Objection-bot Turns Reddit Drama into Courtroom Drama

If you ever get into the comments at reddit, you know how they can start to resemble a free-for-all sometimes. To have some fun with the drama, South African software engineer Micah Price built an application that sniffs out controversial exchanges and sets them into the world of the video game Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. The exchanges caught so far appear to be drama for drama’s sake, for the amusement of the entire forum.

Even better, everybody can join in the fun — all you need to do to trigger the bot is add “!objectionbot” or “!objection-bot” to a Reddit comment on certain supported subreddits (you can view the full list of those here). The bot then scans the thread, finds the top commenters, and turns their discussion into a YouTube video that’s then automatically linked to in the thread (the “objection!” graphic happens when a comment has a negative score, or if the bot’s neural network detects the tone of the comment to be negative).

Price said the whole thing took him about three days to put together. “I wasn’t sure if it would be popular so didn’t want to spent much longer on it,” he said. “I used Python and a bunch of computer vision and machine learning libraries. It’s uber buggy at the moment, though.”

If you don’t want to trigger the bot yourself, just keep your eye out on reddit for u/objection-bot to respond with “Here’s the video!” See them linked here.

[via Gizmodo]