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How I Eat for Free in NYC Using Python, Automation, AI, and Instagram
- scottndecker 8y agoLast I checked, it was a significant pain in the butt to get an API key from Instagram, specifically because they didn't want you doing this sort of thing. Anyone know how he got access to the Instagram API? I've played around with similar methods but ended up using selenium because of the API restrictions of IG
- jerednel 8y agohttps://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API-python https://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API-python
- grawprog 8y agohttps://www.instagram.com/developer/ https://www.instagram.com/developer/ It looks like it won't matter soon. >These capabilities will be disabled immediately (previously set for July 31, 2018 or December 11, 2018 deprecation). The following will be deprecated according to the timeline we shared previously: >Public Content - all remaining capabilities to read public media on a user's behalf on December 11, 2018 >Basic - to read a user’s own profile info and media in early 2020
- ceejayoz 8y agoIt's fairly trivial to get the credentials out of the Instagram app and use the private API the official app uses. As long as you're not being dumb about it like sending a cURL user agent or something, it's fairly hard for Instagram to prevent.
- rezz 8y agoNone of this requires an API. You can scrape the web version of IG and obtain everything OP claims.
- dlgeek 8y ago> In today’s digital age, a large Instagram audience is considered a valuable currency. I had also heard through the grapevine that I could monetize a large following — or in my desired case — use it to have my meals paid for. So I did just that. > I created an Instagram page that showcased pictures of New York City’s skylines, iconic spots, elegant skyscrapers — you name it. The page has amassed a following of over 25,000 users in the NYC area and it’s still rapidly growing. > I reach out restaurants in the area either via Instagram’s direct messaging or email and offer to post a positive review in return for a free entree or at least a discount. Almost every restaurant I’ve messaged came back at me with a compensated meal or a gift card. Most places have an allocated marketing budget for these types of things so they were happy to offer me a free dining experience in exchange for a promotion. I’ve ended up giving some of these meals away to my friends and family because at times I had too many queued up to use myself. > The beauty of this all is that I automated the whole thing. And I mean 100% of it. I wrote code that finds these pictures or videos, makes a caption, adds hashtags, credits where the picture or video comes from, weeds out bad or spammy posts, posts them, follows and unfollows users, likes pictures, monitors my inbox, and most importantly — both direct messages and emails restaurants about a potential promotion. Since its inception, I haven’t even really logged into the account. I spend zero time on it. It’s essentially a robot that operates like a human, but the average viewer can’t tell the difference. And as the programmer, I get to sit back and admire its (and my) work.
- theNJR 8y agoThat's pretty cool, but has all sorts of Instagram TOS violations. If it gets too big it will get shut down. From https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870 https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870 "You can't attempt to create accounts or access or collect information in unauthorized ways. This includes creating accounts or collecting information in an automated way without our express permission."
- baddox 8y agoHow is that a violation? I don’t think the author created the account in an automated way, and the “collection information” clauses are so vague I have no idea what they actually mean.
- sombremesa 8y agoThis seems like a lot of work, and personally, I don't see it as being much more than begging. Sure, it's begging successfully, but it's still begging. Worse, it could be considered a form of fraud. You have no intention of providing real value to your "advertisers". Maybe I have different values, not having grown up in the US of A, but I don't think I could ever pull off such a disingenuous enterprise. Edit: OP literally admits to stealing content. I could see something similar to this being more legitimate, but this is not it. (For the record the insta is @beautiful.[redacted] and almost all of the followers are bots)
- golergka 8y agoHow is advertising them to tens of thousands of real followers not valuable?
- MattLeBlanc001 8y agoDo we know they are "real" followers?
- rootusrootus 8y ago> Maybe I have different values, not having grown up in the US of A This gets really, really tiresome after a while.
- emilfihlman 8y agoThe value proposition is very clear and not fraudulent or are you saying that stuff build by robots is fraud? Here's what is being exchanged: Hi, I have lots of followers (to my knowledge they are not bots themselves) that I can present advertisements to. Many of them are either interested in NYC or located here. Would you like to Ie: let's exchange visibility (for this target group) for perks. This is the basis of advertising, just that perks is money. It's not the person asking for money who might be an idiot, it's the person paying if the value provided does not match. And frankly exchanging visibility for perks instead of money is extremely cheap for restaurants. If the value does not match what the restaurant was after, they can not accept such proposals anymore. There's risk in being in business, you just have to accept that.
