originally posted in:BungieNetPlatform
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For the past month or so I've had a bot posting a topic containing the most popular (most viewed) [url=https://www.freebase.com/m/0h3mtz0]Destiny-related[/url] videos from "now" to "yesterday at midnight" each day. Apart from some edge cases where other gaming videos which have "destiny" in the title of the video (which seems to be a Freebase issue, really) and some less-than-desirable results (keygen scams, for instance) that are filtered pretty easily, the whole thing seems to have worked pretty well.
On the bungie.net side of things, the topics don't get that many posts, but I'd like to think that it's paying off because people are reading them and/or following the video links off to YouTube and getting something out of it. I do wonder if the low-perceived activity/usefulness is because of how the topics are presented in terms of the title I've given them, account mutes (which may be quite high due to previous use), and/or just because of the name of the account. Naming it something like "Destiny News Bot" might get a bit more attention.
At this point I think it would be great to start branching out a bit on what's possible, especially in terms of external news content. I did experiment with that a little when using Twitter's API and checking Bungie's feed, but because of how condensed the material is, it can be tough to justify reposting it as news in #destiny to let others know about it. At least, that was my impression. I didn't consider using @destinythegame at the time, though.
One alternative I was interested in looking at is actual [i]news[/i] that's posted on gaming websites like IGN, kotaku, etc... which will have a really high tendency to post about Destiny, but which also have a readership that thinks "IGN posted about Destiny, I'd better read it". That, in my opinion, is justification enough to want to inject it into the hub of users in #destiny as its own self-contained topic (eg. IGN: "DESTINY'S ACHIEVEMENTS AND TROPHIES REVEALED") and to do so as quickly as possible - new news is good news!
At the moment I'm looking into using feedly's API to be able to do that, but getting the topics might be somewhat involved to the point where I'd need to whitelist sources in [i]an[/i] account category and use the right service to just look at the feed from that [the category]. While that might be great from a "at least it won't include irrelevant stuff" point of view, it also possibly excludes any upcoming blogs or sites that post legitimate news which [i]should[/i] be circulated.
Just have to see what happens.
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It would be interesting to see the direction you take this. Good luck!