Why Because Bot: A Twitter Bot That Answers Questions By Combining Tweets Together

Why Because Bot is another Twitter bot I just launched last week. The bot finds tweets starting with “Why is…” and also finds tweets containing a sentence that starts with “It’s because…” and pairs them together.

Unlike Desire Bot, this particular bot doesn’t repost full tweets. Instead, it looks for just the initial question and stops at the question mark. For the answer, it finds tweets that contain a sentence starting with “It’s because…” and copies everything from there until the end of the tweet.

Why is it people never use the word 'asunder' anymore? It's because of young adults.

— Why Because Bot (@whybecausebot) February 13, 2015

Like all Twitter bots, it’s a bit hit or miss. But it was fun to see if I could grab random text from different sources, and then combine them together to make some kind of statement or coherent message.

Why is one girl never enough for boys? IT'S BECAUSE PEOPLE TALK ABOUT CHANGE MORE THAN THEIR ACTIONS SPEAK.

— Why Because Bot (@whybecausebot) February 12, 2015

There’s not a lot of deep logic happening here, to try to match up the question’s subject matter with that of the answer. Serendipity plays a much bigger role with this bot, but I’m happy enough with the hit/miss ratio for now.

With the setup and practice I got creating my first Twitter bot, making a second one was much, much faster. The time from “I have this silly idea” to actually making the thing live was much shorter, this time around. Which is great, and also a little dangerous.

Perhaps everyone who creates Twitter bots goes through this phase? The “now that I can make one, I’m going to make another” feeling. And anytime some dumbass idea pops into our heads, we think “I wonder if that would make a good bot?”

I may have a few more bot ideas simmering in my head. And don’t be surprised if you see another bot or two pop up in the coming weeks.

But once the novelty of creation wears off, I hope I’ll still be interested in creating bots – but with more going on, behind the scenes. A quick copy/paste job is fun and all, but there are a lot of bots out there doing really neat things.

This is what happens when an English major gets interested in computers. I may not be writing much anymore, but I still like re-arranging words for fun.

Related:
Desire Bot: A Twitter Bot That Re-Posts What the World Wants