A Sampling of My Favorite Twitter Bots
Published March 1, 2018
What is a Twitter bot? In brief, it is a Twitter account that you can program to do automated posts, including: responses based on what other users tweet at it, generative text based on sentence structures you determine in the code, and generative images that manipulate variables like color and shape. Tracery makes jumping into programming Twitter bots easy with its visual display; jump into the Tracery editor and see for yourself and check out Crystal Code Palace for a more detailed tutorial.
My first step into making Twitter bots was The Public Tarot, still being tweaked and refined.
I have been familiar with bots for so long, being a Twitter user since 2008, that I had not foreseen just how many people I would have to explain what a bot was to until more recently. As soon as I mention "spambots", more people are familiar with the idea of purposefully automated account behavior. If you've ever made a Facebook post about a movie only to have a Facebook 'user' immediately comment WATCH STAR WARS HD >>> CLICK HERE >>>>>>>!!! followed by a dubious link: that was a bot. Automated accounts providing everything from customer service responses, search features, and weather updates such as a host of Facebook messenger accounts are also bots.
Bots, however, are much more than spam-generators or customer service helpers. They are also art.
One of the first accounts that I assumed was a bot was Horse_ebooks
Horse_ebooks was later revealed to have its posts written directly by humans rather than generated from code and new updates ceased. The fact that so many people believed in the accidental beauty generated from bots, however, turns our attention to what actual bots can do. Here, then, are a sampling of my favorite Twitter bots across a variety of categories: text, occult, emoji, and images.
Text:
Occult:
Emoji and Unicode Symbols:
Images: