{"id":847,"date":"2022-09-28T22:01:30","date_gmt":"2022-09-29T02:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.ideate.cmu.edu\/60-461\/f2022\/?p=847"},"modified":"2022-09-29T13:45:46","modified_gmt":"2022-09-29T17:45:46","slug":"typology-project-where-i-react-to-short-form-garbage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.ideate.cmu.edu\/60-461\/f2022\/c_\/09\/28\/typology-project-where-i-react-to-short-form-garbage\/","title":{"rendered":"typology project where I react to short-form garbage"},"content":{"rendered":"

tldr: I strained myself to enjoy the feed of an Instagram bot, and I did.<\/p>\n

I find the ecosystem of low-effort algorithmic Instagram content pretty interesting. It’s a mess of scams and thirst traps and fake engagement and the like, all driven by bots driven by people driven by some profit incentive. It spits out a bizarre blend of bot and human made content that exists quite far outside any social media feed I’ve ever experienced. After seeing some of the strange forms this content can take,<\/p>\n

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I was inspired to inject myself into this ecosystem and create a bot to aggregate and somehow classify the content. I still think this premise would be fun to fully pursue, but a consistent critique was “you get a bot that creates a river of shit. Are we supposed to find that shit fascinating?” After some contemplation and feedback, it became clear that most people do not find all this inherently interesting, so the question became “how can I communicate that interest”? The answer became “I’ll just tell them what I find interesting.”<\/p>\n

Step one was to carve a river of shit. I recovered an Instagram account I’d made in middle-school (old accounts are less likely to get banned) and acted like a bot. I went on popular hashtags inundated with bot posts and comments advertising promo-services, promoting scams, or trying to gain followers quickly through mutual-follow tags. The vast majority of accounts that follow bots are bots themselves, so I sought to recreate the kind of feed they would see. Doing so wasn’t too difficult.<\/p>\n