God this makes me want to cry, it's so beautiful, and I'm not being sarcastic. Seems like snark and chuckling and inside jokes is all we ever see. You made something that could turn someone's day around, or more. Wonderful.
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 like this as a concept. The tricky part is now there are two audiences that the system has to avoid alienating -- it has to seem friendly and not creepy to the recipient, and it has to be harmless and non-embarrassing from the perspective of the 'sender'.
Well, I imagine it's some kind of app that you allow to post on your behalf. When you allow it, you know what it will post. If you really want to go the extra mile you could ask each new member to tick off which messages they don't feel comfortable sending out before authorizing the app. But I think that is unnecessary or release 2.0
Moreover if you relate back to the group, the person can see the larger scope and, maybe, join on the effort.
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
It could also be as simple as the bot selecting a feel better buddy from a circular queue and asking that person to send a nice tweet to someone who needs it. This could either be "handwritten" or via some web app that authenticates on Twitter and lets you manually send a canned tweet (not unlike a share button)
Yes that would be a solution too. But I think it increases the barrier to action and participation of the members of the group. I don't use that much Twitter so I would probably miss on the request for help.
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. :)
Neat idea. It is amazing how often those phrases come up.
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.
I am sure you are right but I gave a hug to a stranger and they held on for dear life and when I went to say bye they said the most sincere thank you I have ever heard. Sometimes when you need a hug, you just need a hug.
Well yeah, but maybe in real life they wouldn't announce to the room that they need a hug in the first place. Public Internet spaces have different social norms.
I put together a similar bot that either responds to a recent #fml, or sends a pseudo-random account an unsolicited (hopefully) cheer-inducing missive (from a bank of 200). Runs at a random minute once an hour. Not been banned as yet:
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?
Looks like he may not have had enough variation in his replies.
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.
My problem with that explanation is that @StealthMountain and @DBZNappa both only ever tweet the same message, and to my knowledge both have been running for quite a while.
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.
this is great. the positive responses you've seen combined with an interesting article i read a few days ago [1] make me want to write an ML suicide prevention bot for social media channels. a 20-30% positive response to suicide prevention would be astounding, and the cost is so small.
This is a very dangerous project idea. Have you, for one second, considered that this is not a sales funnel, where the only thing that counts is the "success rate" at the other end, but something dealing with people in a crisis? People who may just be considering suicide, and can be tipped in both ways. For example by a pseudo-empathic bot that tells them the same shit they hear all day in the US, which sounds nice but is the culturally accepted way to say "Please either pretend to be happy, or shut up" [1].
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.
what the fuck merited this response? i've read and re-read my comment, and i can't seem to find anything that would suggest that i'm seeing people simply as numbers here. are you honestly so jaded and cynical that you think someone talking about suicide prevention doesn't realize there is a human element to the matter?
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!
your reply wasn't really grumpy, and i understand it's a touchy subject for many people. the content of the article wasn't what interested me so much as the topic of it. it had never really occurred to me that the movement of potential suicide notes to digital media allows the opportunity for prevention.
I just happened to start my own gag @reply bot last night, https://twitter.com/AssHobby, and quickly hit this same problem. I tried to get clarification on what I was doing that was different than a bot like StealthMountain but of course just got a canned response that answered nothing. It really can't be anything other than followers count or special exemptions. Maybe drastically reducing the frequency such as sublimino is doing would help keep it off their radar. But a definitive answer would be nice.
Awesome project! Any chance you'd be interesting in publishing the code for the bot so we could make variations of happybots to spread the <3 and not-so-subtly protest the suspension of said happybots?
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.
Because the intersection of utter surreality and being really really nice to people is ... to me, both awesome and hilarious.
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 went skimmed through the whole history of the user (dozens of comments, but the account is just a day old right now). It's obvious looking at the number of points each comment got that it depended on there being a large audience in the reddit thread stoked_for_you was commenting on. 1000+ points on very popular threads, 1 point on unpopular ones.
I do want to say that it's one of the best reddit user comment histories I've ever gone through.
I'm glad you like it :) For me it serves as a constant reminder that a little generosity and friendliness can't hurt. It made me re-evaluate much of my own behavior in a way no criticism of said behavior ever could have done. I spend so much time on being right or being better, and that is a complete waste of energy. Changing habits is hard, but this random guy sitting somewhere in the world helped me a great deal already, and will continue to inspire me, I'm sure. The stuff I read so far made and makes me grin all throughout the day, even away from the computer... it's just not true that anonymity only makes people behave at their worst, it also frees some of them up to be more loving and/or funny than they might dare to be in person. Taking some of that spirit and applying it to my thoughts, and to my actions and words towards other people is now a goal of mine.
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
Unrelenting, freewheeling positivity, what's not to love?
"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." :)
Try using a name that doesn't include the word "BOT" in it. Given that your account is suspended repeatedly, and that you alter the frequency of the tweets, consider what you haven't yet changed.
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.
Ok, sorry I'll change that. I figured the chances that a random reader would have started, but not finished a TV series from 22 years ago would be pretty slim (whereas @EnjoyTheFilm specifically targeted those people) ... but apparently not. My bad.
Updated : spoiler removed; just the reaction is shown now. Again, my apologies.
Haha well, if you put it that way now I do look foolish! I mean, I can count the number of people I know who watch Twin Peaks on 1 hand so yeah, you should've been safe.
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.
Late this afternoon, I started @FeelBetterBot back up (I had kept it 'off' for most of the day, while lots of people were looking at it) ... and it lasted less than 3 hours before getting shut down again.
A while ago I made a Twitter bot (https://twitter.com/HereHaveAKitty) with a friend. We used the face.com API to detect sad faces in photos in tweets (as well as ASCII emoticons) and reply with a photo of a kitten. It lasted about as long as yours before being suspended. We tried again (https://twitter.com/KittenDelivery) but that too was shut down.
That's adorable! Except the part where KittenDelivery tweeted some hairless kittens -- those are creepy. Anyway, my bot has (so far) always been unsuspended upon appeal, but sometimes it takes 3-12 hours or something.
Of all the things in the article, the guy's reaction to @EnjoyTheFilm is the thing making me chuckle. As much as I support this idea, I really can't help but laugh at someone's petty misfortune.
"Did you mean sneak peeks?" would be a lot more effective if it went the other way round, finding people who had correctly used "sneak peeks" and asking if they'd meant "sneak peaks".
