Twitter Bot 5
Another update about my Twitter bot since I’ve been fiddling with it a bit over the past week.
First off I unfollowed everyone. This was partly as a disincentive to use: if my timeline is empty, there’s no point uselessly scrolling for hours on end.
But also a few years ago I started following everything. This was back when I was working at Radio Adelaide and in the mornings would follow every account Twitter suggested.
I even used some tools to automate the following process, finding accounts with large followings and hitting follow on everyone.
I think the intention was to maybe catch a few auto-following bots or something but also just to create a lot of noise because, I dunno, reasons. That was a while ago.
And so ever since I’d been stuck following thousands of accounts that didn’t mean anything to me and it was kinda crap. So I wrote a script to automatically unfollow all accounts.
The rate limit on pulling Twitter follows is pretty low so I hit it regularly and left the bot running quietly behind the scenes for a day while it did its work.
That was a fun little task and refreshed my follow count. Now I’m building it back up with a script that automatically follows accounts that mention me, while liking their mention as well.
I’ve hosted this on pythonanywhere.com so it should be running in the background as we speak.
At first it would reply something inane and auto-generated but that got old quick and I haven’t installed the module I use for generating nonsense on Python Anywhere yet – though I suspect it’s trivial to do so.
Maybe now it’s also worth thinking a bit about what this project is about, something I’m not sure I’ve properly articulated.
The idea is to create an extension of myself on Twitter; understanding social networks and the like as extensions already, digital likenesses that sound like you and so on.
Unlike your non-digital self, a social profile doesn’t have automated processes: you have to actively manage it, use the account, hit like, scroll, etc.
So I want to give my Twitter profile a heartbeat of sorts, a way for it to always be doing something even when I’m not actively looking at it.
Twitter-bot-v1 simulated this presence by going through and liking/retweeting things from lists. Now we’re back to basics with liking and following just mentions alone.
Now that I’ve found Python Anywhere and can get things running remotely, I can at least keep the bot running without having my PC turned on.
Anyway, that’s where we’re at at the moment. Gotta go. Bye!