This Coder Set Up A Twitter Bot And Won Over 1,000 Competitions

One enterprising coder set up an automated bot to enter thousands of competitions on Twitter and ended up winning over a thousand bits of tat (pictured above).

Hunter Scott’s bot scoured Twitter for tweets that contain the phrase “RT to win” and dutifully retweeted them, entering over 165,000 competitions in the process.

According to Scott, the trickiest part was avoiding being labelled as spam by Twitter: “They have rate limits which prevent you from tweeting too often, retweeting too aggressively, and creating “following churn”, by rapidly following and unfollowing people,” he said. “Twitter doesn’t publish these numbers, so I had to figure them out by trial and error.“

Despite winning over 1,000 contests, Scott describes his win rate as underwhelming: “Over the 9 months I ran my script, I entered approximately 165,000 contests. Of those, I won around 1000. So that means my win rate was just over half a percent, which is pretty miserable.”

Particularly when you take into account that a lot of the prizes were basically tat: free images, cups of coffee in cities he didn’t live in, bottles of energy drink… You can see the full list here.

The most valuable thing he won was a trip to New York Fashion Week worth $4,000 - but he didn’t claim it because he didn’t want to pay taxes on a $4,000 prize.

"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,” he added. “I love it because it really embodies the totally random outcome of these contests.”

(Image credit: Hunter Scott)