Project Britomartis

Casting a net for for a new breed of spam.

Reader’s Note: this is a sort of manifesto for an orphaned coding project I still hold close to my heart. I still think that these ideas are deeply important, but I don’t have a means to act on them right now. My hope is that in seeing it, others might take up the banner and incorporate similar ideas in their projects.

Join me in the wild hunt?

Uhh, What?

My name is Nicholas, and I’d like to go on a journey with you.

I’ve been doing this alone for a while. I think its time to find some help, so I went through my tweets and collected my thoughts together all in once place. I’ve quoted the tweets here and tried to create a more cohesive story to put my feeling into words. Let me know what you think.

TL;DR: I’ve been on a crusade against marketing automatons. I’d like to make something neat by iterating toward a crowd-sourced anti-spam system masquerading as a relationship-centric CRM tool.

…motto for my crowdsourced twitter overly app: “Combating social spamvertising one relationship at a time.” Thoughts?

Sounds neat, but why?

First rule of the social spaces: if someone can send you a notification, a marketer will figure out how to abuse it. I’m sick of list spam.

I see the problem with spam on social networks as being an ecosystem one. I think we’re reaching a tipping point where twitter is being overwhelmed with it’s own success and we are reaching the marketing equivalent of Eternal September.

In my view, automated spammy growth hacking marketers (and services), with their fake follows and faves, are what is destroying twitter.

With the rapid rise of of social networks, the popularity of Growth Hacking, Shifts in SEO techniques, and the changing landscape of PR, I believe that the nature of spam has evolved. We are not just getting random anonymous content over email or message. Instead we are being inundated with a new breed of spam I’d like to call “Social Spamvertizing”.

Marketers use terms like ‘content marketing’, ‘reach’, and ‘influencers’. I think about it as creating friends and internet pen-pals.

The social spam is coming from many sources:

• Overambitious Startups trying to get traction
• Metric driven marketing that misses the forest for the trees
• Outsourced PR firms running a script
• Misguided small business owners plodding in the dark
• Various ‘Work From Home’ scams
• MLM schemes that focus too much on gaming ‘social selling’
• People who haven’t read Why Content Marketing Fails
• Activists trying to force an issue by spamming instead of engaging in discourse
• [insert your own examples here]

Content Marketing is just sharing cool shit with friends. Building an audience is just finding cool people who share the same values

How often are you inundated with auto-replies by over zealous marketers? How many lists have you been added to because it’s become trendy to (ab)use it? A million and one services cropped up to ‘automate’ thank yous. Social Media Marketers, who live in their own little bubble, ate it up.

Marketing is [a melding of psychology, sociology, sociobiology, systems theory, information flow, memetics, behavior] mostly pure dumb luck.

I read an article a few days ago encouraging brands to be ‘friends’ with people online. I gagged a little. It worries me when it starts sounding like marketing wizards are trying to spawn little brand homunculi to do their bidding. Brands aren’t people. Brands become human by putting their people on the front lines.

Social Media is making art on [cave] walls and [sitting around a campfire] telling stories. Also bots, so many damn bots.

People heard that social marketing was good business, so they jumped on the hype train, and quickly started automating it.

Everyone on twitter is seeking engagement, not realizing all it takes is to reach out and engage. People follow people, brands are secondary

Are we on the Twitter marketing hype train? Because I want off.

Why You? Why now?

There are five things you need to know about me:

• I go by ultimape.
• I have an obsession with Ze Frank.
• I want to colonize Mars with swarms of robotic ants.
• I may be obsessed with human swarms too.
• I really hate spam.

I am a heavy twitter user. It’s basically my drug of choice.

I started using twitter in earnest shortly after breaking up with my wife. It helped distract me from debilitating depression and anxiety that destroyed my relationship. It let me connect with all sorts of cool people by focusing on my passions (read: obsessions). I even landed an internship on here even after years of struggling with undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome and failing interviews over and over.

Twitter has become my support community. I want to see it thrive.

This game is not about views, favs or shares. It’s won by touching people’s lives & bringing value to human beings.

I figure the best way to get more people to follow me is to do something worth following. It seems ranting at bots and random Saas providers until they comply with twitter automation rules and guidelines isn’t quite cutting it.

Become an expert in the system you want to destroy. In a perfect world, there would be no such thing as marketers. Just cool people sharing.

I have spent the past year learning everything I can about the dynamics of social networks and associated aspects of psychology/sociology as it relates to how we form groups. I may also be insane.

Like the Dog Cynic, I shine my lantern on the web, looking for an honest marketer.

I’d like to think I’m a digital native: Before I found Twitter, I was into Google+, Reddit, Facebook, and even DeviantArt. As a digital native I’ve lurked most of the internet, having been on it since 1997. I gained my passion for programming and web design in video game forums. I also have a lot of fun sucking at web site development: Ask me about my SEO ;P

Cool, so what is your plan?

Is there an app to find all the ways I’ve interacted with someone on twitter? I’d love to use tech surrogates to fight Dunbar's Number.

I’m planning on taking a unique approach.

I imagine the extension providing a UI and analytical service as an overlay for twitter Sort of like a CRM, but to weed out crap.

