On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 2:49 AM, Jesse Stay<jesses...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Honestly, I can't see any legitimate reason for doing a search for people to > follow and following more than 200 of those people in a day, other than > collecting spam lists or trying to build up following numbers, reducing the > value of those numbers.
Every number on a computer is a score. The purpose of a score is to get a high one. No matter how you slice it, a vast number of people are going to play "Twitter: The Video Game", where the goal is to get as many followers as you can in the shortest possible time. No matter how hard it is to do, people will still play it. You can't stop the game without stopping legitimate use of the service. Indeed, legitimate use of the service is the official ruleset of the game. If you're not building your score with legitimate use of the service, that's "cheating". Trouble is, legitimate use of the service is something of a grey area, because it mostly depends on what you're thinking when you use it. If you follow someone thinking "this person is interesting", that's legitimate. If you follow someone thinking "this person may follow me back", it's not. Likewise, if you're thinking "people should know about this", posting a URL is legitimate. If you're thinking "people will click this and I will make money", it's not.
