Hi Niall,
I was a bit surprised to read your explanation of what Triberr is. Please consider the following points:
1) You can’t just sign up for Triberr. You can only join the site if an existing member sends you an invite. This fact alone is a strong deterrent to spam, as it doesn’t benefit anyone in the tribe to invite low quality bloggers.

2) You don’t promise to RT blog posts from your tribe. Yes, you have the option to automatically RT your tribemates blog posts, but you also have the option to turn off automation and manually approve posts. I’m in a few rather large tribes where I manually review everything. Here it’s just speeding up the curation process.

3) Triberr has rolled out Karma points and quality scores. Karma points allow tribe members to vote up and down others posts. This adds a level of accountability and transparency within the tribe. If a tribe members posts are always getting negative karma, then everyone can see that their quality is poor and they should get kicked from the tribe. Quality scores are based on the click through rates of tweets, and again provide a quality signal that will determine if the post continues to be shared within the tribe.

4) You don’t always get back the same number of tweets that you give. Some bloggers post more frequently, some less. Some members are on automatic mode, some are on manual. Sometimes bad karma and a low quality score will stop a poor quality post dead in it’s tracks, and a high quality post will jump tribes.

5) “RT’s send you very little traffic” – Where did you get this from? These are all star bloggers sharing other all star blogger’s post with their trusted Twitter following. There have been dozens of posts about the effectiveness of Triberr – in fact, here is one released TODAY from SmartBoyDesigns.com citing actual stats from Triberr: http://plzretwt.me/jqn0

6) “Horrible ideas because they seek to undermine the entire Twitter experience for either financial gain or to try and engineer fake traffic” – Niall, again, where are you getting this from? What we’ve tried to is create a tool that saves bloggers time in doing something that they would naturally do anyway – share each others posts. If you’ve ever had a strong community around your blog you’d know that most bloggers frequently visit, comment and share a small handful of other bloggers stuff, not because they have to in order to get a reciprocal benefit, but because they enjoy participating in related online communities. Here’s a post written TODAY from ExpatLifeCoach.com that talks about how Triberr has strengthened his connections with bloggers in a new way: http://twrt.me/ii87

7) “I think you’ll find that no users will want to take part in either spamming their networks with pop up ads…” First off, membership has skyrocketed since launch. We’re becoming one of the largest blogging communities because members are trying the service, love what they see and invite other friends to try it. You can try to find any marketing material, paid advertisements or self-promotional material for Triberr, but you won’t, because we’ve never needed to “sell” the platform. We just focus on a great user experience and positive word of mouth does the rest.

Niall – I can forgive you for not fully understanding what Triberr is or how it works. It’s one of those things where you really need to be on the inside to fully grasp the power of the tool and it’s community. However, I’m really disappointed at the straight up misinformation that you’re presenting here. Did you even try researching the site before you started writing? You could have read up on our blog, done a quick search on Google to read one of the dozens of reviews, you could have tweeted out, “Anyone on Triberr, what do they think?” or you could have reached out to @dino_dogan or myself directly for a hard hitting interview on the topic. In fact, Dino just wrapped up an interview with Chris Brogan yesterday about the site.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I fully admit that Triberr isn’t for everyone. That’s ok with me. I don’t expect to convert you into a user, but I do expect bloggers to properly research a site before writing such a piece like this.

It’s your creditably and reputation on the line, so it’s entirely up to you if you’d like to edit your post in light of the points I brought up. I’m always available to answer question or do an interview about the site if you’re interested in digging deeper.

Best,
Dan
Founder of Triberr

I think what makes Triberr worth while is its community. Kristi was reluctant at first as well, and now she is one of our biggest advocates. There has to be a reason.

Thank you for making those Triberr points for me, Kristi

Hmmm my reply didn’t show up under Dan, sorry about that.

In regards to the article itself, it screams an obvious message. I’m not spamming my Twitter connections or Facebook friends for a few clicks. I feel the same way, it’s not worth it in my opinion. Pretty and large follower counts are “cool”, but if they don’t have any real value they’re useless.

Hi sorry about taking so long to reply but wanted to give the answer the time it deserves. I know it sucks when somebody knocks your own product and believe me I know because plenty of people have knocked this blog and other things that I have done online in the past. I hear all the points that you are making above and I have actually tried Tribbr and played around with it in the past for research and read other articles about it online to get all sides of the argument before posting this.

I just don’t get the point of trying to have something sitting on top of twitter that builds tribes of people. That sort of stuff should just happen organically around your blog if you are writing good content and engaging with people through Twitter.

At the end of the day though if your users are using it and getting value out of it then thats great. It’s not for me and I wouldn’t be suggesting others use it but there are plenty of different audiences online and you seem to have a community there so well done for that.

From what I’ve read it seems to be something that splits people’s opinions but you seem to be answering the critics well and converting plenty of people and that has to be admired.