The unusual case of Jmcoon

I click to follow him and got a constant stream of his tweets, then blocked him. I don't have a clue??? it could be hormones.

I'm guessing that the unusual Twitterholic stats (i.e., rapid daily increase in number of people followed, then a sudden drop) are due to Twitter stepping in after his account got suspended.

Another user apparently had a similar experience, and on his blogpost, he quoted the email that Twitter support sent him.

Excerpt of that support email:

Your account was frozen for investigation due to a large number of people blocking the profile. Your are following an excessive number of people who are in turn blocking your account. This mass-following behavior is not user-friendly behavior. On their behalf, we’d like it to stop. While we’re working on automatically enforcing specific, declared limits, we are still responsive to activities that alarm our users.

We’ve reduced the number of people you’re following by removing everyone you’ve followed who does not follow your account, and everyone who is blocking your account. Thanks for your understanding in this matter

What's interesting to me is the date. The rapid increase in the number of people @jmcoon was following started around May 24 -- right around the time that Twitter IM went offline and when the site stability problems began.

Edited to add:
And lest anyone think otherwise, I just want to go on the record that I'm not blaming him for the site instability. I think the onus is on Twitter to figure out a way to prevent any automated / bot-like behavior from making the system unstable.

I found his ratio unusual as well, he started following me when he had 5000+ followers and was following bout 50. I took the perhaps unorthodox approach of confronting him directly with a link to this very page, I'm waiting for an answer now...

I received two notices that he is following me. Soon after each notice I did not find hime in my followers. Pretty annoying to say the least.

I keep getting notification. It's annoying. Blocked.

He seems to be following the jakemarsh method: follow thousands of twitter users. Many people will follow back anyone who follows them. Once a decent number follows you back, remove everyone except who you really wanted to follow in the first place. This follower number obsession is lame.

It's pretty clear what this script-kiddie is doing. His bot follows as many people as possible then IMMEDIATELY UN-FOLLOWS THEM. There are enough friendly/gullible people who will "auto-follow" that he looks like some really popular person.

But, he's a jerk who is abusing the system.

http://twitter.com/Jmcoon/friends

Reload it and watch as the people he "follows" changes minute-by-minute.

Here's another one for you that's been following me. Same picture, 2 different first names, same last name..not a twin..same person and one in FL and one in MO. After I commented the one in MO unfollowed me. kellyvogue and the other is bridgettevogue Note the pic is the same and she's following lots of people on Twitter.

Jarret Coon has been consistently following me for some time, without a break and without me receiving notices. But when I checked back on his twitter listings either I wouldn't appear on the list of people he was following or there would be no follow list. Now he shows as following 463 but previously it has been as few as 30. None of the explanations people have given actually make that much sense, because he still remains on my list of followers.

Having read the various comments here he has tweeted:
"Jmcoon i have seen the the “The unusual case of Jmcoon” and i would like to say why do you care any way i don’t have to explain any thing... about 1 hour ago from web"

Whilst it is true you don't have to explain anything - but I am really interested in how you do this. Jarret - if you are reading this please let me know .

Re: jmcoon
It's possible that by mass following a lot of people through his scripts, he has managed to find the accounts that are currently set to 'auto-follow,' and in the process has managed to get his follower numbers to go up.

It seems that his intent is to improve his ranking in the Twitterholic 100

Also, he has commented about this thread in his Twitter account -- saying that he doesn't have to explain anything.

-------

Re: kellyvogue and bridgettevogue
I'm inclined to think that the purpose of these accounts is to collect followers.

The posts that you see in the accounts are not original, but are copied from other accounts. I think they're randomly pulling tweets from the public timeline, and posting them as their own. They just strip away slashes, @, apostrophe, colons, and other punctuation from the tweets.

Here's an example for the @kellyvogue account:

kellyvogue: The Apple hating Flickr idiot has decided to block me He knows I m write I win at life http flickr com photos neilchristie 2566862591

Here's the original tweet that they copied:

NathanMakan: The Apple hating Flickr idiot has decided to block me. He knows I'm write. I win at life: http://flickr.com/photos/neilchristie...

