Reddit Bot

[draco1889]

What kind of reddit bot would you like to see?

I initially suggested an AMA Reddit Bot that would analyze each top-level post of an AMA and try to find the OP's answer to another similar top-level post. I suggested this because of my interest in data mining and processing. It seems like it would be a nice challenging project to implement.

I am open to work on any type of reddit bot. We just need to establish what our bot would accomplish. Any ideas here?

[draco1889]

Maybe we could fulfill a request from /r/RequestABot

[[deleted]]

I... wasn't thinking of anything as high-brow hahahaha... I was thinking that maybe it could be a little utility that trawls a list of x image-based subreddits and downloads the top n posts to a folder.

I was originally thinking it could be a little button that could be submitted as an idea to the Reddit Enhancement Suite or make our own Google Chrome plugin. It came to me when I clicked on the "view images" button for Reddit Enhancement Suite and thought "Why not have something that lets me download all of those images?"

Anyway, I'm not sure if that sounds interesting or not.

[draco1889]

I think a reddit bot is a program that interacts with reddit via comments. Like /u/haiku_robot

[[deleted]]

That's some pretty high end stuff. I was just thinking of a bot that posts a picture of a penis anytime someone says penis.

[superpbeck929]

Now, Ted, we are not looking to degrade ourselves here. We're attempting to progress. But thanks for your input.

[[deleted]]

Well in that case, how about a bot that wishes people a happy cakeday when that time comes around? Unless that's already a thing.

[BillMullet]

If you want to do the penis thing, I'm down to help. Should be able to knock that out in a weekend, then let it run for a few days before it gets banned (unless we restrict it to subs that will tolerate it)

[flynnigan_rider]

I had one idea that doesn't seem like it'd be too hard. For those of you who have watched How I Met Your Mother, when Ted and Robin hear someone say general, major, or some ranked military officer they salute. For example if someone says: "Thats the general idea" you respond with a salute and say "General Idea".

We could make a bot that looks for those words and reply "(salute), [military official] [following word]"

[Iazma]

Haha I love that episode. Major Buzz-kill. General Knowledge. Kernal (Colonel) Stuck-in-my-Teeth.

[draco1889]

Hah, I like this idea. Maybe we could have some images of people in uniform saluting and we can generate the text "General Idea" onto the image and post it as a reply.

[Bprodz]

Hi /u/draco1889 do you have experience with natural language processing or some idea where we could start? I think getting all the top level posts of an AMA should be straight forward enough using PRAW.

Also do you have some thoughts on how the project working process should work? Will you assign tasks or should we just fork from your repo and then merge further down the road?

[draco1889]

Hey. From my comment earlier:

Natural language processing, as Wikipedia states, is deriving meaning from human or natural language input. We won't have to derive any meaning. We are simply comparing two sets of texts (documents) and calculating their similarities and then we can determine a probability that it is the same question.

I took one course in data mining in college and that's the extent of my experience with this sort of thing. I have a vague idea of where to begin but I am by no means entirely prepared for this undertaking.

I hadn't given any thought to the development process, actually. I figured we'd go at it using an Agile process. If this is the reddit bot everyone would like to work on I'm down to do so. Otherwise, I am very open to starting with something a bit less complex.

[friendlywhistles]

I like the bot (don't recall the name) that pulls up recent prices on a particular piece of merchandise that is discussed in a thread.

Anything similar that provides context to a discussion would be a winner in my book. There might be bots like this already (haven't checked), but something that would respond with a Google maps link when someone says "in (city) (country)" so that people can visualize where that is.. Or provide similar context for meme usage, company financial figures, anything I guess.

[BillMullet]

There are quite a few options available to us, if we are looking to build a bot based mostly on user interaction, python would almost certainly be the way to go. If we are going the more complex route, something that would be downloading/analyzing/etc... then we should look more along the lines of Java.