ShitpostBot 5000

Confirmed 118,194

Part of a series on Weird Facebook / Post-Ironic Facebook. [View Related Entries]

About

ShitpostBot 5000 is a Facebook and Twitter page that publishes randomly-generated images based on user-submitted source images and templates. While initially launched on Facebook in 2015, the project has since expanded after receiving coverage from numerous news sites.

History

In April 2015, ShitpostBot 5000 was initially launched by a 20-year-old Australian identified as the online handle Botmin,^[1] who was inspired to make the meme generator while learning about web development. After the initial creation of the Facebook page, ShitpostBot 5000 garnered over 20,000 likes in its first 72 hours through promotion on the now-defunct Weird Facebook page Orange Memes. In December 2015, the @ShitpostBot5000^[3] Twitter feed was created, which received upwards of 93,000 followers within two years. In December of 2016, the original Shitpostbot 5000 Facebook page was taken down due to violating Facebook's guidelines, leading to the creation of a second page for the bot's posts.^[2] Within five months, the page garnered more than 230,000 likes. On August 19th, a Patreon^[6] page for the bot was created, which accumulated upwards of 62 patrons providing $218 per month within nine months.

Features

Shitpostbot 5000 generates images by taking user-submitted and admin-reviewed templates and fills in the blank sections with source images randomly selected from its database. Every half hour, the bot posts a newly generated image to the ShitpostBot 5000 social media feeds. As of May 2017, the ShitpostBot 5000 official website stats claims there are over 5 quindecillion unique possible images from 9865 accepted source images and 2289 accepted templates.^[4]

Highlights

On July 6th, 2016, the internet news site Geek.com published an article titled "Shitpostbot 5000 proves internet memes will outlive humans." In August, several other news sites published articles about ShitpostBot, including The Daily Dot,^[9] The Next Web^[10] and Gizmodo.^[11] On September 6th, the /r/shitpostbot5000^[7] subreddit was launched.

Derivatives

[WIP]

Not a Bot / Sentience

Not a Bot is a phrase often used when the bot posts an image considered too accurate or too humanlike to be just randomly created, leading to in-jokes about the actual human admin in charge of the page posting these pictures.