Horse_ebooks was a dirty, dirty lie.

It seems that one can no longer trust everything they read on the internet. When you can't put your faith in the veracity of a spambot, what is life anymore? To sully a malfunctioning advertisement machine in the name of promotion... I, for one, am baffled, hurt, and dyspeptic.

Soon we will be living in a post Horse_ebooks world. I think what stings the most is that "pumpkin jokes.pdf" was tweeted under Buzzfeed's deplorable tenure.

meh

Modern art.

Meh, I blocked that twitter feed a long, long time ago.

I am mildly sad right now :(

Alan Turing is either rolling in his grave right now or laughing at us all.

The whole world is dark and nothing is pure anymore.

I'll always remember the pre-2011 real honest horse_ebooks

Crap like this makes me glad I skipped the twitter craze.

Huh, weird. I never would have guessed Horse_ebooks and Pronunciation Book were related, and fake. That just makes Pronunciation Manual even funnier.

Never bought into it, so this news is just meh.

There was an actual person behind it? TRUE ART IS DEAD!

Twitter itself isn't a "craze"

Some aspects within it maybe crazes. To call the entire service a craze is a bit silly.

ART IS ART.

ART IS TROLLING.

At least we still have all those Katt Williams parody accounts to fall back on.

so they didn't even create horse_ebooks they just took it over in 2011 without telling anyone? so like good for them i guess

What did people actually expect it to be? Why or how could anyone be disappointed by this. I like Twitter, or really liked it when I got deep into it a year or so back, but the popularity of things like horse_books were always just a snowball effect of moronic hype. There are some genuinely funny people on Twitter and seeing the horse_ebooks account tweet "blue" and get 500 retweets and Fav's isn't funny, it's just depressing. Of course any time you might mention this to someone you'd be presented with the "but you don't get it man" argument. Well I guess no one really got it in the end.

I don't think you understand Twitter and how people use it in different ways.

@humanity: But... you don't get it, man.

Seriously though, I can't speak for everyone, but my "disappointment" is wildly exaggerated. While I truly don't like this kind of marketing, and I do like horse_ebooks (I'm not going to defend that, either... humor is the epitome of subjectivity), I can't imagine that anybody "mourning" this news is doing so without tongue pushed far into cheek.

Isn't there something a bit unnerving about tons of human beings complaining about a soulless spambot they cared about turning out to be a living human being?

@shagge: I dunno, 95% of it wasn't humor, just random words. It was certainly novel when it first appeared but after a while it's like sitting a whoopie cushion 100,000 times hoping it makes a new squeek. There was no excitement for me in it because it was obviously a bot operated by someone. I mean it's not even a mystery, it was always evident that this is a bot that someone keeps active because nothing just runs autonomously. If it's a weird art exhibit tool or not, it's a good thing the joke is getting laid to rest as it's been getting a bit long in the tooth.

I thought that part of the charm of horse_ebooks was knowing that maybe there was a human being on the other end who was actually engineering this madness. cat_ebooks is obviously run by someone and it's still pretty amazing. It's not as if it was controlled by those two guys all along anyway, they only got it in 2011 from an actual Russian spammer, and I don't get why people are more outraged because the two people running the account were also employed by Buzzfeed. Sort out your opinions about this internet horse people!

I don't get any of this at all. This was a thing? I find it odd I manged to dodge this as I'm constantly on twitter.

Horse_ebooks is lame anyway. Homestar_ebooks is the new shit.

I only ever saw that thing two or three times on Twitter, and I thought it was a dude making jokes, so I don't get the uproar.

There's a lot of really funny shit on "weird twitter" but I never laughed at that stupid fucking horse thing.

Lame but it does explain why the quality of the tweets went down.

Persona_ebooks is where its at.

Being 29 and out of touch has rarely felt so good.

I never knew much about Horse_ebooks, so I always assumed it was run by a person. I thought that was the joke. But the fact that the whole thing was secretly a conceptual art piece is kind of the funniest god damn thing to me.

The Citizen Kane of Twitterbots

I didn't realise that it was meant to be a spambot?

but now do you even know if that's a spambot or not now?

EVERYTHING IS A LIE NOW

@animasta: BUY PERSONA 4: GOLDEN ON SONY PLAYSTATION VITA AT YOUR NEAREST ELECTRONICS RETAILER TODAY

For those that don't get what people found entertaining about the idea of horse_ebooks being a spambot, here is my take on it.

I always imagined it as something along the lines of UVB-76, that Russian numbers station. The tweets weren't really all that important by themselves, but I liked the idea that horse_ebooks was just a little snippet of code running on its own on some beat-up old computer propped up between a fax machine and a cardboard box of broken SCSI hard drives in the corner of an abandoned server room somewhere in Eastern Europe. I don't know, there's just something... romantic about the idea.

I do not know what is happening here!

I'm still not quite sure why we care. I was pretty sure all of the _ebooks accounts were curated.

Even if they do parse out text, it's all something some human has put in front of them.

@bbalpert: This, in a nutshell. Also, I always pictured a literal horse attempting to communicate via Twitter, which says a lot about my sense of humor, I guess.

But man... I never knew how strongly people felt against horse_ebooks.

I feel like some people are not seeing how crazy it is that this one guy tweets out fake spam (and even link them to actual products) every couple of hours for more than 700 days and still have a day job. He is literally the Spam Batman of the Internet. This is like when Iron Man reveals his identity, except he turns out to be a BuzzFeed writer instead of a billionaire genius playboy.

Oh, beautiful. Now I'll have to buy a bunch of books and rip random sentence fragments out of them to get my daily fix.

WHY MUST THEY MURDER EVERYTHING I LOVE

Do people feel strongly against horse_ebooks? I thought it was people feeling strongly for horse_ebooks who are affected by this news. Those against it didn't care for it, easily blocked it, and got on with our lives.

@sergio https://twitter.com/fckHorse_ebooks

I'd say so. :P

Nah, I just mean I've seen a lot of rants against it since that news broke.

Even though someone was behind Horse_eBooks, isn't it possible they just let the bot loose on a bunch of documents/self help books?