Free Followers?

I recently tried a couple “free followers” services on Twitter.  I came back later, and my timeline was filled with tweets from people I know that I didn’t follow.  It turns out that you get more followers by the system automatically following others on your behalf.  Also, I made a tweet every two hours advertising one of the services, drowning out my own tweets.

Maybe I should have thought it all the way through; obviously there was some way that they had to fulfill their advertised numbers, but WTF?  From now on, I’m staying with the old-fashioned way of following and getting followers – find something related to my own interests.