Not All Bots Are Bad, and Twitter Knows It | WIRED

But bots don’t even need to be useful. “I don’t think bots have to do something worthwhile,” says V Buckenham, founder of Cheap Bots, Done Quick!, a free tool that helps people create automated Twitter accounts. Tens of thousands of bots have been developed using the platform, most of which Buckenham says aren’t useful. “It’s a joyful thing or a creative thing,” they say. “It’s a form of creative expression, whether that be something lots of people are following, or something that just amuses you.”Some bots blur the boundary between utility and diversion. Journalist Karen K. Ho began posting reminders for people to put down their phones and stop doomscrolling through Twitter at the start of the pandemic. “I had developed quite a following during the pandemic because—understandably—many people were doomscrolling for information on how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic,” she says. She was doing so manually, typing out the missives and hitting send, until she began to find it tiring to do so—particularly late at night, when people were most likely to aimlessly flick through Twitter.So she built a bot to do the job for her. @doomscroll_bot now tweets every hour, reminding people to log off, alongside sitting…
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