- minimaxir 8y agoSee also this interview with the author, which deconstructs the ethics behind such tactics (with comment from Instagram saying it's blatantly against the ToS): https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/automated-instagram-influencer-bot-free-meals https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/automat... As a data scientist myself (who in disclosure helped fact check a few things for that article), I was surprised he admitting to such hacks in a job portfolio piece as data ethics is a very hot issue lately.
- floatingatoll 8y agoHis actions make sense from a game theory perspective. Data ethics is a very hot issue to ethical employers. Unethical employers would be a better fit for him, but do not advertise themselves as unethical. By advertising himself as unethical, he not only filters out ethical employers but offers unethical employers a risk-free way to woo him.
- fattire 8y agoSuggested title: "How I use AI to Target Spam To NY Restaurants"
- chiefalchemist 8y agoWell, one persons trash is anothers treasure. While most places probably want ethical, fact is, some do not. Perhaps it's a subtle but effective way of saying he'd work for the darkside?
- paulcole 8y ago> However, if you credit where the content comes from it’s usually not a problem. This is easiest to say when you're the one stealing content as opposed to the one being stolen from.
- AtlasLion 8y agoI also wonder if he is resharing only Instagram posts or also scraping other sources for images. As a photographer I'd issue a dmca takedown against someone downloading my photo to share it again in theirs. Credit or not! If he asks first it's something else.
- silvester23 8y agoNo need to wonder, just read the article. Spoiler: He only uses instagram.
- GreenJelloShot 8y agoHe says specifically in the article that he is only resharing Instagram pictures.
- purple_ducks 8y ago> resharing Instagram pictures He uses that fluffy language but "resharing" is not an Instagram feature. He wholesale steals images.
- siegecraft 8y agoThat's true, but this is actually normal behavior in the instagram world since it doesn't have the concept of share/retweet. So you screenshot or use some app (ie regram) that re-posts someone's content and credits the original user.
- ryanlol 8y agoInstagram is full of multi-million follower accounts doing this, it's very much an accepted practice on the platform. If FB wanted to disincentivize this they would, but they haven't. Look at @lmao or any other "meme account".
- chubot 8y agoWhy did he redact the name of the account in red? He doesn't want people to know that it's fully automated? I think he could have gotten some additional followers with this post. I would like to see if the content is any good, in addition to being automated ...
- minimaxir 8y agoHere is the account: https://www.instagram.com/beautiful.newyorkcity/ https://www.instagram.com/beautiful.newyorkcity/ EDIT: Just banned about an hour after I linked to it in this comment.
- chubot 8y agoThanks for the link. Looking at the pictures, I probably wouldn't follow it, and I spent last summer in NYC. The algorithm seems to have a preference for HDR pictures of cityscapes? And then the captions are all very generic / spammy sounding. It doesn't seem interesting. I don't have anything against following algorithmic content, but it should at least tell me something cool about the picture that I didn't know, etc.
- baddox 8y agoI’m not interested either, but I’m not at all surprised that there are at least 30,000 people who are interested in faux-HDR photos of NYC.
- timgilbert 8y agoYou're assuming that all 30,000 followers are actual people rather than more bots or spam accounts.
- ryanlol 8y agoWow. Already banned. Everyone does this, but IG never cares unless you somehow draw attention to yourself.
- dawhizkid 8y agoActually, this is a pretty incredible starting point to starting an "Influencer as a Service" biz. I've seen one (selfmade.co), which basically an agency that will help manage your Instagram for you, but if you can create tools to help anyone maximize their followers (with AI-suggested captions, tags, who to follow, photo ratings or improvement tips, etc.) I could see that (sadly) being something a lot of people would pay a subscription for.
- sonaltr 8y agoFor those asking about API keys - While it makes life easy to have API keys, it's quite easy to just use something like Puppeteer[0] to control it via a Lambda etc. [0] https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer
- mrspeaker 8y agoI've always wanted to do something like this as an experiment - automate everything, including the setup (creating accounts/any hosting) then tie it to a genetic algorithm whose fitness is determine by the amount of money/ad revenue it generates. And I have no control over it at all once it's released, it just reproduces on its own. My main issue I have with the author's post is not that it's dodgy (it's resourceful and nerdy and the first I've seen of it so it gets a free pass from me!), is that it's really hard to find something that's actually healthy when eating out... unlimited takeout around Hell's Kitchen sounds like a recipe for a heart attack!
