Remember the good ol’ days of the Internet, when HTML geeks sat around roasting anyone who forgot to add a "target=” attribute to their frame-driven sites? Then came the merciful arrival of style sheets, and we all had to purge the tubes of the brooding-goth aesthetic—read: pitch-black backgrounds with blinding white text. That crusade evolved into shunning the benighted souls clinging to 10-point Verdana and layouts optimized for a glorious 800×600. Will it ever end?

Basically, we nerds always have to hate on somebody, no matter how seemingly benign their sin is. Today I learned about a fresh outrage: the unwashed lepers who send you an auto-DM just because you started following them. For the record, I’ve been reading Kyle Lacy for a while, and I love his stuff. I get the spirit of his post.

I also admire Doug Karr more than a man should publicly admit (platonically, relax, Internet) and I respect his opinion. But I’m honestly I’m going against him in this particular holy war. Are automated DMs destroying the ozone, killing honeybees, or conscripting children into military service? No. Are they secretly harboring weapons of mass destruction? Probably, no. Are people who object to being tricked/persuaded into using/reading/buying something on what they thought was “social” media actually out to destroy capitalism and free speech? Well, okay, everyone, step back and take a breath.

If I’m backing Kyle and hunting for the fatal flaw in Doug’s take, it’s this: I can’t think of a single automated message I’ve received that I could fairly call “authentic” and “emotional.” Not one. I strain to recall an auto-DM that didn’t make me mutter, “Would it have killed Mr. Busy over there to send two human sentences instead of unleashing a bot to hawk his wares? What is it with these JavaScript-happy Willy Loman types, anyway?” I think it just advertised your laziness for no particular benefit. If your DM contained a “pitch-slap” link to your product or site, then honestly, unless I was following you because I was looking for it, you’ve just actively irritated me.

From a computer geek’s perspective (and yes, I work in IT for a marketing company), justification is simple: show me the numbers. How many auto-responding DMs did you send? Of those, how many recipients found your site or product exclusively because you sent them that auto-DM? Of those, how many became regular readers or customers you actually retained? Are those retained users the people you wanted in the first place? Now compare that to a potential cohort who thought an automatic “Thanks for the follow!” was extraneous, or who just wanted to connect with you as an interesting person, and was promptly turned off by you immediately trying to sell them something.

Maybe DMs are beneficial, but numbers don’t have an agenda (unlike your growth-hacking slide deck). Give me data to back the argument, because I trust metrics far more than self-assured hunches.

For my part, plenty of folks follow me on Twitter, voluntarily read my stuff, click the links I share. I follow back a little more than a third of them, mostly because I value my signal-to-noise ratio of my feed more than soft-touching another potential ear to listen to my podcast. An even smaller subset gets an @-reply or a DM from me at all. I’ll usually send one to ask a long-lost friend out for a beer. Might, after scanning their profile, send them a comment on something they posted to indicate I cared enough to read their profile and the subsequent friend request is not automated. Or if I already know who they are, I may actually thank them for—personally, with an actual human brain. Much like real life, on the Internet, I don’t leave my phone or drink unattended, I always wash my hands and my browser history, and I do not talk to random strangers unless I have some idea who they are even if only by reputation. Stranger=danger.

Here’s the point: if I follow you, I’ve at least read your profile. If you have a blog, odds are I’ve already dropped it in my feed reader. Sending me an automated DM to plug your wares does for social media what “There’s no place like Target at Christmas to save!” does for holiday TV classics — it takes a warm moment and replaces it with a coupon.

So, yes, I just admitted Twitter is still less annoying than television. Faint praise, but we work with what we’ve got. Auto-DM’s? Do whatever you want. Just don’t be surprised when “meh” is the only engagement it earns from me.