Make Your Own 4chan Twitter Bot

>>56991753
Needs to remove the reply number to be usable

>>56991780
or change the reply number to the link or something. that way if i want to say "What [post_link] said" or "[post_link] \n this" then the tweet would make at least *some* sense.

>>56991794
But when the thread 404's the link would be dead

>>56991834
so what? links die all the time. at least for the 3-4 days while the thread is alive (or archived) people will be able to see the context.

literally the worst case scenario you're talking about here is that the potential for context for that text gets lost. the status quo is that no context is offered at all, so this suggestion is no worse.

>>56991861
What the fuck? You yourself just said it'd be a good idea to make the link clickable so you have context. If the link is dead how can you retrieve context?

>>56991834
screencap attached the tweet then.

>>56991873
i'm saying it would be better than just the text ">>[post_number]" because it would potentially give you context.

i'm not saying it would absolutely solve the problem, but then most posts on 4chan are at least somehow related to another post, and there's no way to capture the full context of any post in a single tweet.

but it would at least make sense of the ">>[post_number]" nonsense in the tweet.

>>56991883
I think the best solution is to do what the first anon said and remove the link all together.

I would also remove the link before populating. This would allow a wider range of posts because a 135 word post may be ignored by the <=140 if it has any links.

>>56991924
but then it wouldn't make any sense if you took a post that said something like
>you could do [...] or you could do what >>56991883 said and [...]

if you removed all links, you'd get
>you could do [...] or you could do what said and [...]

which would be even more confusing.

just take every post link (anything matching ">>\d+") and make that count as whatever the cost is in twitter for a link (20 chars?), then replace those >>\d+ links with proper URLs.

yes, the links will have a shelf life of raw chicken left out on the sidewalk, but it would add marginally for people that come across the tweet and decide to check what the comment is in reference to.

>>56991924
The problem with including a link on the tweet is that AFAIK you can't embed hyperlinks on tweets. So the URL (even if shortened by Twitter) would probably consume more space than a regular reply number.

Removing the reply number would make it feel less chan-ey, and the bot is supposed to feel mostly incoherent anyways, so I'm not sure what the best solution is.

That's up to whoever's running the script I guess.

>>56991960
95% of the tweets aren't going to make sense in all honesty, what with the garbage being posted on 4chan constantly. But your idea is better than just killing the links. This whole idea needs a bit of shine.

Could blank posts be posted by the bot? I assume yes.

>>56992003
>AFAIK you can't embed hyperlinks on tweets
you can't embed <a> elements but if you just pipe in a URL then twitter will shorten it and only charge you something like 20 characters for it.

(actually i'm looking around and it seems it might be 23 now, according to https://support.twitter.com/articles/78124 )

>>56992023
true. and honestly if you grabbed all the posts on /g/ right now and categorized them by
- length
- whether it references another post or not (at all)
- some other dimensions

i bet you'd find that the posts that are amenable to posting to twitter (the ones that are under 140 characters and without inline links to other posts) are almost all not very good posts.

like, take for example this thread. a few posts are fewer than 140 characters, but they would make absolutely no sense whatsoever out of context. like you could take any of >>56991834, >>56991883, or >>56991780 and i wouldn't think much about it if i just saw the text from those posts in the @horse_ebooks timeline thing.

longer posts tend to be better posts, but tend not to be amenable to twitter.

>>56992026
So you basically at least double the character length of each reply number segment in each user post. Meaning there are less posts you can actually tweet now and things get tighter for the bot.

It's a hard tradeoff.

>>56992058
true. but these posts <140 characters aren't really going to make sense either way.

i mean if you just looked at tweets that didn't reference another post at all (maybe with the exception of posts that reference the OP post since that's the shorthand people use now to open a quick reply box), then you could get good, coherent tweets, but i'm betting the majority of posts you get will sound like nonsense given the absolute lack of context.