- spyder 8y agoAh, an uncontrollable AI spam bot, nice...
- gvand 8y agoSlightly related since this one is a bit borderline, there should be a community/slack for people experimenting with automation/ml-driven passive income projects. I think it's time.
- asdfzalsd 8y agoWould be interested! Shoot me link if you get one started. :)
- cc-d 8y agoSame here :)
- spsphulse 8y agoSame here. Count me in too. Happy to lead/help this initiative. And tbh I don't think it needs to be projects that make $money. Any automation/ML based projects that make life easy for the coder should qualify. Eg: A simple Python script I wrote as hobbist helped me build a meme page with 17K fb followers when I was in school. I had no intentions of monetizing it. Just harmless fun.
- scott_s 8y agoI think he buries the lede that step number one in this endeavor is to entirely unethical. Yes, it turns out that if you take content from others without asking to build a social media following, and then promise to post positive reviews of restaurants to those followers, you can get free meals.
- pastor_elm 8y agoif you care about your content, you should watermark it.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoI don't like the idea either. But I think I can also argue in this case that ethics are contextual. That is, in the culture of social media, likes, follows and shares are currency. What looks unethical from the outside is actually a slick automated version of what's going on on the inside. If it were that taboo - again within __that__ world - there would be repeated spam complaints and blocks. The irony is, these "stolen" shares increase the value of the brand, not devalue it.
- baddox 8y agoThe author addresses that directly: > Now, none of the content my account posts is owned by me. This is a contested topic — some people seem to think this can lead to some issues. However, if you credit where the content comes from it’s usually not a problem. I’ve never had any issues re-sharing content. In fact, I’ve only had people thank me for sharing their photos. Worst case, someone reports your post and it gets taken down by Instagram. As long as you give credit where credit is due, you should be good. I’m not a social media lawyer or “ethicist,” so I don’t know how accurate the claim is. For all I know it may be legal as far as copyright law is concerned.
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- scott_s 8y agoI read that paragraph, which is why I felt he buried the ledge. I think that using someone else's work for your own gain without permission is unethical. It also doesn't address writing fake restaurant reviews.
- chrisallick 8y agoIf you really don’t care about right and wrong, you should have just bought followers on eBay and posted 1 photo for 30 days and paid for the likes. You’d be done with 1/10th the work and compared to even a low hourly rate, you’d save money.
- baddox 8y agoThat seems much easier to argue that it’s unethical. At least in this post, the followers (and thus the benefit to the restaurant in exchange for a free meal) are supposedly real.
- darkwizard42 8y agoI think this brushes against the reason most people do things... you probably could buy your way into a shortcut, but for some people the utility of the time here AND knowing it worked was higher than just paying for the shortcuts known to everyone.
- umvi 8y agoI hate these kinds of articles. If you are willing to do morally gray things, there are all sorts of "life hacks" you can use to take advantage of people and companies. It's like writing an article about "How I hacked the system to never pay for honey" and then when you read the article, it's like: "Once a month I buy a sandwich at Chick-Fil-A and then take every single honey condiment packet and stick it in my backpack!" Like... that's not a life hack, that's just taking advantage of someone's goodwill for personal gain.
- ChicagoBoy11 8y agoWait but what about what he is doing is unethical? Isn't he promising restaurants a promotion on the instagram page in exchange for a free meal? And aren't the restaurants getting promoted on the page and giving him a free meal? What's morally grey about it?
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- WilliamEdward 8y agoUhh, he's taking other people's photos for his own gain. He even thinks crediting them makes it okay, when in fact it works against him by showing that he knows he is stealing. Forget about all the other morally grey things about this, this is blatant copyright infringement. There truly is no such thing as a free lunch, the content is where 100% of the work and money is, and its completely stolen. I re-read his article to see if he took steps to work around this. My god, he even seems proud that he directly scrapes from other people's instagram. I would go as far as to report this guy.