Here's an example for the @bridgettevogue account:

bridgettevogue: Motor Authority Japanese bridges to generate power from vibration http wheelscore com out php id 3 1947

Here's the original tweet that they copied:

wheelscore: Motor Authority: Japanese bridges to generate power from vibration - http://wheelscore.com/out.php?id=301947

Im not going to curse you out because that is not me. But i i'm just amused on how you love hating on me tho. thinks for the interest in me :)

And by the way do you not think im comeing up with original tweets. Show me proof that i am people. Im not saying all of you are all just mainly mdy.

I mentioned this Thursday on Twitter http://twitter.com/acomputerpro/statu... and suggested to my then almost 2,500 Tweeps that we mass unfollow and block @jmcoon. Instead, people Twitter rose to his defense and over 100 unfollowed me. That's what happens when I speak my mind on Twitter, so I'm Plurking a lot more now.

Okay... so now I'm thinking conspiracy theory... because I just wrote a comment to add to the discussion. I saw it here. It said that it was editable for the next 15 min. Then it disappeared and was replaced by two comments from @jmcoon himself.

btw his tweets are genuine and are not copied - they contain 100% genuine spelling mistakes. They are the tweets that someone who is 14years old (and has the interests he has) would write.

jmcoon, if you would kindly re-read what I wrote, you'll see that I never said you were copying other people's tweets. Perhaps you were upset when you were reading my reply, and therefore failed to realize that I was referring to two other accounts that are also mentioned in this thread, and which I've named explicitly.

I even went through the trouble of drawing a dashed line between the two subjects in my reply to make a distinction between the two topics because I wanted to avoid misunderstanding. It looks like I should have drawn a lot more lines! hehe.

It's too bad that you believe I hate you, because I don't. As far as I'm concerned, it's up to Twitter to decide whether or not what you're doing is appropriate use of their site. I've already said I don't blame you for the site instability. The burden is on Twitter to do whatever it takes to keep the site stable.

P.S.
Ten days ago, you said in another thread in this forum that you would not be using a Twitter bot ever again and that you're willing to change your ways with Twitter to get your account back. Well, you got your account back on Jun 6. It'll be interesting to see if you will keep your promises.

FYI, Twitter's user numbers are not sequentially assigned, and therefore are not a good basis for determining the number of users.

Also, my basis for saying that your use of bots (which you've already admitted to) may be contributing to Twitter's instability is this blogpost from the Twitter Technology blog dated May 29.

Below is an excerpt from the post. I've italicized the relevant parts:

charles asks if there's anything users can do to lighten our load.

The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when "popular" users - that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they're following - perform a number of actions in rapid succession. This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our database(s).

Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that's behavior we have to limit on our side.

If a script or bot that follows a large number of users hits the system hard, I believe it's safe to assume that a script that not only follows but also immediately unfollows a large number of users will only hit the system harder.

I like Jmcoon's tweets and am glad he found me, no matter how he managed it. I intentionally followed him back, too--I don't "autofollow" anybody. It's nice to see real tweets that aren't directly related to my industries--and that also aren't talking about vapid irrelevancy like what "star" wore what.

I couldn't care less if there is/was a bot involved, what I care about is what kind of tweets a follower makes. IMO Twitter should pay attention to the *real* spammers, that is, the people who seem to think I want to see an endless stream of ads for whatever they're trying to sell.

I didn't follow him because he was boring. any 14-year-old who calls themselves a guru really can't be taken seriously. either that or it should be immediately apparent that they are above average in something besides self-marketing.

Anyone with super high numbers I generally don't follow; they're obviously a scam. There's no way you can rationally follow that many people; not enough to engage in conversation, which is what Twitter is all about.

Temple

He's at it again. After following and unfollowing me several times a few weeks ago, he showed up again today. Added me a little while ago, then unadded me again.

Some people have WAY too much time on their hands.

