And where is the follower list for an account stored? Who has control over what is posted by an account?
Conversely, where is the follower list for a hashtag stored? Who has control over what is posted to a hashtag?
This is what I mean by exploitable in a way the hashtag following isn't.
If your bots become popular, you could leverage that audience to bootstrap something else by inserting other posts besides the usual auto-boost diet. Take them over entirely and convert them to post about something else. Subtly begin censoring what (or who) they did and didn't repost from the original hashtag.
And sure, if you blatantly did it all at once, it might look like a betrayal and a disingenuous spam tactic. But some amount of it might slip under the radar. And if done subtly, over time—or openly, with "disclosure" that the service was "changing direction," etc., you might get away with it.
You couldn't do the same to a hashtag. As you pointed out, nobody owns a hashtag. You can't editorially censor it for anyone else, and while you can spam it, everyone else can also counter-spam it or drown you out with normal usage. Nobody owns the list of followers of a hashtag, or has control over what is published to them on it.
Again, I'm not saying you are thinking about or would ever do anything like that. But it's the kind of thing that becomes possible when you intermediate content through accounts you ultimately control. I think that's a lot of what people are reacting negatively to here.
