Wait, what? The Holup bot project [sic!]
Over the past few weeks, I set up a Twitter bot that posts submissions from the subreddit r/holup to Twitter every five minutes.
A little backstory
Memes (that is, punchy images on the internet) are the hallmark of Generation Z from my point of view: Pretty much everyone my age has at least a few of them saved on their phone, some even have gigabyte-sized photo albums filled with memes collected over the years.
And I’m no exception either: I’ve got around 4,000 saved memes myself, and I’ve been collecting them bit by bit since 2018.
The origin of these images (and sometimes videos) is often not fully clear, but a large portion of them definitely comes from Reddit. In many ways, Reddit has become the go-to place for topics where specialized forums used to help out before (from computer game tips to pet training topics to world politics, you can really find everything on Reddit).
A lot of people around me, however, don’t have access to Reddit or find the app so confusing that they hang out on Twitter instead. I count myself among this group too; Reddit is simply an organizational disaster in many respects.
And go!
Since 2018, the r/me_irl bot on Twitter has been quite successful (around 250,000 followers at the moment) at mirroring the latest posts from Reddit to Twitter, so I knew what I could do: bring more bots like that to Twitter.
So I started working on developing software to mirror the posts. I began writing it in the Python programming language, but after a short conversation with the operator of the me_irl bot, I switched to the Go programming language, since it let me generate a binary file quite easily.
As the basic framework for this application, I used the software by Kat, the developer of the Me_irl bot. That meant that after just one weekend, I had a working bot that downloaded the latest posts from Reddit every few minutes and posted them to Twitter.
Behind it technically is a binary file compiled from Go, which is called every 5 minutes by a cron job and checks the subreddit r/holup to see whether there are any new, highly rated memes. If there are, the image is downloaded together with its caption, a unique ID is generated, and then it is posted to Twitter. The ID is written to a text file, which prevents the same post from being uploaded multiple times.
