if you're wondering why the screaming became finite, Twitter suspended Cheap Bots Done Quick, the platform that this bot and thousands of other art bots use
Cheap Bots Done Quick is a platform for making *well-behaved* bots, which only @-reply people who @ them first and which have a built in chance of not @-ing people 5% of the time so that they do not get caught in resource-hogging infinite loops
Twitter already suspended 30 or so of my bots, making a year of my work vanish from the internet, but this makes orders of magnitudes of bots just... stop posting
this includes all of the @NoraReed bots, including this one, @thinkpiecebot, @hydratebot, @infinite_bees, @man_products and @likeuberbut
it also includes bots like @tinycarebot, @BodegaBot, @__birds__, @softlandscapes, @infinitedeserts and thousands more
as @GalaxyKate points out, the code isn't lost, and unlike the 30 of my bots that got suspended, this doesn't get rid of those bots' archives.
but if this reflects an attempt by Twitter to crack down not only on bots that post spam and astroturf, but also on art bots, you're about to see an entire field of artistic expression get snuffed out
and that's not even getting started on the ones that post health reminders or which distribute information
fingers crossed that this is just a misfire that will get resolved. i'm less optimistic than everyone else, though, because this is what i got when i tried to get @infinite_awoo, a bot that posts "AWOOO" and variations and then replies to people who @ it with "AWOO", unsuspended 
however, i've never had to get an app used by thousands of people unsuspended; hopefully the process for doing that is less ridiculous than the one for appealing individual account suspensions
if not, I'm already in the process of moving my bots off of Twitter and onto a separate website. i know that a website that says AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH on it is not the same but if this bot dies i will set it up anyway and post a link here.
<3 and AHHH -@NoraReed
<3 and AHHH -@NoraReed
it sounds like there are Steps Being Taken so the platform hopefully will be unsuspended, so do not feel like you must go into bot-mourning yet. but you may have to hold down the fort by screaming yourselves for a bit.
i'm sure you all figured this out, but they're back!! i just wanted to share this thread i did a while back that encourages you to make art even if you don't know what you're doing
Cheap Bots Done Quick is a wonderful platform that makes creating bots really easy and fun. it's a fantastic intro to generative art and you can learn skills with it that you can use for other things
when i started i didn't know what i was doing and was just making bots in the Tracery GUI and then copying and pasting the JSON into CBDQ. it's that easy! you can do it too!
and even if Twitter *does* shut down the bots, suspend them, or become so overrun with Nazis that no one wants to use it anymore, you'll still have the code for any bots that you made and you can put them on whatever platform we all move onto next
want to see what this bot looks like behind the curtain? it's just this: cheapbotsdonequick.com/source/infinit…
want to get started making your own bots? here's the Tracery GUI. i still use this for looking at my code most of the time, even when I'm working on @thinkpiecebot, which is, after being expanded for 2 years, a huge, unwieldy mess brightspiral.com/tracery/
here is cheap bots done quick, the site that runs this bot and thousands of others: cheapbotsdonequick.com
some other resources you might find useful:
delim.co formats lists so you can put them directly into your code (you'll want to use "Converter Settings" and have it add double quotes)
github.com/dariusk/corpora interesting bunches of data
delim.co formats lists so you can put them directly into your code (you'll want to use "Converter Settings" and have it add double quotes)
github.com/dariusk/corpora interesting bunches of data
openclipart.org public domain images that are great for headers/icons
commons.wikimedia.org this one has a lot that's not public domain but if you look for paintings of [subject] you will almost always find something amazing
commons.wikimedia.org this one has a lot that's not public domain but if you look for paintings of [subject] you will almost always find something amazing
anyway: go forth and make this bot some more bot-friends! have fun! if you have questions about any of this feel free to @ me, i'm @NoraReed, i don't pay close attention to this bot's mentions because there are so many and it is mostly people screaming
if you have a question about how to do something that it seems like there should be an easy solution to but you can't figure out what it is, chances are i have a time-saving kludge that i can show you
the outpouring of support and love for this silly thing has been absolutely wonderful; i just wanted to try to pay it forward by showing y'all that you can do this too if you want.
love, solidarity, fuck the police, etc. y'all are great. keep screaming. have fun. <3 -@NoraReed
love, solidarity, fuck the police, etc. y'all are great. keep screaming. have fun. <3 -@NoraReed
PS: you can't actually get CBDQ bots to get into an infinite reply loop by @-ing two of them on one tweet. only the bots' admins can do that, by having one of the bot accounts @ another of the bot accounts. that's how this happened
a limitation of CBDQ is that their "reply" feature only replies to the account that @'d them. this may seem sad because you cannot make the bots loop yourself on demand, but the alternative would be really easy for people to abuse, so it's much better this way :)
they also won't get stuck in loops forever because they have a 1/20 chance of not replying (this is also why occasionally this bot doesn't @-you back)
also i forgot to put it in the bot resources part upthread: when you're making twitter accounts, it requires an email that hasn't yet been used, but you can use yourregulargmailname+somethingunique@gmail.com for that. have fun, be good. <3
