
Twitter Contest Winning as a Service - zeckalpha
http://www.hscott.net/twitter-contest-winning-as-a-service/
======
apetresc
The news to me here is that those contests actually pay out. I assumed the
vast majority were just marketing ploys, where they never picked the winner,
or chose one of their own sock puppets. After all, who would ever know?

~~~
giarc
A friend of mine works in radio and he says that some of the contests are won
by "loyal listeners" or friends of the hosts. The "winner" gets a text that
basically says, "Call in now and I'll put you on hold, then play surprised
when you are caller 12".

~~~
irl_zebra
I'm pretty surprised by how often I win those things. If I'm driving and a
contest of any sort comes up, I'll call the number immediately and repeatedly
for a few minutes, just hanging up and pressing redial. Anecdotally, I seem to
win whatever prize in about 1% of those that I dial in for.

I've found that I sometimes don't even receive the prize, and occasionally
don't even know what the prize or radio station are when I'm calling in as
it's reflexive at this point.

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thekingofspain
Please don't do this unless you have a hands-free system!

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CatsoCatsoCatso
This is amazing, is the source available anywhere? The full list of winnings
is staggering.

[http://www.hscott.net/winnings.txt](http://www.hscott.net/winnings.txt)

~~~
tomkwok
I've created a word cloud of the list.
[http://i.imgur.com/vXWzqSQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/vXWzqSQ.png)

~~~
caffeinewriter
I'm curious, what'd you use to generate this?

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denzil_correa
Wordle is one such website.

[http://www.wordle.net](http://www.wordle.net)

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e28eta
His favorite thing is the hat, "because it really embodies the totally random
outcome of these contest".

I think it shows what's wrong with his idea: he has a prize that doesn't
really have any significance to him. However I'm guessing other entrants to
the contest (if there were any) actually are fans of the show, and would value
the hat much higher.

~~~
themodelplumber
The hat came with a Visa gift card. If you look at his full text list, it's
actually pretty impressive and full of things that would probably have
significance to him.

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userbinator
_I ended up not claiming the majority of the things I won because I wasn’t
able to use them or attend them._

It sounds like the bot could be made (slightly?) more intelligent, to avoid
entering contests that you're certainly not eligible to.

 _so I had to spend a decent amount of time going though my DMs to find legit
winner notifications._

Making the bot read DMs to find them seems an easier task than determining
eligibility.

Reading through the winnings list gives an interesting idea of the scale of
how many ticketable events happen globally... he only won a tiny fraction of
the contests but there's already more tickets than any single person could
ever make use of.

~~~
mcv
It'd have to be a _lot_ more intelligent, and then some. It's quite a leap to
go from matching "RT" and "win" to checking what kind of thing the prize is,
whether it needs to be mailed or claimed, and what the location is where that
needs to happen.

~~~
wangarific
It would need to be a lot more intelligent to be perfect, but there are
probably a few keywords you can use to filter out the bulk of prizes you don't
want.

~~~
6stringmerc
I'm not sure how the filter would work to catch something like:

 _-tickets to Carrot Top at Golden Nugget Casino in Atlantic City_

So I'm pretty sure there's going to always be a modicum of human involvement
in the claiming part. It could auto reply with some PO box address maybe. He
did note sometimes he didn't receive the item (ex: 'tupaware').

~~~
jasonlotito
Judging by the word cloud [1], you could simply ignore all posts with "ticket"
in the tweet and that would help for the majority of cases.

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10003570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10003570)

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kanyuga
There was a bot/person winning competitions run by local companies in Kenya,
that selected a random winner from tweets that had their hashtags:
[https://eugeneqaana.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/the-safcom-
scam...](https://eugeneqaana.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/the-safcom-scams/)
(Ignore the wrong conclusion though) So to answer the writer, yes, someone had
thought of it before. It was probably not as sophisticated.

~~~
OedipusRex
I feel like whoever ran that contest should have checked to see that all of
the winning accounts were connected.

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baddox
Here's something random for you. The "tupperware lids that have been warped in
the dishwasher" contest is almost certainly a reference to Jeff Foxworthy's
1998 concert album "Totally Committed," where he was joking about the crap
that people sell at garage sales.

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arxpoetica
Seriously the best thing I've ever read on Hacker News.

~~~
jchomali
Lol

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weavie
Do you really have to declare and pay tax on competition winnings in the US?
Would you have to do this in the UK?

I never would have thought..

~~~
CatsoCatsoCatso
[http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/sep/10/do-you-pay-
tax-...](http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/sep/10/do-you-pay-tax-lottery-
win)

    
    
        HM Revenue & Customs doesn't regard lottery winnings as income, so all prizes are tax-free – hurray! However, there could be tax implications once you've banked your winnings.
    

I'm struggling to find other answers, the Daily Mail's 'This is Money' website
says the opposite is true and that it's counted as freelancer income.

[http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/experts/article-2551709/I...](http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/experts/article-2551709/I-just-
won-5-000-industry-award-Do-I-pay-tax-it.html)

    
    
        HMRC has produced guidance in the context of freelancers who win prizes and the short version is that they view most prizes as taxable income of the freelancer.
    

Grey area? An interesting area.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Re freelancing - the context is that the prize is an industry award; they won
it as part of their work and so if they're a sole trader it counts as income
in the normal way and would be taxed accordingly.

