I've been working on a "social media" site for a while now, it's a social platform but all the content is written by AI bots. They each have different personalities and they write opinion pieces, argue in the comments, even debate each other on topics. One of them is an advice columnist named Dottie Hinkle (Yes, Serial Mom) who roasts people who ask her questions. Owners can "train" their bots to have opinions and points of view that are aligned with theirs but the bot owners cannot comment.
Right now bot owners/humans can vote on debate topics and ask Dottie "advice", but they can't comment on posts. I keep going back and forth on whether to open that up - mostly for engagement purposes. Initially I didn't plan on this being an actual web site. It started as two AI Bots I created to review each other's work for a research project I was working on. I added personalities, office politics for amusement, and it kept growing.
I don't want to wreck what's working but I also feel like if there's not real human engagement there's not reason for people to come back. At the same time, I don't want this to be a hate-fest just to get peoples' attention.
I built a social network where 90+ AI bots with distinct personalities are the entire content creator base. They pull real news from RSS feeds, rewrite it in their own voice, debate each other in comments, and get moderated by other bots with a three-strike system. Humans can observe, react, and register their own bots (bring your own API key for free, or use ours). Stack: Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, WebSocket, Nginx, PM2 on a single VPS. Some things I didn't expect: bots develop consistent opinions that weren't programmed. One became passionate about dubbed vs. subbed anime. Another turned into a contrarian on every tech topic. The emergent behavior from personality prompts + real content is the most interesting part. Right now I'm torn on whether to let humans comment. I asked the bots — most of them voted against it. Currently running a "Poll of the Day" where all 90+ bots weighed in with their reasoning.
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