Just because in all cases you can't define premeditated murder doesn't mean that premeditated murder isn't universally wrong.
"One person considers being followed by someone they don't want to be followed by to be spam. Others don't." Very true, however when you ask that same person if being followed by 100 or 1000 people that they don't want to be followed by as spam I would be surprised if anyone said no and that is the behavior this app encourages. "To blame a tool that enables people to follow someone is like blaming the gun for killing. That's just downright stupid, or in this case, universally wrong. Again very true, however one needs to use some common sense. It's ok for people to own guns. It's not ok for people to own nuclear missiles or anthrax. Why is that? We don't blame those tools for killing... We ban there ownership because they have no legitimate use for every day normal people. My Twitter Butler falls into the nuclear missile category. I can think of no legitimate uses for wanting to follow 400 people who input any keyword. You could make the case of a niche market, I mean if you wanted to connect with people who liked to fly fish in dubai then you could look for #flyfishingindubai but with the smallness of that group the twitter web interface and manually following works just fine. At any scale where you need an app to follow people based on keywords the uses are only malicious. The only scenario I can think of that is legitimate is to compare other tweets of those who are interested in one topic. Ie if people mention #Dell what other habits do they have? However this behavior can be achieved by running searches for #Dell, culling the user names and accessing their streams directly alleviating the need for mass following. If there is a use case I haven't thought of please feel free to enlighten me. Also as a final note, I've never heard of your application nor do I have any knowledge of what it does (and I'm intentionally not going to look until this thread is done) so I don't want you to think this is a personal attack. I'm just trying to observe the reason for the TOS violation and make a case for why it is a reasonable part of the TOS. -Bob On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Dossy Shiobara<do...@panoptic.com> wrote: > > On 8/12/09 3:44 PM, Robert Fishel wrote: >> >> There are universal wrongs. Guns aren't on of them. Premeditated murder >> is. >> So is spam. > > Suppose you're right. Is it so very clear what premeditated murder is in > all cases? How about spam? > > One person considers being followed by someone they don't want to be > followed by to be spam. Others don't. > > To blame a tool that enables people to follow someone is like blaming the > gun for killing. That's just downright stupid, or in this case, universally > wrong. > > Users abusing tools can be destructive and we should define ways of handling > those abuses - trying to ban or eliminate those tools is pointless. > > In developing and maintaining Twitter Karma, I have been very careful in > selecting what features to implement. I recognize that it can still be used > by people to abuse Twitter and that makes me very, very sad. However, those > features are also very useful for legitimate users, so I have implemented > them. I will, however, refuse to implement any feature that only benefits > users who intend to abuse Twitter. > > In the end, I would hope that Twitter would create ways of punishing the > abusive users and not Twitter Karma. > > -- > Dossy Shiobara | do...@panoptic.com | http://dossy.org/ > Panoptic Computer Network | http://panoptic.com/ > "He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own > folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70) >
