Do you remember when police started giving speeding tickets by using radar?
Then there were radar detectors to avoid speed traps.
Then the police got radar-detector-detectors for places where radar detectors were illegal (California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia).
It was a cross between Sneetches on Beaches and the arms race.
Now look at Twitter… people started tweeting and following, and that was cool.
Then people wanted a way to tweet faster, schedule them in advance, and even fire them off in an automated rotation (Jukebox) without the need to actually look at what you were tweeting any longer… just load up a stack of tweets and start generating noise on auto-pilot.
Tools like Crowdfire App made it easier to start following thousands of people at a time, without much consideration for who they are as a person, in the hopes that people would follow back, thereby making one look more important based on the follower count. Then tools requiring ReCaptcha showed up on twitter to prevent anybody from following you unless they are a real person and paying attention.
I predict that if it has not happened already, the automation of noise in marketing will lead to:
- Bots that are following each other
- Tweeting and posting done on auto-pilot
- Requests, posts, tweets, and following, all being done by automation
- Even complete systems of retweeting on automation
Real, genuine, human beings will start to become a commodity on Twitter and other platforms.
And when a chatbot can pass the Turing Test on Twitter, it will be game-over.
Postscript: It already happened