SoundCloud Comments Bot

A bot that posts random comments from SoundCloud.

Currently posting several times a day to Mastodon. (It used to post to Twitter, but I don't use Twitter anymore and neither do my bots.)

🔊 💬 🤖 → @soundcloudsaid on Mastodon

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As a lover of music, I spend a lot of time on SoundCloud, and can't help but notice the comments. SoundCloud comments have a certain character: a lot of concise and enthusiastic praise, a ton of spam, the occasional multi-sentence opinion on the production, and, rarely, a negative review.

This bot grabs a comment at random.

How It Works

Getting Random Comments

GitHub Actions is configured to run the bot.js script on a fixed schedule throughout the day. That script does the following:

1. Chooses a track at random from SoundCloud. Checks whether the track still exists and if it has any comments. If either is untrue, get another track at random. Retry until we get a track with comments.

2. Check all comments using the criteria listed in the 'Filtering Comments' section below. If none are usable, go back to step one.

3. Randomly select one of the comments that is usable and post it!

Filtering Comments

My aesthetic for this bot is simple, text-only, anonymous. So I filter the potential comments rigorously. I filter out the following:

• self-promotion (anything including the words follow, check out, blog, and any of a half-dozen social networks)
• classic spam (free, dollars, cam, sex)
• anything that looks like a URL
• replies and mentions (anything including the @ symbol)
• anything pointing to another user or track on SoundCloud

I also filter out any comment including any of the bad words listed in Darius Kazemi's wordfilter.

Finally, I use the Google Translate API to make sure the comment is English. The automated check is imperfect for checking informal, comment-style language, but helps discard most non-English comments. The primary reason for this filter is preventing abusive language appearing in my bot in a language that I don't speak and thus cannot filter out.

How It Used to Work

At first I struggled with how to retrieve a random comment—the SoundCloud API doesn't allow for getting random nodes. Then I discovered that track IDs (and comment IDs) are sequential. I found an old comment ID at 100000000 a recent one at 500000000, and figured that 400 million comments was more than enough of a well from which to draw. The script picks a number at random, checks if the comment still exists, and passes it on for filtering.

In early 2020, however, the /comments endpoint was removed from the SoundCloud API without notice, so this bot stopped working. In 2023, I finally rewrote the bot to use the process described above.

Acknowledgements

I could not have created this bot without help from the following people and resources:

• Justin Falcone provided code review.

• Twitter user @berlindisaster also had this idea in July of 2015. (This tweet and account have since been deleted.)

Afterword

This is my third bot. (@obliquestions and @novelcompounds are the first two.)