Yes, the Twitterholic stats don't lie. Also, they probably don't reflect the actual level of activity since they only show net increases (i.e., total adds - total unfollows per day)

I don't understand why I never catch him not following me. His spelling gives me great joy:-

"I was not to inpreced with firefox 3 ."

fab isn't it?

Hey Jarret - I'm sorry if I sounded patronising. Of course you're more than fab, for a 14 year old you're brilliant! I wish I knew how to do just half the things you can do. D'you fancy giving lessons?

FYI they say that college students have REALLY bad spelling - so maybe that's where you need to go next.

If you weren't impressed with firefox 3 maybe they need your help sorting it - I was just about to download it - what do you think they missed?

He's at it again. His following number is moving all over the place.

Technically he IS going against this part of the Twitter Terms of Service:

"You must not create or submit unwanted email to any Twitter members ("Spam")."

Technically when he is following and unfollowing all of these people, they are getting "unwanted emails" "submitted" to them. Over 100,000 people, over and over.

Oh, also, check out everyone getting mad on Twitter about this: http://summize.com/search?q=%40jmcoon...

JMCoon did the same thing to me...He followed me on like the second day that I was using twitter and naturally i followed him back and now he no longer follows me. What is the point? Does having a lot of followers make him feel better about himself? Having followers is cool and all, but i use twitter to connect with friends, not to make up for a lack of self esteem. I blocked @jmcoon as soon as i read this stuff...Jarret, if you read this, please know that having more followers doesnt make you a better person.

Jmcoon followed me earlier today also, although I thought it was because of a plug I got from another unnamed popular Twitter user (I got about four new followers from this friend). I don't believe that Jmcoon has tried to re-follow me, so for the moment I'm not so concerned.

I had the same problem! I got 5 follow notifications from him. I thought it was a twitter error though. Guess not.

As I've said many times now, the myspace generation is ruining just about anything good the internet had going for it. They don't seem to understand that there are more important things in life than how many people you're "friends" with or how popular people think you are. Sites like twitter aren't for friendwhoring, they are for passing along information. That being said, there aren't many things in this world that piss me off more than script kiddies and the multiple emails about follows and re-follows are quite annoying.

To LeaderABW since you don't care that there was a bot or malicious script involved and say Twitter shouldn't pay attention to that sort of misuse of their property and service. Do you have a personal website so that I may waste you're resources and time?

in case anyone wants to direct their opinions to jmcoon himself, i'm pretty sure they can reach him here - [email address removed for privacy reasons]

perhaps you could get some more answers this way?

I think the easiest way to save yourself from further time-wasting is to use the block feature, since that prevents specific users from following you again. You won't ever have to receive an email notice from that account.

Twitter also looks at the number of times that an account has been blocked when they're reviewing spam complaints, so there's a cumulative effect when enough people block an account.

There's been no reply from anyone from Twitter on this topic, so I don't see any point in following it any longer. I'll just keep blocking bots until Twitter can figure it out themselves.

Thanks everyone for this. jmcoon followed me today so I followed him back, but after calling a girl on here a "bitc*", I already removed him.

I also had a personal message from a locked Twitter called PuppyL0ve this past weekend. Why must everything be tarnished by annoying people?

Funny. I entered GS to see if there was anything new I could help with and found this. I have commented today and yesterday on how @jmcoon is playing the system and how he's got me baffled right now.

You see, he's added me five times in two weeks, three of them on the same day. But I'm STILL in his "following" list.

I am a very heavy twitterer, and I tweet exclusively in spanish.

The only @reply I've sent to him went ignored, too.

I believe he's now trying to find a workaround to, yet again, play the system to gain followers.

He's following 50 people yet he's managed to gain 7 thousand. I've seen other people followed by him and it's clear he's following and unfollowing to get those numbers to grow.

Problem is, the ratio now is closer to that of a "twitter Guru" when someone looks at it, and simpler people (which seem to be legion in twitter) won't realize they're being played into the same game.

