If you have a Twitter account, you’ve probably seen concert ticket contests or “retweet and win” type of contests, and maybe you’ve even won a few. But you’ve probably never won like this: Computer engineer Hunter Scott created a Twitter bot that automatically entered contests for him, winning an average of four per day for nine months straight.
To answer the question of whether or not people actually won these contests by retweeting, Scott wrote a Python script that logged into Twitter, searched for tweets that said something like, “retweet to win,” and then retweeted them to see.
“I’m not sure if anyone else has done this before, but I didn’t see any evidence of other bots that were behaving like mine,” Scott said.
His study found evidence of actual people participating in contests by retweeting hundreds of them for hours. Some contests would require you to follow the person who posted it. Scott would find the original accounts, follow if it was required, and then retweet.
“The most difficult part of this project was preventing the bot from getting banned by Twitter. They have rate limits which prevent you from tweeting too often, retweeting too aggressively, and creating ‘following churn’, by rapidly following and unfollowing people,” Scott explained. He had to figure out how to manage this through trial and error until his script met the quota.
Twitter also has a limit on the number of people you can follow based on how many followers you have. If you have fewer than 100 followers, you cannot follow more than 2000 people. Since many of the contests did require following the original account that posted it, Scott had to use a First In, First Out (FIFO) method in order to follow the most recent 2000 entries. This ensured he had the greatest chance at winning.
Majority of his wins were tickets to events or t-shirts with logos. Many of the tickets were to concerts taking place in different countries, which Scott was usually unable to attend. Another frequent prize was digital currency in online games, such as FIFA.
The most valuable prize he won was a trip to New York Fashion Week for him and a friend, including a limo ride and $500 spending cash. Unfortunately, Scott was unable to claim that prize, as he doesn’t live near New York and refused to pay taxes on the $4,000 prize. Touché.
As for the identity of the bot, Scott never confirmed its name. What he did confirm was his favorite prize won was a cowboy hat autographed by the stars of a Mexican soap opera which he had never heard of.
Via Engadget
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