- unexpected 8y agoI mean, I agree with you philosophically, but he's not stealing their photos - he's re-sharing other people's photos and giving credit back to their pages. This is common Instagram practice - it's essentially a "re-tweet". If he were copying and pasting the images, that's one thing, but what he's doing has no losers - it amplifies the original user and falls within acceptable instagram practices. That doesn't mean that I don't feel slimy about the whole thing.
- entangledqubit 8y agoOdd. I don't see code for tracking the potential tax liability of all those "free" meals.
- geater10 8y agoJust because you didn't see it - didn't mean he didn't do it.
- peg_leg 8y agoSounds like a social marketing job and he's underpaid.
- kyleblarson 8y agoI've noticed lots of follow requests from these spammy / scammy sorts of accounts over the last 8-10 months on IG. I finally deleted my account last month and haven't looked back.
- BadassFractal 8y agoAlso buried in the article is that likely most of his growth came from doing the follow/unfollow gimmick that people have been doing on Instagram for years. You can pay online services to bot that for your account for $x a month. It's frustrating on the receiving end, you think someone is following you because of genuine interest for what you have to share, but in reality it's a bot that's trying to scam you into following it back, only to unfollow you soon after. One of the worst aspects of the application, especially now that millions of accounts are all doing that at the same time. The signal to noise ratio is horrible.
- pnathan 8y agoYeah, that's super annoying. As someone with an insta, and as someone who kinda would like to be able to figure out how to get some visibility- surfacing my own content seems to be obscure.
- odnes 8y agoWhat is the value in unfollowing people? Do accounts that follow a lot of people have less authority?
- BadassFractal 8y agoYou have a limit of 7500 people you can follow. Thus if you're going to be spamming following people, you need to unfollow them as well to make room for more follows.
- dlgeek 8y agoFrom the article, under "Unfollowing": "You have to unfollow the people you follow for two reasons. The first is that you cannot be following over 7,500 people at any time. The second is because — although artificial — you want to have your follower/following ratio as high as possible as it is a sign of a more desirable account."
- zemo 8y ago> I wrote code that finds these pictures or videos ah, so you don't even make the content, you just wrote a content-reposting bot and then set it to automatically catfish restaurants. Behavior like this is why more and more people hate the tech industry every day.
- throwaway5752 8y agoWhat a shame that someone with some talent is doing something so sketchy and selfish with it.
- juandazapata 8y ago"I violated Instagram TOS and I'm telling everybody how I did it in detail, so they can just shut down my account". https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870 https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870
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- gricardo99 8y ago>I will not be providing code or anything like that Ok, still might be an interesting read from a technical standpoint... Later on: >Using some opensource software, I set up a scraper to go through and download media Seriously? Couldn’t even say which open source software?
- zerr 8y agotl;dr?
- ufmace 8y agoThis thing doesn't seem to be getting much love on here, but I don't have any problem with it - assuming of course that he's actually posting those business pics he said he'd post. Everyone involved is getting something out of it - original photo posters are getting more attention to their work, businesses are getting more exposure and business for what's a trivial cost to them, passive consumers are getting nice pictures and information on things to try. What it means to society that this is a viable and mildly profitable thing to do is a more interesting question.
- geater10 8y agoI actually personally worked with this kid. Doubt any of this was malicious. I know he did promotions on that account for some restaurants that said they couldn't afford to give away free food. Incredibly smart and generous. I think he's only about 22 years old, which is mind-boggling he was able to create such a system. I do understand your concerns about the original posters, though.
- bluesnowmonkey 8y agoAre you him?
- rland 8y agoI wonder how much money he saves by eating for free. I guess you could check his page, see how many restaurants he's "endorsed," and multiply by 15 bucks. I can't imagine it's more than $1000 total. This would be a great personal advertisement to show off his skills to employers if not for all of the ethically murky rule breaking. I'm sure he could bring this up in an interview to score some points. In other words, the amount of potential upside is far higher if he just doesn't take the next step of breaking the rules and getting the discount. Instead, just focus on building the account. After all, that's the impressive data-sciency part of this.
- robbyt 8y agoCall me skeptical, but I don't believe he automated this to the degree described in the article. There's no code, some of the technical writing is a bit weird and non-idomatic, and according to the author's GitHub he was just doing very basic boot camp projects 6 months ago. I'd chalk this up as "boring sci-fi"
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- g-b-r 8y agoThis guy ought to watch more South Park (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_Not_Yelping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_Not_Yelping)