[shaggyfrog]

If I were ever forced to tweet about a video before I watched it, I would immediately close the tab and instead send a tweet about how idiotic the video poster is for making me jump through such a ridiculous hoop.

I'm not even sure how you'd take into account someone not actually having a Twitter account in the first place. I hear tell those people call themselves "normal".

Edit: almost forgot... if this "service" ever took off, the first thing I'd do is write a plugin to disable it.

[sinaiman]

And I might set up a separate Twitter called "ShittyVideos"

Haha just kidding, I think this is a cool idea/experiment, it'd be interesting to see what user reactions would be. Initially I would try to have a "dismiss" button just so you can see the ratio of users who tweeted vs. dismissed to see what kind of "annoyance index" you may be looking at here. Edit: ...what kind of "annoyance index" you may be looking at by disabling the dismiss button in the future

Definitely an interesting concept.

[shaggyfrog]

I don't comprehend why anyone would want to experience with seeing just how far they can annoy a user, on purpose. It's like poking some poor caged animal with a sharp stick. Are you annoyed yet? No? How about now... are you annoyed yet?

[sinaiman]

Sure, you could look at it like that, but this is what marketing is at it's core, really. You run a campaign and you then judge whether it was effective or not. And yeah, when some marketing effort isn't effective, it could be because it was annoying.

But, the bottom line is that marketing a product or service is the process of figuring out what works on real people and a really good way of figuring that out is by actually trying it out with a real audience and recording the results, like a real experiment. You can call it purposely annoying users, but I don't see it that way, and for all we know some people might like the option of tweeting about the video they're about to watch...

[shaggyfrog]

There's a CBC radio show called the Age of Persuasion that did an excellent show called "Breaking the Contract" [1] on this topic. What is the role of advertising? You are saying is essentially about being annoying; I say, bad advertising is about being annoying, and good advertising gives something back.

The idea of putting up some sort of "Tweet-wall" before I can watch a video and forcing me to tell everyone I'm watching said video is a bit like coercing a review from someone about material they have never seen. Never mind being incredibly annoying, it's also basically asking the user to lie. You can't have an opinion about something about which you know nothing.

And do the Twitter messages coming from this Tweet-wall really add value? To anything or anyone? To the user having to type the message, it's like they're being asked to generate spam for all their followers.

And does that forced Twitter spam actually benefit the video in the long run? Or does it cast a shadowy pall over the video, the video owner, the person forced to tweet, and ultimately, the technology itself?

I'm fascinated at how many in this thread see this as a good idea. I can't even fathom how someone would come to that conclusion.

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/ageofpersuasion/episode/2009/02/14/season-...

[sinaiman]

"I say, bad advertising is about being annoying, and good advertising gives something back."

I totally agree with you here. All I was saying is that it would be interesting to see if this idea would work, that's all. One way to figure that out is by running the experiment and capturing the statistics