FeelBetterBot wants you to feel better
aaronbeppu.com
aaronbeppu.com
Maybe a solution to your banning problem could be to create a federated "FeelBetter" group of people who would be willing to automatically grant a few of their tweets. So you build an app that posts a FeelBetter message as one of the member of the group, in rotation. Kind of Seti@Home but for twitter tweets. The tweet would relate to the whole group something like: "@Recipient hug from me and the @FeelBetterBot community"
I'd be more concerned that you get hacked like buffer did a few days ago and you start sending bad tweets as the members :) but besides that I'd be willing to "donate" a few of my tweets to this do-good project
I think the automatic bot style is the way to go. The importance is not the "really thought out message" that someone can send, while rather the low latency, the immediacy of the reply to those that need it. So timing is more important. At least this is what I felt from the positive comments you showed off in your blog post. :)
It's also interesting that people would find comfort in a random tweeter passing them a hug. Imagine in real life some strange guy coming up and hugging you - a bit odd to say the least. Not that a virtual hug is the same thing, but one would think people would be more often turned off than happy, but apparently folks on twitter are different than I think they are.
It's a shame twitter keeps banning you - you would think they wouldn't want to keep wasting their time reviewing it and give you a once and for all yes or no.
Deleted comment
Previous interactions visible on Topsy:
Maybe the way around Twitter's bot policies is to use the bot as a coordination device rather than an auto-responder. How about @ing or DMing FeelBetterBot followers that person X could use a hug or helpful message?
If you have only 20 different tweets, its easy for them to look like a typical bot to automated filters. Even if you are posting them slowly, it wouldn't be a stretch to assume one flag would be a ratio of similar tweets.
The response criteria could be another thing raises a flag. It wouldn't be difficult for a filter to recognize someone only replying to specific key phrases.
Also has to send some non-@replies, so it'd work better as a dual-purpose bot that does some other work too, I guess.
I was inspired by GloatingPig: https://twitter.com/GloatingPig
Anyway, in my research, those are some of the things I found, but I don't have citations. I think the @replies are the more important half of things, and I imagine those bigger ones get a pass because they're so popular.
[1] http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/6451/what-suicide-n...
Please generously apply the hacker mentality to software, arduinos, knitting, cooking and art, if you like. Don't be afraid to fail, nothing bad happens there. Build, test, iterate, enjoy.
There are, however, things in life where the stakes are higher. They require more knowledge than you can quickly gather with a Google search, and, you know, professionalism. Healthcare is one of these topics.
[1] As this seems to be a bit of a cultural blind spot for people in the US, I highly recommend http://www.amazon.com/Bright-Sided-Positive-Thinking-Undermi...
The research is clear and unequivocal - suicide has elements of "contagion". Posting the content of suicide notes carries a serious risk of causing the deaths of other people. Writers have a responsibility to not cause harm and the least they should have done is to include suicide helplines prominently at the start of the article.
And it's full of lousy, lazy, unresearched information.
> and was more true to the typical format of a suicide letter,
Well, no. Research on real suicide notes shows people making requests and showing concern for those left behind rather than making any comments about how the person is feeling or why they made this decision.
> Better yet, we can deal with the threat of suicide, which is increasingly pervasive around the world as we move deeper into the 21st century.
Is suicide "increasingly pervasive around the world"? And the article only mentions finding people at risk of suicide. It makes no mention of what we actually do with these people when we find them.
Sorry for the grumpy tone of this reply. It's a topic I'm particularly sensitive about. Your idea is potentially a good one, and I wish you luck. But please please get some expert opinion on it too!
(also linked from the article text.)
I'm fine with other people making lots of happybots. I just hope no one would adapt the code to, say, harass or bully people who are already feeling shitty.
I would suspect but have no idea how to test that the upvotes are coming from fans of it as performance art who're following the user, rather than particularly from people already interacting in the original thread.
I do want to say that it's one of the best reddit user comment histories I've ever gone through.
And all that because I wanted to see if the NSA stuff is on reddit too, and getting stuck in some random funny pictures thread, where I saw a comment by that guy! Sorry for rambling, but I'm genuinely stoked for stoked_for_you :D
"negativity is just positivity with more electrons" -- stoked_for_you
I don't read reddit usually, but I could see myself reading a bit of that comment history every day.. that account reminds me of the "saying" "I strive to be the person my dog thinks I am." :)
If changing the name works (i.e. create a new account), then you have something else to write about: Twitter doesn't care if you spam people with tweets, as long as you are concealing the fact that its spam!
I just had an idea for Twitter though. Twitter should make it so that bots get banned after a time proportional to the number of followers they have. Essentially this says: if people like what the bot is producing then it should need less manual review. Of course, you'd need to make sure that those are real people who follow it, but I dont think that that should be too difficult.
I find it highly ironic that OP's example mocking a "bot designed to actively try to ruin people's evening" just ruined my evening.
Other than that, though, this does seem like a cool project and I can't imagine why Twitter keeps banning you.
Updated : spoiler removed; just the reaction is shown now. Again, my apologies.
But I'm sure you can imagine my surprise at reading Laura Palmer and thinking, "why do I know that name..."
I'm not upset or anything so don't feel bad! I was pretty amused at the irony, actually. The 'ruined my evening' part was more for comedic effect.
That said, if anyone tells me another spoiler from The Wheel of Time for me... god help them. I'm looking at you, Wikipedia.
One of my all time favourite troll accounts was "The EyeBrow Thief". They went around LiveJournal, finding images of people, then photoshopping the eyebrows off and reposting the image. http://web.archive.org/web/20110815234132/http://eyebrow-thi...
Seems like twitter has already suspended the account.
edit: Can we rename this bot "The Feels Good Man"? ;)
nevermind. here it is: https://gist.github.com/abeppu/6958565
awwwwwwwww.