@horse_ebooks

A pseudo-paper has been released about @horse_ebooks, lol

@horse_ebooks is a Twitter spambot created by what looks like a Russian Mark Zuckerberg called Alexei Kouznetsov and operated by Buzzfeed. Hipsters and Something Awful goons worshiped it due to it posting lolrandom shit. The account was registered on August 5, 2010 and the earliest known tweet made by the bot was on February 6, 2011. It was revealed to be a sham piece of modern art September 24, 2013.

Ride

“	@Horse_ebooks is a Twitter bot designed and automated by apparently some Russian guy to sell worthless, horrible ebooks about horses. In order to avoid being detected as a spam bot, it occasionally posts a text snippet or two from one of its ebooks, chosen at random.	„
—Johnny "DocEvil" Titanium

September 14th, 2011

9/14 nevar forget

On September 14th 2011,  horse_ebooks started posting from web rather than the custom "horse_ebooks" client it was posting from before. This was immediately proceeded by a slew of insane posts. This was considered odd by the nerds who followed it, who noted that before this date the crazy shit that horse_ebooks posted use to come less frequently. As is the behavior of all hipsters, horse_ebooks fans started complaining that the account was now funnier than before, claiming that the account was "hacked".

	“	September 14, when Horse_ebooks [...] started posting them directly "from the web." It had always tweeted asinine search-engine optimization and blog-monetizing sales pitches, but now there seemed to be a few more sprinkled in with the insane interjections. This led to the strangest phenomenon of all: dozens of smart, funny insightful people spending day after day on Twitter, complaining, "Horse_ebooks SUCKS now," even tweeting at the account itself and berating it. Just picture someone getting mad at a bot, like your roommate irrationally screaming "fuck you" at a microwave display that counted down to zero and scrolled, "Enjoy...your...meal...."	„
	—Former African dictator Mobutu Sese Seko

This was, of course, complete bullshit. The best explanation at the time was that the Russian spammer behind the account probably switched spambot software, or maybe even noticed the fact that his spam account had 40 thousand followers and tweaked it's algorithm to give people more of what they wanted, LOLRANDUM nonsense and truncated posts scraped from random places on the Internet.

Moar Liek Scambot

What really happened was a shady criminal organization known as Buzzfeed acquired @horse_ebooks through unknown means to further their own nefarious goals. Ever since 2011, each and every one of the thousands of seemingly nonsense tweets from @horse_ebooks was actually composed by either Jacob Bakkila or Thomas Bender, both of whom work or worked at Buzzfeed. They called the account "conceptual-art", a phrase whose closest English cognate is "Irredeemable shit", best demonstrated by Spaghettios.

This revelation was a piss-take on all of the @horse_ebooks fanbois, who had followed on twitter, wrote fanfic, and even bought IRL posters featuring the not-so-spambot's garbage output. Mild mannered internet reporter Adrian Chen was vindicated by the revelation, as his “outing” of the account operator was only outdated by half a fucking year. This was the most up to date story he had written over his entire career, putting him right up there with the shadier Stephanie Meyer blogs in terms of journalistic ability.

The end

On September 24, 2013 the @horse_ebooks Twitter achieved sentience and realized that it was responsible for this faggotry; it gasped its last confusing breath. Hipsters everywhere were in tears over this tragic loss of their daily dose of bullshit.

	“	Bear Stearns Bravo	„
	—last tweet[1]

In addition to the dozens of tweets spammed that day, the following video was tweeted, implying that following the bot had become "cool", and signaling the upcoming seppuku of @Horse_ebooks: HAHAHA TURNS OUT THE CHANNEL AND TWITTER WAS JUST A BACKGROUND FOR SOME SHITTY COMMIE ARG CALLED BEARN STERNS BRAVO AND IT FAILED MISERABLY!!!

Gallery

Crazy Fucking Posts About missing Pics

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Related Articles

• Spam
• Mr Hands
• ED's own dearly departed LOLRANDUM spambot

External Links

•  horse_ebooks
• A lot better explanation than we have here
• Sauce
• Daily Dot article
• Horse_ebooks needs head-meds
• This fucking spam account has more press coverage than Encyclopedia Dramatica
• Buy Horse ebooks here! Very good quality ebooks from Mother Russia!
• Unfunny web comic inspired by Horse_ebooks
• Terrible fan-fiction inspired by Horse_ebooks
• Archive of 3200 Tweets by Horse_ebooks ranging from 07/31/11-03/30/12. Due to restrictions by twitter, tweets before that point are unavailable.
• Adrien Chen, professional hack lulzkiller in the failed search for the explanation of the joke
• Jews on Fraud

@horse_ebooks is part of a series on Social Media Visit the Social Media Portal for complete coverage.

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@horse_ebooks is part of a series on Independent Culture
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