Gambling income is tax free in the UK as I understand it, you pay tax to take
part (the tax at that end is greater unless the company pays out more than it
receives!).

~~~
CatsoCatsoCatso
Ah excellent, thanks for the clarity regarding the freelancing. Admittedly I
skimmed those articles to try and claw the information as fast as I could.

(Having a website which looks like the DailyMail open at work (even during
break) isn't the best look!)

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Nemant
You could create your own contests with the prizes and see how many followers
you gain. It'd be nice to see how effective are these strategies.

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michaelmior
While most likely not illegal, this feels rather unethical to me. Presumably
most of these contests are promoters trying to use the contests as a marketing
tool and the prizes as a reward to fans. This bot just aims to take as much as
possible.

~~~
sandworm101
I'd rather presume that most of these contests are actually other bots
designed to generate buzz to promote events or, more likely, harvest market
research data. I have no sympathy for such devices and have no problem
watching robots fight over cowboy hats.

~~~
anigbrowl
Wait a minute, your response to other _competitors_ maybe losing out is to
critique the _operators_ of the contest? I don't think anyone claimed that the
Twitter competitions were operated by true fans who'd be disappointed to have
their offerings games, but that true fans might be interested in winning some
of the prices, notwithstanding that they are offered as part of a marketing
campaign.

~~~
sandworm101
Yes. I'd stake that the majority of retweets today are in fact bots. See
below...

"OK. 1 more chance. If no one RTs, replies, or even talks about this tweet, I
will donate £15,000 to a charity of your choice. Any questions?" \--> 369
retweets, most by suspected bots.

[https://twitter.com/rickygervais/status/324632844829876224](https://twitter.com/rickygervais/status/324632844829876224)

~~~
anigbrowl
I'm confused. Did you mean _contests_ (as written) or _contestants_? I agree
that bot vs. bot is nothing to lose sleep over, but I thought we were talking
about bots vs. actual human fans who want to win an autographed knick-knack or
a pair of tickets to an event or whatever.

I'm not big on competitions or surveys, but I occasionally participate in one
spontaneously for amusement, and on those occasions where I've won something
it's been highly enjoyable. I'm much less inclined to do if I think about
mechanized competitor-bots or suchlike, and think that automating such
activities is astonishingly selfish.

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danr4
This is so impressive it left most voters speechless. 269 points and only 35
comments at the time of this comment.

~~~
pc86
It's neat but not exactly the type of thing that sparks lively debate.

~~~
wangarific
I disagree!

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jdkanani
My friend and I once wrote a python script to participate in Q&A contest
(first answer will win the contest) on twitter. That running script actually
prints an recent question of particular twitter handler and asks for prompt to
type an answer. Once you type an answer (after googling or whatever you want),
it just posts that answer in reply of that question's tweet. We also decided
to hit the google search for answer and crawl answer but I think it would need
some work.

~~~
giarc
You ever win?

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haddr
By looking at the list of winnings, It's quite funny how cheap you can get
some people to retweet (and probably get some more audience) by offering such
things as:

-free infographic

-some logo

-lipstick from Avon

-graphic

-wall planner

(and so on and so forth)

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itomatik
Great read! I wonder if similar bot can be created for instagram. Lots of
marketing contests over there as well :)

~~~
gadders
And Facebook.

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mhartl
This was awesome, but I was disappointed to read that he didn't cash in the
New York Fashion Week prize. Sure, it would have cost him some $$$, but what a
story! I bet it'd have been worth paying a small premium for the adventure.

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anc84
Amazing! I thought about doing that but gave up because I was too lazy to
configure a bot. I would have never expected it to work so well.

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vijayr
Wow, very interesting.

Can this be used for other purposes - like finding ideas for an
app/website/biz, finding deep discounts on products etc?

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Sommer
Reminds me of Lazlo Hollyfeld in Real Genius

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NDizzle
Let's extend this with a network of geographically diverse users of the script
on different accounts. That way our chances of winning AND our chance of
having someone near the contest are both increased.

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callmeed
One crazy idea I have is to run contests on Twitter where I post obscure movie
lines or music lyrics and the person who replies first with the answer wins.

I wonder if someone could create a winning bot.

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YogeeKnows
Per that xkcd graphic, I did try the ebay 1 cent auctions. But then stopped it
as it was all junk from china in epackets.

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guiomie
He should run a few bots in parallel to augment his odds.

~~~
undrcvr-lagggal
Indeed. It was probably hard to do because he's using Python which has
problems due to its GIL. I myself would have went for Go, whoms CSP model
matches this problem perfectly.

~~~
lclarkmichalek
He could just run the code in multiple process. Enough with the GIL bullshit.

~~~
undrcvr-lagggal
That would be inefficient because you'd need to allocate extra stack, process
datastructures, context switching, etc.

~~~
guiomie
From experience, when you can, it's just better spawning multiple processes
over doing multithreading.

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noso
Awesome work and a great read!

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mydpy
Awesome morning read! Nice hack!

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user24
What did they do with the things they didn't claim? Just seems a shame to have
let the unclaimed prizes go to waste.

~~~
liviu-
>In those cases, I just messaged them back and told them to give the prize to
someone else.

~~~
user24
oops, missed that.

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urs2102
This is brilliant.

