
How I Eat for Free in NYC Using Python, Automation, AI, and Instagram - dlgeek
https://medium.com/@chrisbuetti/how-i-eat-for-free-in-nyc-using-python-automation-artificial-intelligence-and-instagram-a5ed8a1e2a10
======
umvi
I hate these kinds of articles. If you are willing to do morally gray things,
there are all sorts of "life hacks" you can use to take advantage of people
and companies.

It's like writing an article about "How I hacked the system to never pay for
honey" and then when you read the article, it's like:

"Once a month I buy a sandwich at Chick-Fil-A and then take every single honey
condiment packet and stick it in my backpack!"

Like... that's not a life hack, that's just taking advantage of someone's
goodwill for personal gain.

~~~
ChicagoBoy11
Wait but what about what he is doing is unethical? Isn't he promising
restaurants a promotion on the instagram page in exchange for a free meal? And
aren't the restaurants getting promoted on the page and giving him a free
meal? What's morally grey about it?

~~~
josephorjoe
He is promoting a business to his followers as a place they should patronize
without any actual belief that they should patronize it (other than his belief
that businesses that pay him should be patronized).

He is behaving honestly with the restaurants but not with his followers.
Unless he is actually posting things like:

"Hey, I've never been to Moe's Tavern but they said I could have a free burger
if I posted this picture, so here it is. Go check it out! You should totally
spend money there. Moe's is awesome!! (at least, they were awesome enough to
offer me a burger to type this!!11!!!)"

~~~
SergeAx
That's what all so called "influencers" do: selling their followers to a
highest bidder. Actually, that's what every advertisement business do.

I wish this craze go wider and wider, so people finally stop believing what
they are told from billboards, TV screens and social media apps.

I don't think that agency selling places on bus stops has actually tries any
of the promoted products.

~~~
thwythwy
Influencers are regulated by the FTC and have to disclose that they're
compensated for the review: [https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/foia/frequently-
requested-reco...](https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/foia/frequently-requested-
records/instagram-influencers)

So ethical or not, it's illegal to not disclose.

------
scott_s
I think he buries the lede that step number one in this endeavor is to
entirely unethical. Yes, it turns out that if you take content from others
without asking to build a social media following, and then promise to post
positive reviews of restaurants to those followers, you can get free meals.

~~~
dallashoxton
Really have to love how the HN hivemind can simultaneously defend wholesale
intellectual property theft (genlib, piratebay, et al) and claim that
copyright law is too strict while getting morally bent out of shape over
someone aggregating and curating otherwise low-value instagram posts in order
to eat takeout for free.

The lack of moral consistency is astounding.

~~~
th0ma5
No, digital information is not the same as a tangible object, so everything,
including the morals, is different.

~~~
dallashoxton
Many people are taking issue with him quote-unquote "stealing" other people's
content when he's ostensibly just resharing single images that fit in a
broader theme of being vaguely NYC-related. This seems much more defensible as
fair use as opposed to rehosting/pirating somebody's entire textbook or TV
show.

------
minimaxir
See also this interview with the author, which deconstructs the _ethics_
behind such tactics (with comment from Instagram saying it's blatantly against
the ToS):
[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/automat...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/automated-
instagram-influencer-bot-free-meals)

As a data scientist myself (who in disclosure helped fact check a few things
for that article), I was surprised he admitting to such hacks in a _job
portfolio piece_ as data ethics is a very hot issue lately.

~~~
floatingatoll
His actions make sense from a game theory perspective. Data ethics is a very
hot issue to ethical employers. Unethical employers would be a better fit for
him, but do not advertise themselves as unethical. By advertising himself as
unethical, he not only filters out ethical employers but offers unethical
employers a risk-free way to woo him.

------
sombremesa
This seems like a lot of work, and personally, I don't see it as being much
more than begging. Sure, it's begging successfully, but it's still begging.
Worse, it could be considered a form of fraud. You have no intention of
providing real value to your "advertisers".

Maybe I have different values, not having grown up in the US of A, but I don't
think I could ever pull off such a disingenuous enterprise.

Edit: OP literally admits to stealing content. I could see something similar
to this being more legitimate, but this is not it. (For the record the insta
is @beautiful.[redacted] and almost all of the followers are bots)

~~~
golergka
How is advertising them to tens of thousands of real followers not valuable?

~~~
MattLeBlanc001
Do we know they are "real" followers?

------
dlgeek
> In today’s digital age, a large Instagram audience is considered a valuable
> currency. I had also heard through the grapevine that I could monetize a
> large following — or in my desired case — use it to have my meals paid for.
> So I did just that.

> I created an Instagram page that showcased pictures of New York City’s
> skylines, iconic spots, elegant skyscrapers — you name it. The page has
> amassed a following of over 25,000 users in the NYC area and it’s still
> rapidly growing.

> I reach out restaurants in the area either via Instagram’s direct messaging
> or email and offer to post a positive review in return for a free entree or
> at least a discount. Almost every restaurant I’ve messaged came back at me
> with a compensated meal or a gift card. Most places have an allocated
> marketing budget for these types of things so they were happy to offer me a
> free dining experience in exchange for a promotion. I’ve ended up giving
> some of these meals away to my friends and family because at times I had too
> many queued up to use myself.

