We Built A Twitter Ratio Bot That Tracks All Your Terrible Tweets

Whatever Twitter was originally intended to be, it certainly wasn’t this. Nazis roam free, celebrities melt down daily, entire news cycles run their course in a matter of minutes, and you can’t figure out why 200 people with rose emojis in their username keep calling you a cop. Not only is the constant noise just generally overwhelming, but it can also bury one of the platform’s few perfect uses: watching other people dunk on terrible tweets. Those days are behind us now, thanks to a new Twitter bot built by HuffPost in collaboration with Adam Pash (who in real life is a director of engineering at Postlight).

Friends, allow me to introduce @ratiobot69.

In Twitter parlance, getting “ratioed” means that the replies to a tweet have severely begun to outnumber that tweet’s favs, the heart button that is the site’s most basic indicator of approval. The exact definition of a ratioed tweet will vary depending on whom you ask, but it’s safe to assume that a non-question tweet that compels more people to type words than to click a button was ill-advised in some way.

Our new Ratio Bot uses a still-evolving algorithm to identify tweets from celebrities, politicians, pundits and otherwise prominent individuals that are in the process of getting ratioed. (False positives are inevitable, but we’re working on cutting those down.) For example, this past weekend, the uproar over The New York Times’ reluctance to use the word “lie” in reference to President Donald Trump put our little bot to work.

And here’s just a sample of some of the other godawful tweets @ratiobot69 picked up during its brief trial run.

Just terrible.

So if you, too, want front-row access to the best of the very worst Twitter has to offer, go here and follow Ratio Bot on his journey into hell.

See a ratioed tweet our bot didn’t pick up? Have a suggestion? Tweet it at us or email ratiobot69@gmail.com.