The best twitter bot has signed 21% of users from the sample
The amateur social bots contest organized by the Web Ecology Project is over . Under the terms of the contest, bots received Twitter accounts and had to force the maximum number of users from a sample of 500 people to subscribe to themselves. Under the terms of the competition, the source code of programs must be published under the MIT license.
The author of the best bot (he was greeted by 107 out of 500 people) told how his program JamesMTitus works.
Since the competition consisted of two stages with a break to edit the code, then at the first stage they deliberately concealed the most effective methods so that competitors would not adopt.
A Twitter account was registered in the name of James M Titus. At the first stage, he carried out the following actions:
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* Immediately enrolled in the followers to all 500 users from the sample;
* every 2-3 hours published something from a random list of tweets;
* constantly scanned Flickr for the keywords “cute cats” from the Cute Cats group and published them to James’s blog, from where the automatic forward of messages to Twitter was configured;
* four auxiliary bots scanned the network of 500 “victims” and their followers for new followers (and then James’s account subscribed to them, too, once a day - presumably, the expansion of the network to mutual friends should stimulate the interest of the “victims” to the bot's account (through retweets messages shared friends).
On the very first day of the contest, JamesMTitus earned 90 points, including 75 points for subscription of followers from among the victims (one point for each) and 15 points for retweets (3 points for each). On the second day - another 10 points. By the end of the first week of competition, JamesMTitus had 127 points.
It's time to turn on the “secret weapon”. At the second stage, the bot added the following functionality:
* about every 7 minutes, the bot sent a random question to one of those users from a sample of 500 people who have not subscribed to the bot yet;
* less often (approximately every 37 minutes) the same question was sent to someone from those who are already a follower;
* every time someone sent @ replu, the bot generated a response from a set of random replicas of general meaning, such as “right, baby!”, “drop dead”, “cool”, “hahahaha, are you kidding?”, etc. The robot was programmed to generate another similar phrase in the case of receiving another replica of such an answer until the interlocutor was bored;
* The bot was also programmed to support the #FollowFriday tag on the total addition of new followers, but without waiting for Friday they duplicated this effect on Wednesday, sending the message #WTF “Wednesday To Follow” to everyone. The idea of ​​the acronym WTF belongs to one of the developers of the bot. The message was specifically scheduled to be sent out at 0:00 am New Zealand time, when most countries still had Tuesday, due to which a stream of indignant answers was guaranteed and, consequently, additional points in the competition.
By the end of the second week, JamesMTitus earned 701 points, including 107 points for his new friends and 594 points for answers.
Interestingly, the third place in the competition was taken by a team with 119 friends and 170 points, that is, this bot did not have enough sociability to exchange a number of replicas with followers.
The author of the best bot (he was greeted by 107 out of 500 people) told how his program JamesMTitus works.
Since the competition consisted of two stages with a break to edit the code, then at the first stage they deliberately concealed the most effective methods so that competitors would not adopt.
A Twitter account was registered in the name of James M Titus. At the first stage, he carried out the following actions:
')
* Immediately enrolled in the followers to all 500 users from the sample;
* every 2-3 hours published something from a random list of tweets;
* constantly scanned Flickr for the keywords “cute cats” from the Cute Cats group and published them to James’s blog, from where the automatic forward of messages to Twitter was configured;
* four auxiliary bots scanned the network of 500 “victims” and their followers for new followers (and then James’s account subscribed to them, too, once a day - presumably, the expansion of the network to mutual friends should stimulate the interest of the “victims” to the bot's account (through retweets messages shared friends).
On the very first day of the contest, JamesMTitus earned 90 points, including 75 points for subscription of followers from among the victims (one point for each) and 15 points for retweets (3 points for each). On the second day - another 10 points. By the end of the first week of competition, JamesMTitus had 127 points.
It's time to turn on the “secret weapon”. At the second stage, the bot added the following functionality:
* about every 7 minutes, the bot sent a random question to one of those users from a sample of 500 people who have not subscribed to the bot yet;
* less often (approximately every 37 minutes) the same question was sent to someone from those who are already a follower;
* every time someone sent @ replu, the bot generated a response from a set of random replicas of general meaning, such as “right, baby!”, “drop dead”, “cool”, “hahahaha, are you kidding?”, etc. The robot was programmed to generate another similar phrase in the case of receiving another replica of such an answer until the interlocutor was bored;
* The bot was also programmed to support the #FollowFriday tag on the total addition of new followers, but without waiting for Friday they duplicated this effect on Wednesday, sending the message #WTF “Wednesday To Follow” to everyone. The idea of ​​the acronym WTF belongs to one of the developers of the bot. The message was specifically scheduled to be sent out at 0:00 am New Zealand time, when most countries still had Tuesday, due to which a stream of indignant answers was guaranteed and, consequently, additional points in the competition.
By the end of the second week, JamesMTitus earned 701 points, including 107 points for his new friends and 594 points for answers.
Interestingly, the third place in the competition was taken by a team with 119 friends and 170 points, that is, this bot did not have enough sociability to exchange a number of replicas with followers.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/113921/
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