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Fun Bots From The Botsphere 🤖

Good Twitter Bots From The Botsphere

With all the negative sentiment surrounding Twitter bots these days — and Twitter itself, for that matter — it’s worth highlighting some positive examples from the botsphere.

Twitter bots are nothing new. They’ve been fixture since the earliest days of the social network. But in recent months, they seem to have bubbled up from the public subconsciousness into the zeitgeist. Election meddling. Brexit. Mind manipulation. Twitter bots have acquired a bad rap — rightfully so in many cases — but with this increased awareness and interest in the botsphere, as well as the development of easy-to-use botmaking tools, creative and fun twitter bots abound along with the nefarious. 

I limit the number of accounts I follow in my primary feed on Twitter. In my opinion, staying as close as you can to Dunbar’s number is a good rule of thumb. Still, I make room a number of bots within my self-imposed (and fairly flexible) Following limit. They add a bit of levity to my feed. Here are a few of my favorites.

I hope that Twitter’s recent crackdown on bots doesn’t cull the good, in an attempt to root out the bad. There is good yet in the botsphere.


Archive and Library Bots

@ArtBrowsing

Scanned books from the Smithsonian via the Internet Archive. Also, previously by @tinysubversions, @MuseumBot.

@youtubeartifact

Random YouTube image or video glitches every 3 hours

@MOMArobot

Random objects from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art

@winampskins

WinAmp skins

@gifs_bot

Gif images from 1992 “Gifs Galore” CD.

@oldschoolflyers

Random flyers from hip hop’s formative years

@AnimalVidBot

Animal (mainly bird) videos sourced from @macaulaylibrary (defunct)

@HistoryPixs

Amazing pictures throughout history

@censusAmericans

Tweeting the census one real American at a time.

@wayback_exe

Generative Bots

@RadicalThinkerz

Generating book covers and titles in a specific left-wing intellectual style.

@ThinkpieceBot

A satire of millennial explain-pieces.

@StinkpieceBot

A malodorous parody of @ThinkpieceBot

@metropologeny

Cities, towns, villages, hamlets, conurbations, burghs, municipalities, metropoles https://twitter.com/metropologeny/status/971053664138924032

@UnchartedAtlas

An atlas of unknown lands

@softlandscapes

Soothing landscapes, every 6 hours. Similar: @_cavebot

@some_new_cities

Cities and their slogans from nearby sideways dimensions

@relativeprices

Comparing the relative price of things

@magicrealismbot

Magical realism plot elements

@FellasBot

Asking whether things are gay

@expandingbot

Blowing your mind with progressions of concepts. Uses abstraction chains from ConceptNet.

@mothgenerator

New javascript-generated moth species

Literary Bots

@WordsofMcCarthy

Words and scenes and dialogue of Cormac McCarthy. Every Day.

@DailyKerouac

Jack Kerouac. Daily.

Change-Tracking Bots

@nyt_diff

Bot that highlights the changes in the news on the main page of @nytimes. Plus, @NYT_said_where

@congressedits

Anonymous Wikipedia edits that are made from IP addresses in the US Congress.

Music Bots

@DailyPianoScale

Other Bots

@pentametron


Botmaker Patreons

Many great botmakers accept donations via patreon and other platforms. I’d encourage everyone to send a donation their way. Pick your favorite. Support their others project. Small donations add up and also gives these individuals encouragement to keep creating interesting internet art.

Let me know if I should add any other bootmakers to the list, and I will. If you have a favorite Twitter bot not listed here, I’d love to check it out.


This post Fun Bots From The Botsphere 🤖 originally appeared on williamwickey.com.