#twitter bots

The end of Twitter bots

Twitter is removing the free API access, which will have the inevitable consequence of driving most twitter bots into extinction.

I've written a fair bit about art bots over the years, since they're one of the more accessible generative art forms (and therefore one of the most creative and prolific).

Here's a talk by Kate Compton on the poetics of bots, which will have to stand in as an eulogy for now.

One bot use that I think I'll particularly miss is the use of bots as periodic chimes. Having something that marks the passage of time is a frequent part of the human experience; before clocks we had periodic chants and rituals that marked the hours of the day or the changing of the seasons. Big Ben chiming hourly, reminders that the weekend has started, and so on.

Other bots generated moths or tiny gardens, or painted like Bob Ross, or just posted pictures of cute animals.

Some bots performed practical services, like generating a feed of new arXiv papers or emergency service notifications. Some of those will survive, if whoever is running them deems it worth paying for the API access, but most of the delightful little bots that make people happy will be going away. And on social media, that's an important part of the experience for many people.

Many bots have migrated over to Mastodon, of course. The CBDQ equivalent is cheapbotstootsweet.com and many bots live on a bots-only server at botsin.space.

I think I'll let @infinite_scream have the last word:

It’s really hard even for a bot designed for this, twisted up in all the things you want to say.