What I’d like to do is create a personal CRM tool that lets you take notes on why you followed people, and have a heads up display of your recent conversations.

Over time, I’d also combine this with an analytics platform that curates different ways of interpreting how people behave. I want it to answer questions like “if I follow X, how noisy will their feed be?”, or “do they use service Y that sends out annoying @ mentions?”.

I wonder also, would any sufficiently complex but feature complete facsimile to the systems behind Dunbar’s Number will be too complicated.

I hope to turn it into a chrome extension (or app like tweetdeck) that overlays this information on demand as you go about using twitter. Basically create tools to help automate what I’ve been doing manually for the past year.

I’d like to see it morph into a spam reputation system for twitter — where people can submit custom filters to create stronger communities.

The long term vision: once I’ve got a basis of this CRM tool is to work toward developing a platform to get others involved in collectively combating spam.

It used to be that spam was just some random person sending out massive quantities of junk mail, so the focus was on the contents of the mail itself. Tools like Akismet and Gmail’s spam filtering software are constantly improving and in some cases are almost perfect. The trouble is that most anti-spam measures target content — and we’ve gotten really good at it.

I’d like to target users themselves.

But one man’s spam is another man’s news feed, so I have to make sure it isn’t going to be defamatory.

Because of the power of twitter there’s a large number of ways people use it. I can only begin to enumerate them.

Some accounts are glorified socially accessible RSS feeds. Others are corporate brands run by dozens of interns. Many organizations are trying to create a place to connect with their followers on social media. Some people run dedicated support accounts to help their customers. And of course the myriad numbers of standard users who are just here to connect with like minded souls and become part of a community.

Twitter is amazing. But it has problems.

Twitter’s problem from my perspective: 630 of 1273 of my followers have been real people / not marketing automatons.

I am against shaming tactics as a means to enforce social norms as they often end up being destructive. But not in the case of these people.

As way to discourage behavior that directly destabilizes twitter’s ecosystem, shaming is the tool for the job. Although do so with empathy.

Its important that if you take part in shaming, you also come in with a mindset that they are just misguided. Shaming should include advice

The beauty of twitter as a community platform is slowly being drowned out by social spam and automated junk. We need to create a way to nudge people into behaving like good twitter citizens. We need an incentive to stop people from polluting our commons with robotic megaphones running around like misbehaved screaming children. I see it as only way to avoid The Hecker’s Veto while also preserving freedom of speech.

Tragedy of the commons is a hard game to fix. Nash equilibrium normally require outside nudges to reach global optima.

Right now, our emperor has no clothes, but because he only sneaks out at night, no one is saying anything at all. I’d like to shine a light on this behavior. Only by highlighting destructive behavior, putting it on the forefront of our consciousness, can we begin to question the emperor. Some one has to speak up.

I want to help create a community driven ‘nudge’. A wiki for filters that anyone can contribute to. If we can create a meta-layer of reputation for twitter, along the lines of what StackOverflow or Discourse is doing, perhaps we can tip the ecosystem back in our favor.

I believe the key to pulling this off is to have a publicly curated list of advisory filters that tell you what kind of account you are dealing with. Let people subscribe to different filter sets, and create a crowdsourced market of filters that we rank and share.

The magic happens when you consider: How would you feel if the highest ranked anti-spam filter is one targeting your app?

TL;DR: fight bots with bots.

So you just hate marketers?

Cost of a Cargo Cult Marketing professional to spam all the things? $111,000 Getting banned from Twitter for TOS violation? Priceless.

No, I don’t hate marketers. I’ve found a tons of really inspirational people who could call themselves marketers. I’d even venture to say that to sell is human.

So I think I’m basically going to try and do this for spam bots on Twitter: XKCD 810 “Constructive”

I think the best way to describe what I want to do, is to create a sort of ‘Clue Stick’ to help marketers measure how they are approaching social. I use the term Cluestick as a nod to the Cluetrain manifest, both the original, and the New Clues.

Curiously, the most apt entry in the 95 thesis is #84, and is exactly 140 characters: “We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?”

TL;DR: Stop focusing on your follower counts. Do what growth hacking was originally about: Challenging assumptions and testing hypothesis.

How can I help?

Right now what I need is your support.

Feel free to engage with me on twitter over this. Read all the (Source) links here and favorite the good ideas. Tell me you like it, tell me you hate it. Write blog posts, or create memes telling me your experiences and what you think.

I don’t really care. I just need some signal to show me I’m on the right track. I need motivation.

I also need ideas. I have thoughts on how to implement this and a tentative roadmap in my head, but I need people to pick this apart and beat the idea into the ground.

Mostly I just need something more catchy, #SocialSpamvertising is kinda bad.

Also, I am hopeless at spelling.
Feel free to leave a comment if you see errors.

Why call it “Britomartis”?

Because if you created nets, and are BFFs with Artemis, you’ve go to be pretty cool.

It’s also a nod to some cool people who created Block Together — A crowd sourced tool meant to help with online harassment and a major inspiration for me.

The shit they have to go through to work toward making twitter a better place makes fighting spam look easy by comparison. At least for me, bots don’t bite back.

Keep being awesome!