We Built A Twitter Ratio Bot That Tracks All Your Terrible Tweets
Whatever Twitter was originally intended to be, it certainly wasn’t this. Nazis roam free, celebrities melt down daily, entire news cycles run their course in a matter of minutes, and you can’t figure out why 200 people with rose emojis in their username keep calling you a cop. Not only is the constant noise just generally overwhelming, but it can also bury one of the platform’s few perfect uses: watching other people dunk on terrible tweets. Those days are behind us now, thanks to a new Twitter bot built by HuffPost in collaboration with Adam Pash (who in real life is a director of engineering at Postlight).
Friends, allow me to introduce @ratiobot69.
In Twitter parlance, getting “ratioed” means that the replies to a tweet have severely begun to outnumber that tweet’s favs, the heart button that is the site’s most basic indicator of approval. The exact definition of a ratioed tweet will vary depending on whom you ask, but it’s safe to assume that a non-question tweet that compels more people to type words than to click a button was ill-advised in some way.
Our new Ratio Bot uses a still-evolving algorithm to identify tweets from celebrities, politicians, pundits and otherwise prominent individuals that are in the process of getting ratioed. (False positives are inevitable, but we’re working on cutting those down.) For example, this past weekend, the uproar over The New York Times’ reluctance to use the word “lie” in reference to President Donald Trump put our little bot to work.
667 replies and 256 likes for username's tweet https://t.co/VWqHs7as6H pic.twitter.com/v9Ya4gt80G
— Ratio Bot (@ratiobot69) May 27, 2018
111 replies and 96 likes for username's tweet https://t.co/9TXTFfcdGj pic.twitter.com/LVrJRlpOTb
— Ratio Bot (@ratiobot69) May 27, 2018
63 replies and 33 likes for username's tweet https://t.co/5TYUhfXZf1 pic.twitter.com/JAWP17NMTY
— Ratio Bot (@ratiobot69) May 27, 2018
And here’s just a sample of some of the other godawful tweets @ratiobot69 picked up during its brief trial run.
22 replies and 2 likes for username's tweet https://t.co/7mVOJ33uoM pic.twitter.com/3BptyOVIAZ
— Ratio Bot (@ratiobot69) May 23, 2018
58 replies and 32 likes for username's tweet https://t.co/7w8ZOPw2Vd pic.twitter.com/oiQIydjfXL
— Ratio Bot (@ratiobot69) May 18, 2018
238 replies and 159 likes for username's tweet https://t.co/eJ03lQ05mX pic.twitter.com/GxtqE3aVyl
— Ratio Bot (@ratiobot69) May 20, 2018
31 replies and 11 likes for username's tweet https://t.co/RvGe8qU74V pic.twitter.com/gjLs8iQzgg
— Ratio Bot (@ratiobot69) May 18, 2018
64 replies and 26 likes for username's tweet https://t.co/NfwMVcWcSN pic.twitter.com/d5qnt4GcvL
— Ratio Bot (@ratiobot69) May 16, 2018
22 replies and 5 likes for username's tweet https://t.co/dGlW2wwsS6 pic.twitter.com/QsNhdCOVMK
— Ratio Bot (@ratiobot69) May 22, 2018
Just terrible.
So if you, too, want front-row access to the best of the very worst Twitter has to offer, go here and follow Ratio Bot on his journey into hell.
See a ratioed tweet our bot didn’t pick up? Have a suggestion? Tweet it at us or email ratiobot69@gmail.com.
Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.