Isn't she pretty? That ship called Dignity

[venta]

Twitter is a strange beast.

I noticed earlier that a user I'd never heard of had re-tweeted a throwaway remark I made (in the guise of Pintwatch) to leathellin. Who is this aboutdignity, I wondered.

It turns out that it's an account which appears to re-tweet any remark anyone makes which contains the word "dignity". Even more strangely, it has 1500 followers.

Is this an isolated oddity, or are these aggregating accounts common things ? Would following it tell me something deep and meaningful about life, dignity, and the human condition ? It seems rather unlikely, to me, since pattern-matching on text has rarely produced much that's hugely insightful. Except by accident.

Do people follow in the hopes of serendipitous wisdom from the masses ?

Comments

[rabbit1080.livejournal.com]

How odd.

Personally I prefer to listen to Big Ben on twitter (I don't follow it, I just wander by for a listen occasionally)
http://twitter.com/big_ben_CLOCK

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

They were playing A Ship Called Dignity in a shop recently - somewhere trend-tastic like New Look I think. The 80s are clearly not yet dead.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

I love that.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Your favourite search engine will find many, many more if you look for "retweet bots". No, I don't know either.

[marjory.livejournal.com]

I don't know!

However, I asked someone 'do you dream lucidly?' in a (silly) reply to a tweet and... KA-BOOM! an account called 'Lucid Dreaming' added me.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's a tool in some sociolinguistic experiment. Perhaps next year an academic paper will be out analysing the corpus of verbiage thus tracked, or the strength of the network effects, or sthg like that.

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

By chance I mentioned "tea" in a tweet once and I found that there is a retweet bot for that.
And I've been manually added by people for various other things I mentioned.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

The ones that amuse me are the ones that pick up on the opposite of what they're hoping for. I tweeted something about detesting tennis and had a 'UK Tennis Fans' bot retweet me; ditto cricket. I now think of deliberately annoying things to tweet when I find one of these. :)

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

In addition to re-tweet bots, there seem to be quite the menagerie of auto-followers, that will follow you if you incant the right keyword.

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

It sounds along the same lines as allthesausages (http://twitter.com/allthesausages), but less silly.