Twitter Auto-DMs are Pure Evil

Interesting, but you're not the norm. Literally 99% all of 417 DMs I have right now either just say hi, or are all sending me to their product or service website, or pitching me some affiliate junk. That's considered direct, untargeted, outbound marketing.

What you're doing is more of a social media optimization tactic and imho would be much more effective & is much less obtrusive/agrivating.

I don't spend a lot of time complaining about auto-DMs either, but when the subject comes up, I do sometimes feel free to submit my opinion, as you're doing. And, yes, there are more productive ways to spend time, but sometimes you just have to spend time unproductively to express your opinion or just relax.

It was in one of his Internet marketing programs. The most recent date on version I have is 1999. So, either he said it in 1999 or earlier and didn't update it or change it for the 1999 edition.

True. While auto-DMs may not technically be considered spam, many of them are still junk. Maybe we need a different name for them. Maybe we can call them smeat.

You can't have been the loudest of them. I think the loudest of them was the guy that reported me as a spammer for sending him a "Happy Holidays" eMail that wasn't commercial in nature at all. And, it wasn't a harvested eMail or anything either, since I had communicated with that guy too, both in eMail and on a forum. So, maybe you were the second loudest.

I disagree. Auto-DMs have already largely destroyed the usefulness of DMs for communication, especially for those with a large number of followers.

If I get 20 auto-DMs in a day, which does happen though it happens less often since I opted-out thru Tweetlater and SocialToo dropped auto-DM'ing, that pushes any real DMs to the second page, which means I'll likely miss it.

While that may not compare with the 50-100 spam messages I receive in eMail every day (those are just the ones that slip through the spam filters), it's still detrimental. It could be argued that you could unfollow those people and not receive them anymore, but it seems to me that most people only have an auto-DM upon following. So, it's a one-time deal. So, that makes it kind of like the CAN-SPAM Act, where you can send an unsolicited message and then say, Oops, sorry, won't do it again! if they complain.

Still, those one-time DMs are still burdensome. As mentioned in previous posts, they do interfere with personal DM messaging. And, you don't know until you follow someone that you will be hit with an auto-DM.

And, really, the majority of people that really need auto-DMs are marketers, and social networks, like Twitter, are not designed for marketing. They are designed for social networking. As such, they don't need to keep marketers happy.

And thus the importance of warning against auto-DMs, which are eroding a communications channel.

I had a forum for a while that was almost 100% spam-free. But, registration was by mail, so that pretty much kept a lot of would-be spammers out.

I don't know that they will be completely phased out, as there are legitimate uses for them. But, what Twitter may do is broaden their definition of spam to include auto-DM'd marketing messages. By doing that, auto-DMs would still be permitted, but if there are enough complaints against a user sending "smeat," Twitter could suspend their account.

If you look at it, Twitter is already pretty tough on marketers. If you set up an account with just a website link in your bio and a handful of short tweets ending in a "Hey check this site out..." and then go follow a bunch of people, you will likely get your account suspended. So, it's not really a stretch to imagine Twitter taking that a step further and suspending accounts that send a website link through auto-DMs instead, especially if enough people complain about the practice.