The Twitter Police have arrived! Everyone shine your shoes, tuck in your shirts and stand at attention! Oh, and apparently delete any trace of auto-DM associations or else you might get sent this in return.
Honestly, I think some folks could eat rainbows and poop out butterflies and still find something to gripe about. Come on people. It’s one DM that you get when you follow someone. Can you not just ignore or delete the stinkin’ thing and move on? It’s not like you’re going to get your tweetstream bombarded with auto bot messages, or your DM box filled to overflowing from this day forward with auto DMs from this person.
It’s a welcome message. That’s it. So what if it has a link. Don’t click it. If you chose to follow them, then if you were wise and at least followed something similar to my 3 Point Check List before you clicked that follow button, then you already know you have something in common with this person and have a basis on which to build a social networking relationship. So get over this one auto DM and get on with getting to know them. Hopefullythey will be able to extend the same kindness to you and overlook your equally as annoying Twitter habits. 
Oh and for the record: I use an auto DM message for my new follows. I am very busy, but wanted to at least be polite and thank everyone for following and not miss anyone. Here’s my message,
Thanks for the follow. Have an awesome day!
If you can’t handle that, then don’t follow me; I promise, I won’t be upset. Oh, and have an awesome day!
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your use of the term “Twitter Police” makes it difficult to take you seriously. Nobody is forcing you to do anything, but there are consequences for all actions in life.
I just got my first auto DM a few minutes ago, and yes, I was annoyed by it. Not enough to yell at anyone or to unfollow, but still annoyed.
The thing is that getting the DM through Twitterfox didn’t bother me at all. There, it seemed charming. But getting the automated message through my e-mail brought on the annoying factor, and, honestly, I think it was a trained response to years of being bombarded by e-mail spam.
And, since regular “at” replies show up in the public timeline, there really is no way to perfect the automated welcoming message system.
Personally, I’d be more impressed by real replies and genuine conversation.
YatPundit: I have a dry sense of humor. No apologizes for that.
My point is that while I can understand folks not liking auto DMs, I do not see why they feel the need to so vehemently respond as if they are *the* policing authority of Twitter, setting the rules and guidelines for all.
And your point was mine as well: no one is forcing you to do anything. So if they don’t like auto DMs they can just unfollow the person – why send them to a link? [By the way, I have never personally had that link sent to me, that was sent to someone else and shared via Twitter; that, along with other recent tweets on this very topic, prompted this post.]
Sharonda: Since we choose to receive the email notifications when someone follows us or we receive a DM, we can hardly complain when we receive one.
Again, I just delete.
Auto DMs don’t bother me, even though some are without a doubt – spammy. I don’t click the links, I just ignore and delete. But what I do find very annoying, is when folks choose to send their auto welcome messages into the public tweetstream. That is an option they can change with the service they’re using to send their auto welcome message. Again, I just ignore those tweets – even if there are lots of them some days. My tweetstream moves pretty fast, so they flow on by quickly.
Again, yep – there are things that other peeps do that can be annoying. So we can either sit around and gripe about them, try to ‘police’ them and create rules or we can ignore the annoying and realize we probably annoy others too.
I guess I’m a peacemaker. I want world peace for 2009. I say let’s start on Twitter. Peace out everybody and take a chill pill!
Traci,
Hilarious – great point and post. Seriously, it seems like there are plenty of things in life worth getting worked up over…and DM’s aren’t one of them. There’s a fun new thing on the keyboard these days called the “delete” key. All the kids are doing it.
I most definitely can complain when I get an auto DM via e-mail, since I shouldn’t miss out on notifications of real messages, written specifically to me, just to avoid the robo-stuff.
You must like “Horton Hears A Who”.