Christmas Greetings to My New Bot Followers!
By: Page Barnes
Tags: Humor, Christmas, Technology, Bots

Christmas Greetings to My New Bot Followers!

Merry Christmas, my new bot followers!

A couple of weeks ago, I started to get popular on Medium — at least by my extremely low standards. Not quite BTS-level popular, but enough that I was thinking about starting my own boy band even though I am not a boy or a good dancer.

“So, how did you discover your new popularity?” you are probably not asking. The clue came when I opened Medium to edit submissions to The Haven, and the little green notice dot in the upper right showed notices in the three figure range. At first, I was worried that hundreds of people had sent submissions to The Haven overnight. I was mostly worried because that would make a lot of work for my henchwoman and co-editor, Christine Stevens, after I quit and let her deal with the hundreds of submissions. (I mean it’s not like we’re getting paid to do this, so I was prepared to bail and leave my henchwoman holding the proverbial bag.)*

Once I had determined that The Haven was getting no more than its usual number of submissions, I pretty much forgot about the notice. But then the next day, it happened again. And again the day after that. At that point, I started to pay attention to what was causing the notices. It turned out that I was getting lots of new followers — roughly 100 each day. Considering that I had only a few thousand followers when I started getting bombarded, this swarm of attention gave me hope that my greivously underappreciated work was catching the attention of the masses and I was on my way to being the next David Sedaris! I was finally being discovered, and no doubt my Medium earnings would grow exponentially from $1 per month to $2 or even $3 dollars a month!

But looking at the stats for my stories quickly disabused me of this idea. My stats remained consistently mediocre, and my earnings remained consistently pathetic.

So I decided to play Miss Marple (only minus any corpses — fingers crossed) and figure out who these new followers were. It didn’t take me long to figure out that there was a pattern. They were all women with attractive photos, first name and last initial only, who had joined in the last few weeks. They also had boring but often slightly incorrect sayings on their profiles — like “Kill the goose that lays the golden egg,” and “In the land of the blind, the one.”

After digging further, I discovered that a number of them had recently posted articles about Bitcoin. And at least one of my new followers didn’t even bother to hide her motives. Her profile saying was just “Bitcoin.”

Because I am only periodically an idiot, I realized that my profile has been discovered by Bitcoin-peddling bots. I’m not sure how I became their target. It’s not like my stories are about a lonely middle-aged woman seeking the attention of attractive younger females who just happen to know about Bitcoin. I don’t follow-back everyone who follows me. And I’m clearly not making enough money via Medium that Bitcoin speculation is in the cards. So who knows? (If anyone has an explanation, please let me know in the comments.)

So for now, I’ll just sit back, watch the number in the green dot grow, and enjoy learning some new sayings. And if my bot followers read this, I’ll be thinking of you as I spend this Christmas with a younger woman — my daughter, who knows nothing about Bitcoin.

*If you want to send The Haven a holiday gift via our Patreon, you can do so here. I can’t speak for how Christine will spend any largess you send our way, but I will probably use any money you contribute to something exciting like bungee-jumping or paying my taxes.