This post was upvoted by sockpuppets. We have banned those, buried the post, and banned the site.
Edit: We're also banning the site of the startup this was promoting, since it has been promoted abusively on HN in the past and asking for that to stop [1] seems only to have encouraged more.
I don't get why there seems to be hostility towards Outpost. On both occasion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637010 and the current) the articles have been relevant to the YC community and to my knowledge hadn't been up voted by sock puppets that we created or operated. This article mentioned Outpost once and wasn't even centred around it. I could have replaced Outpost with any other company and it still would have same purpose.
Our hostility is to abuse and gaming of HN. If you aren't doing it, it must be someone else. In that case, their dedication to promoting your personal blog is remarkable.
They managed to find their way to both of your own (now deleted) submissions of this article from medium.com, and then helpfully re-submitted it from your personal domain and ring-voted it up. They don't seem interested in anything else, either. Quite the fans.
The idea of directly engaging potential users actively seeking/asking for a particular product/service on Twitter is very interesting; but unfortunately the way you are implementing it right now is unethical and in violation of Twitter's Automation Rules and Best Practices [1]:
"Creating serial or bulk accounts with overlapping use, however, is prohibited."
I initially thought you were using your company's own Twitter account for messaging people; instead, by your own admission [2], you have resorted to using multiple 'realistic' accounts:
Well you can always argue what is right and what wrong. Very true, it is a violation of the Twitter terms of services but I still appreciate it for sharing with the HN community.
There has also been a post about Darkmarket (https://github.com/darkwallet/darkmarket) on HN. Again, I do not encourage trading illegal goods at all but as a proof of concept it is still impressive.
Perhaps, but some famous startups got traction by doing such "unethical" things. IIRC even Reddit seeded their site with fake accounts and conversations.
Also if the Twitter accounts are truly of the interns like the post says then it's not really that bad. In that case, it would really be an employee mentioning their employer's product.
Have you considered what potential there is for scaling in up? Because if all you are getting that way is 100 uniques a day, the effort involved sounds like it'd make it a net loss compared to simply buying the traffic via paid advertising. If the tweets continue to generate additional referrals down the line, then of course it might change.
But frankly, having seen the travel space up close, I find this system more interesting than your startup...
The problem is that Twitter's filtered Streaming API has quite a small limit on the number of words that you can provide to match tweets. So, it would be impossible to scale.
A better option might be retrieving tweets from the Firehose Streaming API, but one would need a massive backend to handle it. Additionally, access has to be requested to Twitter and it's very rarely granted. Alternatively, Datasift or Gnip can be better sources for the firehose, but I think they only provide a fraction (like 1/10) of the real amount of tweets that go through the actual firehose.
The Twitter Streaming API allows you to track up to 400 keywords. For most businesses, that seems like enough. Or if you need 1000, you simply need 3 accounts.
I'm already a fair way into building a similar paid tool (curated engagement via twitter+disqus), if its something you might want to try out ... email in my profile.
It's something I've thought about and both our current investors and potential future investors have mentioned that this could be a product on its own. If I were to scale it up and turn it into its own startup I'd want to make sure not to saturate the tweetosphere with it or there's no benefit over the competition. I'd also probably license it out to early stage startups instead of bigger companies because no one wants to be spammed to by the next HP, Apple or Dell computer when you ask for suggestions from friends.
If this trick is still really working for you, please, do yourself a favour and shut up about it. Drawing attention to it is not going to end well for you, either twitter shuts you down or people just copy your idea and it loses effectiveness. The correct time to write about these things is when they stop working.
If all he's doing is parsing search results, then nobody would be seeing his advertisements. You conveniently left out the part where he uses a bunch of different Twitter accounts designed to appear to be different people.
I agree, but the general point is that specific marketing tricks that work well should be hoarded, not shared, because sharing them destroys their value.
Because it'll lower your competitive advantage? If your main competitive advantage is knowing about some cheap Twitter trick--sorry, I mean "Growth Hack"--then you need to rethink your game plan.
