I've had a Twitter bot running for just over a year now. It's going to gain it's 6000th Follower at some point today.
I find it odd that an automated account I made has more Followers than all of my human accounts across all social networks combined - a lot more. I like to wonder about my bot Followers, how many of them are bots? How many of them are real and feel an actual connection with "me" and look forward to my Tweets, blissfully unaware that it's a bot?

This Twitter Bot will make you addicted to Books.

That is the title I came up for this post.

Anyway I just wrote a new Twitter Bot that when tweeted the name of the book that you last read, it will reply back with a related book suggestion.

Feel free to take it for a spin and share your interesting finds. I know you will try to break it :)

Twitter bot is now up on GitHub, for anyone wondering how to use the Twitter4j API.

Detection of influential Chat bots on twitter that manipulate people’s genuine expression of interest over social media and later report them to twitter and stop them from doing the same.

A follow up about Mozilla IRL spotify radio.

Very interesting talk relates to internet and privacy in gerenal. (Not about programming btw)

Eg: Bose headphone app sends your data to data broker,
which ransomware rated with top customer service,
how to setup a bait for catching Twitter bots

It feels like Mozilla is fighting for justice.
I'm totally sold.

Just realised that I've not been on Twitter since downloading this app; just popped on and rejected 8 follower requests from bots, had a look around ... Saw it was still shit and came back here 😬

LLMs will FIX the internet, not ruin it; an argument:

Sam Altman recently acknowledged the large presence of LLMs on twitter and stated that he was finally starting to believe in dead internet theory.

And I couldn't agree more nor be any happier.

I had a sudden realization that social media has slowly crept from being "connect to your friends" to "try not to commit suicide as you climb the infinite social ladder amongst people who are not your peers"

... and I think it deserves to die. Furthermore, I think the only thing that could kill it is the greed that we're seeing finally strangle social media today.

People will never quit social media just because it's *bad for them*. It's too exciting, too interesting.

People will only quit social media if it itself becomes *bad*.

And when it becomes overbearingly full of corporate "brand personalities", LLM slop accounts churning out 500 posts a day to gain $4 in ad revenue, and 100 different AI bot accounts that add nothing to the conversation...

... that's when it's gonna be *bad* enough for people to reduce their usage of it. It will once again encourage the spaces we had before greed took a strangle-hold. Private areas for just you and your real-life friends. To be safe from the corporate slop bots, the LLMs, the 8-second videos of kittens performing impossible tasks... just you and your buds keeping up with each other.

This is the self-healing that nature is so good at. It's incredible how it always happens.

Do you know what is both a good and a bad thing about old tech like IRC ? vs Slack, Twitter, Facebook, Email, etc for socializing ?

excepting that they were recording most channels traffic with bots, you could miss things.

things changed.
it was more living you expected people to be there to have real conversations. and then the conversations unless fragments were saved, disappeared on there own.

it made you have to remember things.

Fuck, got one of my Twitter bots permanently suspended. Twitter won't even tell me why.
It was called "gifb0t" and simply searched for "favourite gif" every hour and Retweeted 5 of the search results.
It turned up some killer gifs.
But it also sometimes (unintentionally) found porn gifs... Maybe someone complained?
Frustrating as I have other bots that are allowed to keep running.
Farewell and thanks, gifb0t!
And fuck you, Twitter.