The twitter flatterbots are at it again.
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So, back in 2010, Lisa Hoover said a paragraph worth of nice things about Metafilter in an interview here:
http://www.personalbrandingblog.com/personal...
Aw. People like us.
And then at some point someone took that nice paragraph and split it into a couple of tweets and tweeted them. And that got retweeted/favorited a bunch by as far as I could tell at the time were actual people seconding those nice sentiments.
So, again, aw.
And then...some twitter spambots noticed that those tweets were doing well, I guess? And so assimilated them as reliable chaff to give a bot a bit of reliable content?
And so, ever since, bots just periodically barf up this bit of flattery again. And again. Sometimes just one at a time, sometimes in great bursting orgies or robotic flattery. The actual original sentence structure has decayed over time, some tweets starting in mid-sentence, others ending in mid-word.
This is a screenshot of a search column I keep open in Tweetdeck as a lofi way to try to keep an eye out for sudden happy bursts of tweets/mentions of the site (or the occasional dramarocket kerfluffle) so that I have a heads up if something making the rounds or getting weird. Usually it's handy in a passive sort of way.
Not so much when the flatterbots start acting up.
http://www.personalbrandingblog.com/personal...
Aw. People like us.
And then at some point someone took that nice paragraph and split it into a couple of tweets and tweeted them. And that got retweeted/favorited a bunch by as far as I could tell at the time were actual people seconding those nice sentiments.
So, again, aw.
And then...some twitter spambots noticed that those tweets were doing well, I guess? And so assimilated them as reliable chaff to give a bot a bit of reliable content?
And so, ever since, bots just periodically barf up this bit of flattery again. And again. Sometimes just one at a time, sometimes in great bursting orgies or robotic flattery. The actual original sentence structure has decayed over time, some tweets starting in mid-sentence, others ending in mid-word.
This is a screenshot of a search column I keep open in Tweetdeck as a lofi way to try to keep an eye out for sudden happy bursts of tweets/mentions of the site (or the occasional dramarocket kerfluffle) so that I have a heads up if something making the rounds or getting weird. Usually it's handy in a passive sort of way.
Not so much when the flatterbots start acting up.
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