A bot that posts random comments from SoundCloud.
Currently posting several times a day to Mastodon. (It used to post to Twitter, but I don't use Twitter anymore and neither do my bots.)
🔊 💬 🤖 → @soundcloudsaid on Mastodon
As a lover of music, I spend a lot of time on SoundCloud, and can't help but notice the comments. SoundCloud comments have a certain character: a lot of concise and enthusiastic praise, a ton of spam, the occasional multi-sentence opinion on the production, and, rarely, a negative review.
This bot grabs a comment at random.
GitHub Actions is configured to run the bot.js script on a fixed
schedule throughout the day. That script does the following:
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Chooses a track at random from SoundCloud. Checks whether the track still exists and if it has any comments. If either is untrue, get another track at random. Retry until we get a track with comments.
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Check all comments using the criteria listed in the 'Filtering Comments' section below. If none are usable, go back to step one.
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Randomly select one of the comments that is usable and post it!
My aesthetic for this bot is simple, text-only, anonymous. So I filter the potential comments rigorously. I filter out the following:
- self-promotion (anything including the words
follow,check out,blog, and any of a half-dozen social networks) - classic spam (
free,dollars,cam,sex) - anything that looks like a URL
- replies and mentions (anything including the
@symbol) - anything pointing to another user or track on SoundCloud
I also filter out any comment including any of the bad words listed in Darius Kazemi's wordfilter.
Finally, I use the Google Translate API to make sure the comment is English. The automated check is imperfect for checking informal, comment-style language, but helps discard most non-English comments. The primary reason for this filter is preventing abusive language appearing in my bot in a language that I don't speak and thus cannot filter out.
At first I struggled with how to retrieve a random comment—the SoundCloud API
doesn't allow for getting random nodes. Then I discovered that track IDs (and
comment IDs) are sequential. I found an old comment ID at 100000000 a recent
one at 500000000, and figured that 400 million comments was more than enough
of a well from which to draw. The script picks a number at random, checks if
the comment still exists, and passes it on for filtering.
In early 2020, however, the /comments endpoint was removed from the SoundCloud
API without notice, so this bot stopped working. In 2023, I finally rewrote the
bot to use the process described above.
I could not have created this bot without help from the following people and resources:
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Justin Falcone provided code review.
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Twitter user @berlindisaster also had this idea in July of 2015. (This tweet and account have since been deleted.)
This is my third bot. (@obliquestions and @novelcompounds are the first two.)