enough, it’s only your own tweets in that widget, of course you can republish them if you want. But if I were curious why, for instance, you’re talking about a penis-shaped cake, I could click on @maggiephilbin and see all her tweets – including more @replies that she presumably *didn’t* ask to be published via a Flash widget on a celebrity-focussed Web site with far greater circulation than barnet and medway. Isn’t this what you’re supposed to be opposed to here?
I hope it’s clear from my previous comments that I think the above situation is perfectly fine and dandy – that’s how Twitter’s supposed to work. It’s less clear to me what the fundamental distinction is that makes your widget OK and Chris’s bots worth calling him a cunt over. Not to mention (IMHO maliciously) reporting him as a spammer, which may yet have repercussions depending on how long it takes Twitter staff to look at it. I’m not saying that the bots and the widget are precisely equivalent, but neither can I see a yawning chasm of a difference.
Hi Pete,
Firstly the C-word in the tweet wasn’t mine – it was that of the other person. Please get your facts straight. I never use abusive language unless in jest.
All of my followers on Twitter know of the flash widget on my site. To also have a similar widget on their official site it is one of the most accepted ways for celebs to prove they are genuine.
These widgets are put there through the person’s own choice and that is the major difference – CHOICE
There are also some legal ramifications in retweeting that Chris should consider – if, to take an extreme example, somebody promoted a child porn link with the word ‘barnet’ in it then Chris would also be guilty of redistributing / promoting pedophile images.
An extreme example but it is why my business customers spend a lot of money on web and e-mail filtering platforms.
BTW – 99% of my tweets are crude and that’s what people who follow me know to expect. I’ll try not to mention Medway, Barnet and Hackney in any.
Martin: This is the tweet I was thinking of: http://twitter.com/mkayes/status/1771236147 . Now I re-read it I see it is bowdlerised, but that hardly changes the intent.
Hiya
Gutted you’ve felt it necessary to pull the medway retweet.
Loved being able to see stuff from people I wasn’t following but then did.
Hope you can bring it back.
Mx