Emoji meadow Twitter bot is here to bring calm to your noisy feeds

Twitter in 2017[ or the epoch of Donald Trump] can be a noisy and anxiety-inducing place. If our feeds aren’t bursting with shouty all-caps Twitter rants about politics, they’re brimming with news updates that determine you on edge.

But, one Twitter bot is sending out positive vibes into the ether in the form of “emoji meadows” randomised smorgasbords of nature emoji with the odd animal thrown in every now and then.

A string of flower emoji might not sound like much, but this Twitter bot is having a allaying impact on Twitter, bringing much-needed tranquilize to many people’s feeds. And, let’s face it, when the dominant emoji in your feed are , and, these digital meadows are a welcome injection of positivity.

Joe Sondow is the man behind the Emoji Meadow bot. He comes from a software engineering background and has been running Twitter parody accounts largely about Star Trek since 2013, “before the bulk of the internet’s harassment armies and Nazis came to try to spoil the party”. Sondow says that back then “Twitter was a place to have fun”.

Sondow was inspired by Twitter art bots like @< strong> tiny_star_field . He appeared through the most recent emoji set and decided to experiment with Twitter API calls and bot infrastructure. His first experiment came in the form of Emoji Aquarium , a bot which tweets a “tiny aquarium full of interesting fishies” every couple of hours.

Sondow wanted to branch out in emoji grasses, blooms and occasional small-scale animals and, so, Emoji Meadow was born. Every few hours the bot sends out “a tiny meadow full of grass and flowers”.

“To some degree everything there is felt a little bit silly in the middle of our country’s second civil rights motion, but it was something I was itching to do as an artist, and it’s been helping to sharpen my Twitter automation skills for other uses, ” says Sondow.

“The response from adherents has largely been gratitude for a moment of tranquilize and quiet on people’s otherwise angst-inducing Twitter timelines, so I think of @EmojiMeadow as a contribution to help people keep themselves sane in crazy periods, ” Sondow continues.

Sondow decided to get a little creative with his bot by adding an algorithm to some of the meadows.

“Looking at some of the meadows, I realised it would be cute if an animal had to follow a maze to get to a treat, so I added a path-building algorithm for some of the meadows, to the purposes of range, ” says Sondow.

Sondow says he’d like to set up some “‘deplorable’-blocking algorithms” in an effort to “make Twitter simpler and more fun to use”.

“I use a variety of blocking systems so I can choose whom I want to hear from, and there’s still plenty of room for improvement in that area, ” he continues.

Long may the emoji meadows continue!

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