Press quotes and coverage

Below is a list of articles, blog posts, and announcements where I was quoted or my work has been discussed.

Stefan is the creator of Botwiki, an open catalog of friendly, useful and artistic online bots, tools and tutorials.

Alongside fellow admin, Veronica Belmont, Stefan and co have worked tirelessly for the past year and a half on the site that’s dedicated to teaching folks how to make friendly, whimsical, and (by his own admission) “sometimes mildly annoying”, online bots.

Creator Spotlight: Building Twitter Bots with Stefan Bohacek — May 8, 2017, Glitch

Botmakers.org provides a list of tools and resources for developers to create ethical bots, and the organization has a Code of Conduct that applies to all bots its more than 700 members create.

Stefan Bohacek, Botmakers’s organizer, said reaching outside of your usual social and professional circles to other groups can give you a different perspective and help you realize features your bot might need for harassment prevention.

Why Microsoft believes that AI bots are the only logical path forward — March 31, 2016, dailydot.com

On Glitch, I found Twitterbot code by web developer Stefan Bohacek. In barely an hour I remixed it into a bot that tweeted haiku-like poems based on lines from poets like Sappho and Basho (“have i been here before? / i can almost hear your song / o planets”). Surprised by how easy it was, I started remixing videogames and chat apps. After a couple of days, I realized that, whoa, I was beginning to absorb the logic of Node.

It’s Time to Make Code More Tinker-Friendly — May 2017, WIRED

Developed by BotWiki, The Monthly Bot Challenge started as a community event with a simple concept: on the first day of each month, a new challenge topic – and prize – is announced online.

BotWiki / Monthly Bot Challenge — March 2016, andfestival.org.uk

Le site botwiki.org a commencé à les cataloguer, en plus d’offrir des tutoriaux pour en créer et plein d’informations, et comme Twitter est un des réseaux les plus accueillants je vous ai fait une petite sélection de mes préférés :

Le monde fantastique des bots sur Twitter — March 10, 2016, laboiteverte.fr

Botwiki came about because Bohacek wanted to be able to run fast searches whenever he had an idea for a bot. As he explains, similar websites that already existed “were either a bit incomplete, hard to browse, or plainly just didn’t work most of the time.”

A Wiki for All the Internet’s Bots — March 8, 2016, hyperallergic.com

Stefan Bohacek decided he would catalog every bot on the web.

It’s no small task and he’s far from done. At his site, botwiki.org, you can search bots by category, by platform, or if you’re a dev and you want to learn how to make a bot, you can search by language or the text or data you want to use.

Find any bot ever with this awesome online encyclopedia — March 2, 2016, technical.ly

@stefan is clearly not only focused on the technical aspects of bots on social networks though: “I am really excited about being part of something new and positive that we can all help grow together. Between the scams of the profit-oriented “web3” and the continued automation of jobs that the working class will hardly benefit from, there really hasn’t been much to get excited about in the tech world. So this is a very welcome change, and I am happy to be part of it.”

Last Week in the Fediverse — February 10, 2023, The Fediverse Report

If Stefan’s name sounds familiar, we profiled him 6 years ago (essentially, a million in web years) about creating Twitter Bots. Obviously a lot has changed since then (we got TikTok, a global pandemic happened, we lost Twitter) aside from Stefan’s passion for creating bots. We caught up with him to chat about the recent AI hype and the future of bots on the web.

5 Minutes with Stefan Bohacek, bot builder — May 17, 2023, Glitch Blog