Feature #39
botify.it
Description
Project idea:
Service which allows people to hand over social accounts to a bot.
Why:
Centralized platforms have inherent flaws, because the incentives of the platform owners are not well aligned with user's interest.
Users who come to this conclusion (or to other conclusions which make them abandon a platform) may find it interesting / funny to hand over their profile to a bot instead of just abandoning or deleting it.
Also, those with commercial interests have long started to use bots. Thus it's also an act of re-balancing to have bots talk to this bots.
How:
Ideally, users should have choices about how the bot should behave. Proposals:
- Go crazy. Be random. Be nasty. Be spammy. Be messy. (but remain legal).
- Analyze prior behaviour and try to replicate it (machine learning?)
- Choose from a set of predefined prototypes (e.g Hipster, Nerd, ...)
- Follow and engage with specific profiles / pages
If the user wishes so, the bot may periodically deliver activity reports, even if it's just for the lulz.
Tech:
Facebook: would probably require scraping (e.g like this).
Facebook Messenger: should be possible via API.
Twitter: API.
other?
Legal:
Are there any legal implications to be considered?
Funding:
Participate at contests like this bot did ;-)
History
#1 Updated by didi almost 8 years ago
- Description updated (diff)
#2 Updated by didi almost 8 years ago
Matthias says Facebook also exposes most functionality via API (with same exceptions, e.g. mentioning somebody in a post and probably friend invites).
But where should the bot be hosted? If it's just a normal server, it may soon be detected and blocked.
Usage of Tor will probably also trigger also sorts of alerts.
Ideally the bot could run on the previous owner's smartphone. Would also be the best solution legally.
Would be great to combine this with a kind of privacy reverse engineering.
E.g. Matthias told me Facebook lets users introspect shown ads. That way you can e.g. find out if you were added to a custom audience, e.g. by uploading a list of E-Mail addresses, and by whom.
Would be funny to track and profile ad sources that way.
Not sure if and how financing for such a project could work.
#3 Updated by didi almost 8 years ago
- Description updated (diff)