> The beauty of this all is that I automated the whole thing. And I mean 100%
> of it. I wrote code that finds these pictures or videos, makes a caption,
> adds hashtags, credits where the picture or video comes from, weeds out bad
> or spammy posts, posts them, follows and unfollows users, likes pictures,
> monitors my inbox, and most importantly — both direct messages and emails
> restaurants about a potential promotion. Since its inception, I haven’t even
> really logged into the account. I spend zero time on it. It’s essentially a
> robot that operates like a human, but the average viewer can’t tell the
> difference. And as the programmer, I get to sit back and admire its (and my)
> work.

~~~
theNJR
That's pretty cool, but has all sorts of Instagram TOS violations. If it gets
too big it will get shut down.

From
[https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870](https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870)

"You can't attempt to create accounts or access or collect information in
unauthorized ways. This includes creating accounts or collecting information
in an automated way without our express permission."

~~~
baddox
How is that a violation? I don’t think the author created the account in an
automated way, and the “collection information” clauses are so vague I have no
idea what they actually mean.

~~~
zrobotics
He literally built a scraper to directly take content from other Instagram
pages, and a ML classifier to select what to post. The account is 100%
automatically run, he states that he has not logged in since creating the
account. I fail to see any way that that isn't a TOS violation.

------
BadassFractal
Also buried in the article is that likely most of his growth came from doing
the follow/unfollow gimmick that people have been doing on Instagram for
years. You can pay online services to bot that for your account for $x a
month.

It's frustrating on the receiving end, you think someone is following you
because of genuine interest for what you have to share, but in reality it's a
bot that's trying to scam you into following it back, only to unfollow you
soon after. One of the worst aspects of the application, especially now that
millions of accounts are all doing that at the same time. The signal to noise
ratio is horrible.

~~~
pnathan
Yeah, that's super annoying. As someone with an insta, _and_ as someone who
kinda would like to be able to figure out how to get some visibility-
surfacing my own content seems to be obscure.

~~~
odnes
What is the value in unfollowing people? Do accounts that follow a lot of
people have less authority?

~~~
dlgeek
From the article, under "Unfollowing": "You have to unfollow the people you
follow for two reasons. The first is that you cannot be following over 7,500
people at any time. The second is because — although artificial — you want to
have your follower/following ratio as high as possible as it is a sign of a
more desirable account."

------
robbyt
Call me skeptical, but I don't believe he automated this to the degree
described in the article.

There's no code, some of the technical writing is a bit weird and non-
idomatic, and according to the author's GitHub he was just doing very basic
boot camp projects 6 months ago.

I'd chalk this up as "boring sci-fi"

------
chrisallick
If you really don’t care about right and wrong, you should have just bought
followers on eBay and posted 1 photo for 30 days and paid for the likes. You’d
be done with 1/10th the work and compared to even a low hourly rate, you’d
save money.

~~~
darkwizard42
I think this brushes against the reason most people do things... you probably
could buy your way into a shortcut, but for some people the utility of the
time here AND knowing it worked was higher than just paying for the shortcuts
known to everyone.

------
gvand
Slightly related since this one is a bit borderline, there should be a
community/slack for people experimenting with automation/ml-driven passive
income projects. I think it's time.

~~~
asdfzalsd
Would be interested!

Shoot me link if you get one started. :)

~~~
cc-d
Same here :)

------
dawhizkid
Actually, this is a pretty incredible starting point to starting an
"Influencer as a Service" biz. I've seen one (selfmade.co), which basically an
agency that will help manage your Instagram for you, but if you can create
tools to help anyone maximize their followers (with AI-suggested captions,
tags, who to follow, photo ratings or improvement tips, etc.) I could see that
(sadly) being something a lot of people would pay a subscription for.

------
mrspeaker
I've always wanted to do something like this as an experiment - automate
everything, including the setup (creating accounts/any hosting) then tie it to
a genetic algorithm whose fitness is determine by the amount of money/ad
revenue it generates. And I have no control over it at all once it's released,
it just reproduces on its own.

My main issue I have with the author's post is not that it's dodgy (it's
resourceful and nerdy and the first I've seen of it so it gets a free pass
from me!), is that it's really hard to find something that's actually healthy
when eating out... unlimited takeout around Hell's Kitchen sounds like a
recipe for a heart attack!

~~~
spyder
Ah, an uncontrollable AI spam bot, nice...

------
zemo
> I wrote code that finds these pictures or videos

ah, so you don't even make the content, you just wrote a content-reposting bot
and then set it to automatically catfish restaurants. Behavior like this is
why more and more people hate the tech industry every day.

