I was able to focus more on the content the bots were creating, instead of scrolling past and barely reading them on my way to juicier tweets. It felt almost like sitting in a quiet room by myself. No pressure to interact, no high-octane arguments. I chose bots in the style of such as and more quote and lyric bots from assorted media properties image bots such as which tweets random protein structures, and which shares objects from the Museum of Modern Art and a variety of oddities such as (“AAAH” in different lengths), (“real deaths from medieval coroners’ rolls”), (every single word in English in alphabetical order), and (self-care reminders every hour). They visually divide up the timeline, providing both a brief respite from the surrounding discourse and a little puzzle - the replies are filled with guesses, such as “Two elephants cautiously attempt to kiss” and “The sharks from Katy Perry’s halftime show, back to back, looking up at the stars.”Īfter I discovered a few other bots, such as which tweets a picture of a sleek black cat every time he enters or exits his home through a door rigged up to a camera, and which, every four hours, tweets a randomly generated story, such as “ A Catalan math teacher goes for a walk in a forest and discovers a yew tree made of light.” I also discovered a few lyric bots, such as which tweets “random chunks” from songs by They Might Be Giants and quote bots, such as which tweets highlights from the webseries Dimension 20.īut recently, fed up with the density of my timeline, I thought, “why not go all the way?” I made a side account that only follows bots - 35 of them - to see how it would feel to check a version of Twitter not populated by a single human. Its bio describes the bot as “a small exercise in creative seeing” that sends out “a unique, automatically-generated dot-blot four times a day!” The account’s tweets, arrangements of dots which sometimes look like ships from Galaga or beetles or bowties, take up much more vertical space than your average wordy tweet. The first bot I ever followed was programmed by the writer and illustrator Jonny Sun. Many are made with platforms such as “ Cheap Bots, Done Quick!”, which are fairly accessible even for people without extensive coding backgrounds. These bots are undisguised programming projects that make their own tweets on a variety of creative themes. But in basic terms, bots are simply programs that have been coded to fulfill particular tasks, and there’s a large sector of benevolent bots. The term “Twitter bot” is, I think, commonly understood to refer to malicious, automated spammers: in a lot of recent discourse, the term “bots” often refers to accounts that repeatedly promote scams or attempt to disguise themselves as humans to increase clicks to a website. The goal is to never be it.” Well, what better way to avoid seeing all the main characters than to eliminate all humans from the timeline? It’s comforting to recognize when you’re not the only one having a hard time, and a feeling of dedication to the community with which you are commiserating can easily emerge - we’re in this together, right?īut how do I maintain this feeling of comfort when some pundit I’ve never heard of before says something completely bonkers, and I have to see every single reaction in real time immediately? I’m reminded of oft-cited tweet: “Each day on twitter there is one main character. It is a heavy emotional burden to log in every morning and see a combination of pleas for financial assistance, fully justified anger at the state of the world, and cabin-fever-motivated bickering between niche internet communities that describe themselves as “irony-poisoned” or “brain-rotted” from too much time spent online.Īnd yet, I feel glued to the screen. This is a bit counterintuitive, because it doesn’t feel so much like an escape anymore - or rather, it feels like a whole lot of people trying very deliberately to escape but continually turning to despair. Social media usage has intensified during the pandemic, probably out of a need for escapism.