OldPersonFilter: Why would someone want to replicate @pauijiac3?

January 22, 2015 12:50 PM

Some kid (I presume, his userpic looks young) badgered me on Twitter to give him information on making Twitter bots. He said he wants to make something that replicates @pauijac3. I look at that Twitter account, and I have no idea what it is. I enjoy weird Twitter, but this seems far afield of gregnog territory. Can anyone explain why people like that account and why you'd want to make a bot like that?
posted by ignignokt to Society & Culture (6 answers total)

What, exactly, do you mean by "replicates"? Something that literally retweets anything that @pauIjac3 tweets? Something that randomly generates original tweets in a similar grammatical style (like a Markov generator)?

I Googled one of @pauIjac3's tweets ("bet you that the nascar cars be so hot inside when the weather is hot i can tell they be hot in the cars"), and found this comment on a Facebook post, which quotes it verbatim.

I Googled another one, and found this user profile which uses the exact same text.

I tried a few others, but mostly found references back to @pauIjac3's Twitter feed.

I'm baffled as well, but maybe the above clues are helpful? If it's a meme, it's a strange one.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:08 PM on January 22, 2015

Here's a page on Storify called "Pauljac tells a story", which seems to be composed of tweets from @pauljac3's Twitter feed (example).

Oddly, the Storify page is dated "a year ago", but that example tweet is only a couple of months old.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:12 PM on January 22, 2015

Can anyone explain why people like that account and why you'd want to make a bot like that?

For the same reason that Rick Astley or cats or a guy lipsyncing to a Rumanian pop song became A Things - that reason being "the Internet is just weird."

Seriously, this is one of those "forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" situations, I suspect.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:14 PM on January 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

...and @pauljac3 has 148,000 tweets. So, yeah—if there were any doubt that he's just a Markov bot, I think that settles it.

I think EmpressCallipygos is right.

I mean, why is the "over 9,000" meme considered funny? Or the "Darude—Sandstorm" meme? Why wouldn't the Internet shut up about bacon for, like, two years? They all seem completely arbitrary and unfunny to me.

Forget it, Jake. If I had to guess, I'd say that your young supplicant is (a) just young and easily amused (this kind of thing is much funnier when you haven't seen it a hundred times before), and (b) maybe harboring a smidge of unexamined racism (@pauIjac3 seems to build its Markov chains from a corpus of African-American vernacular—apparently that's supposed to be funny—and the photos and videos associated with the account are all weird images of black folks).

Just a guess, though.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:26 PM on January 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

Part of what makes this type of weird twitter funny is the simplistic grammar and shitty spelling.

Check out pr0spector88 for a similar account.
posted by stinkfoot at 2:01 PM on January 22, 2015

If the kid is offering to pay you, his money is as good as anyone's, take it and do it. Don't question the why. Every time I am asked to do something and question the why, I regret it.
posted by 724A at 3:13 PM on January 22, 2015 [1 favorite]