twitter expert

Ethical Community Building

Twiends has been built to provide users with a compliant, ethical, and responsible way of growing their online communities. As Twitter grows in popularity and stature, they get to define a number of the rules by which people may use the service.

Twitter was built in 2006 to answer one simple question, "what are you doing?". Over the last few years it has grown to become an important form of communication between people. Our ethics are underpinned by these core principles:

  • Don't sell followers
  • No automation
  • No spamming
  • No aggressive follow churning

The benefit of being able to influence and communicate to a large audience is well known, and because of that an incentive to grow these audiences will always exist. Unfortunately, some groups will attempt to grow their audiences via any means possible, including means that can be considered unethical, a violation of Twitter's rules, or in some cases criminal too.

Twiends decided to make its mark in the Twitter ecosystem by being a "good" participant. We recognized that we could only be successful if we played by ALL the rules, consistently and fairly. Our number one priority is to always take our guidance from Twitter and to conform to their rules always.

We recognize that failure to do this will result in our service not being allowed to operate. To this end, we regularly review Twitter's policy updates every month to ensure that our website conforms to any new updates they make. Here are some of our (and their) guiding principles:

Don't sell followers

We want to be very clear about this as this is core to our service, we do not sell followers, and we do not automatically add followers to your account. You will not be able to buy followers or "get followers fast" on our website. This is strictly prohibited by Twitter and is clearly stated in their rules. We have gone to great lengths to ensure that every bit of writing on our website accurately describes this and is not misleading.

Our website is free for all to use as a discovery and directory service. You do not have to perform any action on twiends in order to use the service. All actions that take place on the site are strictly opt-in and are performed by users who choose to do so.

No automation

We do not permit any automation or bulk actions on twiends. Every action has to be explicitly performed by the user. In addition to this we actively monitor for abuse in this area and limit or block accounts that may be trying to circumvent these rules.

We do not allow you to control multiple Twitter profiles from a single account. We also monitor for users attempting to create serial accounts, by using network and browser information. Any identified serial accounts are blocked. We do not provide any follow-back functionality either, and we do not provide any means of replicating another users follows or actions.

No spamming

Spam is something we all hate, and we can safely say that none of us want to be a part of the problem. We think Twitter does a good job to list some guidelines around what it considers spammy behaviour. Their definition isn't only restricted to what you tweet, but also incorporates a description on following and unfollowing behaviour.

We address this in the next section, but in terms of tweeting we decided to completely eliminate any potential abuse on our website. Messaging features are not required for directory and discovery services, so we made the decision not to provide these features, thereby preventing the possibility of using our service for spam purposes. We do not provide any Tweet, Retweet, likes, or DM functionality.

We also take active steps to eliminate spam accounts through active content monitoring and human moderation. Over the years there have been different 'waves' of spammy themes. These included a deluge of fake One Direction accounts many years ago, to a bunch of crypto airdrop accounts more recently. When these patterns emerge we take steps to filter them out as best we can.

No aggressive follow churning

We do not allow users to aggressively bulk follow others, and we pay special attention to users attempting to game Twitter's limits by churning (repeatedly following and unfollowing large numbers of other accounts). Twitter has placed sensible limits on following in order to ensure the stability of their platform and the quality of the conversations that take place on it.

We have implemented a number of measures to help us prevent this type of behaviour. These include our own more rigorous limits, as well as active connection monitoring to spot early signs of churning. Our limits are progressively set based on the past behaviour of an account, as well as some early indicators available to us. For example, if you don't have a profile photo, then you will not be able to follow anyone on twiends. Likewise, if you have very few tweets then you will be severely limited in the number of people you can follow.

We also actively monitor every follow that takes place via our platform. We do this for many weeks after it was made, and are able to spot most forms of follow churning due to this. If we detect that a user is aggressively following and unfollowing others then we will limit their ability to follow going forward.

These limits and active monitoring are essential to being a good ecosystem player. They have played a big part in helping us prevent bots and other bad actors from using our service.

Your privacy

We will not collect information about you, other than the profile information provided by Twitter and any information you directly provide to the site. We will not ask you for your Twitter password either, and we ask you never to give it to us or any other site. We use OAuth to authenticate with Twitter and you can revoke this access at any time. We will never tweet to your account.

Twiends™ uses the Twitter™ API, displays it's logo & trademarks, and is not endorsed or certified by them. These items remain the property of Twitter. We do not sell followers, we only provide display advertising. Bots & fake accounts are not permitted on twiends. © 2009
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Key Info:
Started in 2009
Over 7 million signups
We never auto tweet to your timeline
We never auto follow others
We actively moderate our community
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