------
scottndecker
Last I checked, it was a significant pain in the butt to get an API key from
Instagram, specifically because they didn't want you doing this sort of thing.
Anyone know how he got access to the Instagram API? I've played around with
similar methods but ended up using selenium because of the API restrictions of
IG

~~~
grawprog
[https://www.instagram.com/developer/](https://www.instagram.com/developer/)

It looks like it won't matter soon.

>These capabilities will be disabled immediately (previously set for July 31,
2018 or December 11, 2018 deprecation). The following will be deprecated
according to the timeline we shared previously:

>Public Content - all remaining capabilities to read public media on a user's
behalf on December 11, 2018

>Basic - to read a user’s own profile info and media in early 2020

~~~
minimaxir
It's past December 11th 2018, so some workaround/hack is being used for this
workflow.

~~~
grawprog
Yeah I know...I was refering to the 2020 one. In less than a year you won't be
able to read your own profile's media or info. It's going to make lots of
things difficult I imagine.

------
ufmace
This thing doesn't seem to be getting much love on here, but I don't have any
problem with it - assuming of course that he's actually posting those business
pics he said he'd post. Everyone involved is getting something out of it -
original photo posters are getting more attention to their work, businesses
are getting more exposure and business for what's a trivial cost to them,
passive consumers are getting nice pictures and information on things to try.

What it means to society that this is a viable and mildly profitable thing to
do is a more interesting question.

------
paulcole
> However, if you credit where the content comes from it’s usually not a
> problem.

This is easiest to say when you're the one stealing content as opposed to the
one being stolen from.

~~~
AtlasLion
I also wonder if he is resharing only Instagram posts or also scraping other
sources for images. As a photographer I'd issue a dmca takedown against
someone downloading my photo to share it again in theirs. Credit or not! If he
asks first it's something else.

~~~
GreenJelloShot
He says specifically in the article that he is only resharing Instagram
pictures.

~~~
purple_ducks
> resharing Instagram pictures

He uses that fluffy language but "resharing" is not an Instagram feature. He
wholesale steals images.

~~~
siegecraft
That's true, but this is actually normal behavior in the instagram world since
it doesn't have the concept of share/retweet. So you screenshot or use some
app (ie regram) that re-posts someone's content and credits the original user.

------
sonaltr
For those asking about API keys - While it makes life easy to have API keys,
it's quite easy to just use something like Puppeteer[0] to control it via a
Lambda etc.

[0]
[https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer)

------
juandazapata
"I violated Instagram TOS and I'm telling everybody how I did it in detail, so
they can just shut down my account".

[https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870](https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870)

------
throwaway5752
What a shame that someone with some talent is doing something so sketchy and
selfish with it.

------
rland
I wonder how much money he saves by eating for free. I guess you could check
his page, see how many restaurants he's "endorsed," and multiply by 15 bucks.
I can't imagine it's more than $1000 total.

This would be a great personal advertisement to show off his skills to
employers if not for all of the ethically murky rule breaking. I'm sure he
could bring this up in an interview to score some points.

In other words, the amount of potential upside is far higher if he just _doesn
't_ take the next step of breaking the rules and getting the discount.
Instead, just focus on building the account. After all, that's the impressive
data-sciency part of this.

------
chubot
Why did he redact the name of the account in red? He doesn't want people to
know that it's fully automated?

I think he could have gotten some additional followers with this post.

I would like to see if the content is any good, in addition to being automated
...

~~~
minimaxir
Here is the account:
[https://www.instagram.com/beautiful.newyorkcity/](https://www.instagram.com/beautiful.newyorkcity/)

EDIT: Just banned about an hour after I linked to it in this comment.

~~~
chubot
Thanks for the link. Looking at the pictures, I probably wouldn't follow it,
and I spent last summer in NYC.

The algorithm seems to have a preference for HDR pictures of cityscapes? And
then the captions are all very generic / spammy sounding.

It doesn't seem interesting. I don't have anything against following
algorithmic content, but it should at least tell me something cool about the
picture that I didn't know, etc.

~~~
baddox
I’m not interested either, but I’m not at all surprised that there are at
least 30,000 people who are interested in faux-HDR photos of NYC.

~~~
timgilbert
You're assuming that all 30,000 followers are actual people rather than more
bots or spam accounts.

------
kyleblarson
I've noticed lots of follow requests from these spammy / scammy sorts of
accounts over the last 8-10 months on IG. I finally deleted my account last
month and haven't looked back.

------
peg_leg
Sounds like a social marketing job and he's underpaid.

------
geater10
I actually personally worked with this kid.

Doubt any of this was malicious. I know he did promotions on that account for
some restaurants that said they couldn't afford to give away free food.

Incredibly smart and generous. I think he's only about 22 years old, which is
mind-boggling he was able to create such a system.

I do understand your concerns about the original posters, though.

~~~
bluesnowmonkey
Are you him?

------
entangledqubit
Odd. I don't see code for tracking the potential tax liability of all those
"free" meals.

~~~
geater10
Just because you didn't see it - didn't mean he didn't do it.

------
g-b-r
This guy ought to watch more South Park
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_Not_Yelping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_Not_Yelping))

------
gricardo99
>I will not be providing code or anything like that

Ok, still might be an interesting read from a technical standpoint...

Later on:

>Using some opensource software, I set up a scraper to go through and download
media

Seriously? Couldn’t even say which open source software?