My account had posted it from Medium earlier but I realized how SLOOW it was loading so I loaded up a Ghost Blog droplet for Digital Ocean and reposted it there. I needed a new account to post it on behalf of so a smashed my keyboard. Voial!
The reason you didn't address what phea said is that you promoted this story through abusive techniques. So abusive, in fact, that we've banned your main account too, as well as this site.
Edit: We're also banning the site that you've abusively promoted here in the past [1].
I'm not affiliated with it, but LeadSift does something similar to this and is actually pretty good at it for picking up new lead opportunities http://leadsift.com/.
This post is doing something a bit different and probably more useful, but it reminds me of the people that search Twitter for mentions of their competitors and then try to convince those people to use their product instead. I see this every once in awhile when I search for our product mentions and it makes me sad. I'm sad because it's a huge waste of time for them and they are actually damaging their brand (not ours).
Even though Twitter is public, there's still a sense that some random person isn't just going to start replying to your tweets.
I wonder if they are using paid interns or unpaid interns? Makes me wonder if the cost of paid interns was put towards regular advertising whether it would generate a better return.
It was what I originally was planning on doing but felt that a personal response would be better than a bot. During the hours of 3am - 9am I do set it up to be auto replies but there's not much traffic anyways. There are similar Twitter bots that do this and I've spoken to someone from Twitter about a grey of the ToS area I might be able to work in.
I think the question is, how spammy would you think if 1000 other people would do the same? How relevant would the answers be if every answer would have 100s of answers from bots that are advertising their service?
I agree with the sentiment that this is borderline unethical, but I think that it's probably okay as long as there's a human in the loop presumably spending as much time/effort verifying the usefulness of the tweet before sending it as it costs the end user to read the tweet and decide if it's worthwhile.
People often write about making web stuff here. And their email addresses are often easy to find. Does that mean that we're all asking for outsourcing firms to send us "manual, personal" form emails via a 99.8% automated process, even if a marketroid blesses each one?
Of course not. That's spam. Similarly, if I post a question on Twitter, I'm asking my followers. If some random jackass butts in because it's profitable for them, that's spam too.
There's a difference between holding up a 1x1 foot sign at a gathering of friends and planting a 1x1 foot sign on your lawn.
Are you expecting your tweets to be private or public?
If you publicly announce a problem, (and asking for public comments back.. ) then it is not spam if you get a relevant and appropriate message sent to you.
Scaping usernames here however is not comparable to the blog post's example
edit: misrepresentation as 'just another follower' is what i am against here.
A question of ethics. I could have written it to be as flexible with its replies as possible but I didn't want it to look like spam. Even now the odd tweet gets passed but it occasionally makes for a laugh as the replies I'm giving make no sense based on the question.
To me, this is a big no-no. If you're answering someone who posted a question and it's clear that you're the business behind the product/answer that's okay with me. But if you're using a personal profile (real? fake?) to push traffic to your website, you're actively misleading people.
Great innovative lead-gen. I'm more curious about your database of destinations. Do you have formal partnerships with the sites you're linking-to to syndicate their listings?
Am wondering if there are an API based services which can be used for NLP? Something cheap because the number of messages to be processed will be extremely large.
I'm planning on doing a more in-depth write up on how NER/NLP in the tweetosphere is different that general NER/NLP which will by me technical explanation of what I did here. That should be up sometime later this week.
Can you elaborate more on how having these specific tweets helps your specific startup or how you are converting them from casual tweeters to your new users?
Right now there is a big disconnect in the post. I am guessing its because you assume the reader understands even what ner/nlp is
Check out our API for your NER needs, we cover quite a large corpus of people, places & things. Might be able to broaden your scope: https://www.repustate.com/semantic/
Edit: We're also banning the site of the startup this was promoting, since it has been promoted abusively on HN in the past and asking for that to stop [1] seems only to have encouraged more.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637010