Engineer creates a Twitter bot that wins him 4 contests a day for 9 months

Have you ever seen those Twitter contests as you’re browsing your feed? You know the ones that prompt you to “Re-Tweet to win”?

 

Well engineer Hunter Scott has participated in 165,000 of them — that’s right— 165,000. So who has time to take part in that many Twitter contests? An engineer with a lot of coding background, that’s who.

Scott, a young Motorola engineer, created a Twitter bot that automatically entered him in Twitter contests and the result was on average four contests per day won over a span of nine months.

According to Scott’s project page, the most challenging aspect of the project was keeping the bot from getting banned by Twitter since they implement rate limits which prevent you from tweeting too often, re-tweeting too aggressively, and creating “following churn”, by rapidly following and unfollowing people. Since Twitter doesn’t make this information readily available to the public, Scott had to play around with them to discover the perfect recipe.

So what kind of stuff did he win?

“My favorite thing that I won was a cowboy hat autographed by the stars of a Mexican soap opera that I had never heard of. I love it because it really embodies the totally random outcome of these contests,” said Scott.

He even won a trip to New York Fashion Week, with a limo ride, spending money, and tickets to the show (total value $4,000), but he declined for tax purposes and ended up declining most of the prizes he won.

In the meantime, he did code a contest-winning bot and then discovered that his skill could be used to do some good as well. There are many charities that require the same amount of re-tweeting to raise awareness or funds, like this:

So Scott can participate in those activities, too.