A lot has changed across Twitter over the past few months, much of it having impacted me directly. While I’ve had an ordinary account there for years, more recently I’ve created developer accounts, and on them applications (’bots’ if you will), coded programs that can interact with Twitter automatically. The first one of these was the Love Every Word Bot (@lovingeveryword).
With great misfortune, it is confirmed to have been completely lost. The circumstances behind this are unclear, but this year, the account was deactivated by Twitter themselves and unrecoverable soon after. The Love Every Word Bot, at its peak, had a follower count that was over 9,000 (not intended to be a Dragon Ball Z reference, the account literally had slightly over 9,000 followers before its demise) and was regularly interacted with. Every half hour, Love Every Word posted a word from the English dictionary with the word ‘love’ in front of it, and sometimes interacted with its spiritual twin account Fuck Every Word 2.0 (@fckeveryword). Ever since June 2019 it was active. Now it is time to move on.
Since then I spent some time formulating a backup plan to replace the original Love Every Word. Meanwhile, the Sailor Moon Script Bot (@sailormscript, tweeting dialogue from the English dub of Sailor Moon), one of the other developer accounts I created, continued its run. Eventually, I was ready to resurrect Love Every Word and its mission. On April 17th it made its return, as Love Every Word 2.0 Bot (@hearteveryword) with upgrades such as being able to provide word definitions. Both accounts may be in need of further updating, however, after what is supposed to occur on Twitter in the next few days.
To those who may not know, the Twitter corporation has been gradually closing off access to its API, which simply, is an interface that allows programs to communicate with each other. There is a version 2 that must be migrated to, but I cannot with the current applications that support both Love Every Word 2.0 and Sailor Moon Script bots. There is something I can do about this, but it’s possible either account may be put offline for a while. The good news is that in the end, both accounts are eligible to continue operating under the Free plan, which is designed for developer accounts that make little use of the API. Bad news is, Twitter’s new plans will rule out many other developers from continuing to operate there at all. Many fan-favorite bot accounts are in danger of dying, as they cannot afford to subscribe to Twitter’s new plans to continue their use of the API. While there’s great uncertainty with what direction the website is taking, preparation’s a good idea, and that’s what I‘m trying to do with what may happen.
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