Horse_ebooks Is Human After All 72
An anonymous reader writes with word that two of the more intriguing memes of recent times have been outed as elaborate performance art. Bizarre Twitter-centric entities @Horse_ebooks and Pronunciation Book aren't really inexplicable, it turns out: "[These feeds] have been running for the past several years, both have the hallmarks of automation, chugging along anonymously and churning out disjointed bits of text in a very spam-like fashion, but neither is as it appears."
The Escapist has a bit more, now that the horse is out of the bag.
Here's the missing information. (Score:5, Informative)
First, Horse_ebooks is a twitter feed.
This twitter feed started out as part of a network of spam twitter accounts to promote the (probably illegal) sale of ebooks from a russian seller. It often includes random lines of text from the ebooks that it's trying to spam/sell in an attempt to avoid being classified as spam. Basically, bayesian poisoning.
Some folks thought it was amusing because it would create odd non-sequiturs, and in the same way that people started posting zombo.com links, it perputated, though apparently only among folks with their heads way far up the twitter lower GI.
So, it was experiencing some popularity for hard to define or reproduce reasons.
At this point, 2 guys who work for internet media companies purchased the twitter account from the russian spammer who operated it, in 2011, after it had shown up in a few non-internet specific publications. Apparently they couldn't figure out how to milk commercial value from it, and continued to sporadically post from it, claiming it was some sort of art project, though it's more likely that they just never capitalized it and tried to mimic the previous behavior.
The only reason you're hearing about it now, is because these accounts are now being used as part of an alternate reality 'game', like Halo's "I Love Bees" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees [wikipedia.org] ), and so are being promoted widely for that reason. I would argue that it's a 'game' per se, but whatever.
Interestingly enough, it's claimed that this was all held in great secrecy until now, yet I note nearly simultaneous news releases from a large number of primarily internet-only media sites, not just now, but previously since 2011. As if they were all in on it. Most of the recent articles have some permutation of the claim that it's a well established meme, and that it's a "persistent mystery on the internet," almost as if they were given a press release and are just regurgitating text.
Personally speaking, I'm fairly well aware of memes, and I hadn't heard of this one. Perhaps it's just because I avoided twitter? In any case, it looks and feels like someone's trying to artificially force something to become viral when it's not really that appealing to begin with.
Hopefully though, my sleuthing has saved you from having to look this stuff up and perpetuate it, and you can continue to ignore it.