@najimi@hellsite.site @monorail horse_ebooks' greatest triumph was having an account that did nothing but make comics out of its generated tweets, horse_ecomics.
... I kinda miss those comics tbqh. they were silly and fun.
@najimi@hellsite.site @monorail oh dang it also turns out that horse_ebooks wasn't actually a bot, it was a buzzfeed employee apparently, so it was all manually cribbed and posted stuff.
@Nine @najimi yeah, i was following an arg related to one of those parody "pronunciation book" accounts and then at the end it was like "hey! arg's over. did you guess that @horse_ebooks was involved? that's my girlfriend or something. that twitter account is this youtube channel's girlfriend. anyway, buy my book!"
what a kick in the teeth
@monorail @najimi@hellsite.site I'm glad I missed that particular revalation because I only ever followed horse_ecomics on twitter and then got the news from them that the comic was stopping because horse_ebooks was stopping and I was like "awww, ah well" and didn't read any further and just unfollowed. literally only found the truth of horse_ebooks today and...
it still fucking stings, y'know??? just... wow. D:
@najimi@hellsite.site @monorail wait hold up hold up
... okay so truth is apparently it WAS a bot, but in 2011, it was bought by a buzzfeed employee and run for two years to promote some kind of AR game through viral marketing. immediately after it was revealed, the horse_ebooks account stopped being posted to.
Ironic. a spambot that evaded detection by not mass following and @ing people was so beloved, that when it was taken over, it lost its soul, and people noticed the drop in quality