In my last post I talked about some of the coding projects I worked on over lockdown to keep myself busy, two of which were Twitter bots. One of them tweets about my top tracks and artists, songs I liked or am listening to on Spotify (and #EndSARS tweets with relevant songs but that was added later). The other bot tweets reaction videos/memes with descriptions so people (me) can find them easily. From time to time I check the interactions with these bots so I am able to see who is actually interacting with them and it always reveals some interesting things.
There are are wide range of people that interact with my bots, from artists promoting themselves, to people saving memes with one of those downloader bots but the vast majority of accounts are either other bots, football fans, other sports fans, music fans and Stan Twitter. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which and that is what I’ll be talking about (I know it’s not a technical post, boo-hoo sad story).
fan: “a person who has a strong interest in or admiration for a particular person or thing.”
stan: “an overzealous or obsessive fan of a particular celebrity.”
bot: “an autonomous program on the internet or another network that can interact with systems or users.”
What is the difference between a fan, a stan and a bot? Google says the above definitions are from Oxford Languages and I’ll take their word. The main difference between fans and stans is that stans are apparently overzealous and usually reserved for celebrities (Definition: “a famous person, especially in entertainment or sport.”). As a Manchester United fan who tweets a lot, I can tell you for free that stans are not reserved just for music/entertainment celebrities, they also exist in sports. Now bots on the other hand, are kind of a different thing because they are autonomous. However, it is difficult distinguish between bots and serial retweeters (it’s me. I’m a serial retweeter) and a lot of fans and stans are serial retweeters. So how exactly do we know which is which? I am not always sure and maybe they are actually the same when you really think about it.
For Nigeria’s Independence date, I made “A Playlist For Fed Up Nigerians” made up of songs spanning several years lamenting about the state of the country, and a few days later the #EndSARS protests really started. Seeing a chance to lend my voice, I added a feature to my music bot to tweet songs from that playlist with the #EndSARS hashtag. It got some retweets but I noticed those retweets were largely from other #EndSARS bots. Other people had the same brilliant idea about using bots to spread awareness. This made me wonder just how much of the internet is simply bots interacting with other bots. I think it’s a fair amount. My second bot, the reaction video bot, is another data point as a lot of replies to its tweets are mentioning other bots to download the videos in the tweets.
Back to my first bot, the music bot. Excluding the #EndSARS bots, it doesn’t get much interactions other than from artists and fan accounts. Both of which under certain circumstances act very bot-like. When artists are promoting new songs they go into overdrive and retweet pretty much every tweet about said song. I don’t claim to be an artist so I don’t know whether they do that one by one or have some managed services that do that for them. So bot or not bot? Not sure but I’ll say not bot. Fan accounts are accounts dedicated to one artist and there is a subtle difference between fan accounts and stans but I can’t put it in words, but essentially if you think artists promoting their songs is a lot (I don’t. Everyone has to promote themselves these days. Don’t like it but the game is the game), then fan accounts are a serial retweeters on steroids. And honestly I think some of them have to be bots and if they are not bots then they must be the dictionary definition of stans.
On that note, let’s talk about Fans/Stans. Without looking at the stats, I’m going to say the most active stanbase is DJ Tunez. Wizkid (see pic above where one expresses disappointment that the bot’s tweet had only 1 retweet after an hour. Stan or Fan?)and Tiwa Savage (shout out to the account whose name is “TIWA is not the cause of your spiritual problem” that I always see) being a close second but there are some artistes with surprisingly active stans/fan accounts are: Peruzzi (Southy Love gets mad love), Mayorkun, Oxlade, Cuppy. Obviously my stats are skewed by the songs I listen to and the ones the bot actually tweets about. Would be interesting to actually run the numbers on all 10,000+ tweets but perhaps that is for another day.
My second bot is perhaps more interesting in this case, it tweets reaction videos that I like and describe and has organically grown to over a 1,000 followers with no promotion at all and will soon have more followers than me. It gets used regularly by K-pop stans, football twitter, FT, basketball twitter, film twitter, anime twitter, crypto twitter, Nicki Minaj twitter, and so much more. It is a melting pot of different internet cultures that shows that memes are universal and it really does only interact with fans, stans and bots.