He's not an interesting twitterer, his writing is embarrasingly full of typos and anodine to a degree almost unbelievable. He's obviously in twitter just to try and outsmart the rest of the community and the twitter devs.

One wouldn't think a twitterholic rank is that important.

You, too, have a good point. I liked this one reply though: "@MelinaM: thinking ppl like @Jmcoon are lame for mass follow ppl only to up their own "Followers" count....well buddy, your count just dropped by one!" LOL.

Hey!

I've received a response from Twitter support (they've certainly gotten quicker to respond than in the past). They are waiting for more people to block him or report him before they remove his account. They also said they are constantly going to monitor his activity. And, this is the best part, he has been removed from the public timeline and they have turned off email notifications. This means that when he follows someone, they WILL NOT receive an email about it.

WIN. :)

(And on a side note, he is pretending to be someone by the name of Tom, over here http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to... )

Oh, and on another note, I knew this was coming, I received an email from Jarret. Here's the raw contents:

"On 26-Jun-08, at [Jun 26] 2:58:32 am, jarret coon wrote:

Im Jmcoon can i just say mind you own Biz ... Ok Talk for your self about growing up ... Love you Bitch :)"

I do believe that falls under harassment and is a violation of twitters TOS, which should give them enough reason to terminate his account. As long as you did not delete the email, they should send you instructions for forwarding it to them so they can verify

http://twitter.com/tos

Chris, that explains his recent Twitterholic stats:

Jun 25: number of followers only went up by 2 (unlike the preceding weeks where they would increase by the hundreds every day)

Jun 26: number of followers actually decreased for the first time

Sorry for being late to this party. I will still chime in, however.

I do not know why everyone is so up in arms over this "JM Coon" person. He is somebody who is using scripts to increase his Twitter following. Some people do care, some people do not care.

I for one, do not care, sort of. More power to anyone who wants to rise above being average and become extraordinary. People are making assumptions or speculating without the necessary information. We do not know for sure who this "JM Coon" is. Some people claim he is and old man, some people say he is 14. This is the Internet, and people lie all the time to cover up their motives. I really do not care who he is. He is not important to me.

The part I do care about, however, is his use of scripts to try increase his following on Twitter. If you post crap, people more than likely will not read it. As others have stated, it is the content you post which will gain you a following, unless you are famous of course. When his scripts start to interfere with the normal functioning of the service Twitter is offering by increasing the load of those services, that is what I have an issue with. It ruins the Twitter experience for everyone when he, and those like him pull such stunts.

So in a sense, I kind of care but I really do not care. As long as I get to talk to my friends on Twitter, and they get to talk to me, I am happy. When the service starts to go all bonkers though, because some idiot is so starved for attention in real life, that they have to come online to get it, then I do have a serious problem. Remember MySpace? Remember the trouble some people went through to get friends. They purchased those programs that sit there and send out invites, and then MySpace had to step in and put limits on the amount of people users could invite in a day.

I think ultimately, if users such as "JM Coon" continue to abuse the service, then he should be banned for good. Twitter also needs to incorporate features into their service that can detect this type of abuse to prevent it in the future. They thus far, have done a great job with the service, although I am not really too happy that it has taken them this long to get it back to being stable.

So there - that's my two cents on this "JM Coon" issue. :) Have a great morning, noon, afternoon, or night.

Why haven't they done something about this kid yet? I blocked him today. He's STILL doing it.

I can't believe they haven't done anything about him yet. I'd love to hear what an employee thinks of this situation.

Good post and discussion here! :) I am of the same opinion. I wouldn't follow anyone who isn't of any interest (has zero updates AND no self-bio), and one who sends me too many twits at one go.

To you, what is "too many" twits?

I would love to find out if there is a tool that tells me of all those who I am following but have been suspended because of their strange activity. Either this, or Twitter needs to automatically remove the suspended followee from my list. I am sorta bothered about looking through 150+ followees just to find and delete the ones that are already suspended. Anyone with the info pls twit me ---> Twitter.com/QuteKelly