Posted by:
Tate Linden
Getting those annoying TrueTwit validation messages from people you follow on Twitter? So am I. And I’m not happy about it. Read on to learn how TrueTwit’s leaders have created a league of unwitting sales zombies, and wasted over 80 years of human effort, while building a badly aligned brand.
While I must admit that the business model TrueTwit uses is brilliant, it’s also pretty damn creepy.
Here’s how it works.
- You click follow to track someone interesting on Twitter
- You immediately receive this direct message: “SoAndSo uses TrueTwit validation service. To validate click here: [...]
- If you click the link soon after you get it you’ll be sent to a page with a huge 18 word ad for TrueTwit, followed by a paid Google ad, followed by a slim 32 words telling you how to validate, followed by 47 words telling you that if you inflict the service (for free!) on your own followers you’ll never see this annoying message again, followed by 70 words telling you how awesome their paid service is. Some paraphrasing may have occurred above, of course. Only then do you actually get to enter the two captcha words to prove you’re human.
- If you don’t click the message shortly after you receive it you may get the same two ads as above and a message saying “Sorry, but it appears the person you followed may no longer be following you.” That means that the user (or more likely TrueTwit) classified you as not worth following back. Opportunity to make a connection is lost.
I am not a subscriber of the service and I’m not willing to waste the time of my select few followers or my own money to try it out, so I don’t know every detail about how it works from the inside. And while the website has a FAQ sheet it doesn’t give the kinds of details I want to hear about. Honestly I don’t really have questions, though. They’re more a seething pile of visceral responses to the business practices I see being used by TrueTwit. Stuff like…
- By far the most egregious issue is that TrueTwit says it has the technology to automatically ensure that human users are identified and don’t need to go through the validation process at all. It’s a formula that the paying users are able to utilize. Fine. But for the non-paying users there is no legitimate ‘validation’ reason to make a human follower go through ten validations in a row to prove they’re human. The only reason to require it is to annoy the Hell out of the follower and get them to sign up and annoy others – or buy the service.
- While I do get Twitter spam occasionally, most spam I receive is from TrueTwit. And worse, it’s exactly the sort of bot spam that the service is supposed to prevent. If I want to get rid of it all I have to do is agree to do everything TrueTwit wants me to do or pay them money. Sounds an awful lot like a protection racket, since the only thing I’m trying to do is have them stop wasting my time – and potentially billable hours – to prove something they already know (see my first complaint) – that I’m human.
- By having the basic TrueTwit service automate the validation process via DMs it turns its non-paying users into the very bots that it claims it is trying to eliminate.
- TrueTwit isn’t a validation service at all. The DM spam sends the follower to a page with 32 words telling people how to validate buried on a page with three links to sign up for the service, a paid ad, and 135 words trying to get me to do something other than what the link said they were going to give me? Just counting the words alone that’s worse than a 4 to 1 ratio of advertising copy to information. TrueTwit isn’t in the validation business – it’s in the ad business.
- The basic service preys on selfish people who value their own time over the time of those who choose to follow them. They’re fed up with all the spam and shut it of for themselves, making the rest of their new followers similarly annoyed, spreading this time-wasting ad service like, sadly, a virus.
- TrueTwit admits that the service doesn’t actually stop human spammers – saying “If a spammer is human they will get through. The point of TrueTwit is to eliminate automated spam software from grabbing your attention.” Which is exactly what TrueTwit basic is doing to the world. Worse, all it takes is a human to click the link and validate so that their automatic tweets can hit your stream, so a human can dig through piles of TrueTwit DMs at about 15 seconds each to validate and then auto-spam at will.
- Want to break the system? Pay $20 and spam as a “validated” user. While TrueTwit can terminate a user for any reason, they don’t specify Twitter spam (only listing email) or unwanted DMs as a cause. And most of the limitations under “USER CONDUCT” as currently written only apply to international users. So if you’re American and want to send unlimited tweets without having to validate through the annoying TrueTwit service then you’re home free!
- As great as TrueTwit’s (Google owned) reCaptcha is, it has been hacked as recently as 2011, and has allowed bots to bypass the security check, so the whole thing is pretty much not as (overly) advertised.
TrueTwit turns its users into bots for no reason other than increasing its own advertising reach and increasing income. The validation it provides is intrusive, wasteful, and ineffective.
If they want to be useful I think there’s a simple fix. Stop spamming mandatory site links to everyone. Let some of the more advanced services trickle down to the free service and change how your validation works. How about:
- If someone has just validated on your site then let that validation stand for a period of time for all the people they follow – even if it’s just an hour that’s better than nothing. Perhaps let your validated and trusted users decide how long that period should be – give them a range and make it easy to find and adjust. After all – they’re human and your service is not.
- Once a Twitter account is validated within that specific time-frame you can have your auto-DM (still spam, mind you) indicate that the follow was approved by TrueTwit automatically and if they want to know more they can click the link. That turns you into a service rather than an obstacle.
- Consider using your algorithms to keep specific accounts validated for longer periods. New accounts may need to re-validate frequently, while established accounts with tens of thousands of followers and low spam profiles might only need validation once a week – or perhaps never.
The real reason this is so annoying for me is that it is an example of organizational leadership completely out of alignment. What they think, say, and do in the name of the organization is a mess.
TrueTwit says: “What if you could know for sure that your followers are truly human and not some cyborg?” But TrueTwit does: send cyborgian links to actual humans who universally don’t want them.
TrueTwit says: ”Avoid Twitter spam” but does send the same Direct (DM) Twitter message advertising the TrueTwit service from multiple TrueTwit users to a single follower multiple times in a single day.
All of this makes it seem that the motivation (what TrueTwit thinks) is to get free advertising or lots of money – or both – by breaking the rules they say they enforce.
That’s not a recipe for long term success and respect. Unless you maybe the mob, in which case you are totally awesome and I have no complaints at all with your methods. (And it has just dawned on me that since there’s not a single indication of who runs the service on the website and no owner attribution on whois this could conceivably be run by them. So… apologies if that’s the case. I like my kneecaps and shall retract this post if that’s what it takes to keep them.)
I’ll share you with the saddest part of all. On the right side of TrueTwit’s Welcome Page there’s a statistics sheet that currently shows over 4.2 million verified followers. We’re looking at about a minute to read and digest the page copy and enter the Captcha codes – assuming we get them right the first time. If my math is right (and it probably isn’t) that’s more than 80 years of lost human effort. More than a literal lifetime wasted responding to an automated process that never had to happen in the first place.
It’s time to practice what you preach, TrueTwit. Stop causing the problem you say you’re here to solve. Trust us to willingly advertise services that we like instead of forcing your message down our throats with Sisyphean cyborgs.
Love the name, by the way. After looking into the organization in such detail I find it somewhat descriptive.