The Automated Solution To Your Unpopularity

You feel that you’re unpopular and no one likes you. The bad news is that if that’s the case in the real world there’s no easy way to fix it. The good news is there’s a great substitute — your popularity on Instagram. With this vending machine you can replace your personality with followers on Instagram. It’s just a shame we have to wait a year until Coachella.

This project is an interactive installation from [Dries Depoorter] that makes it possible to buy followers and likes in just a few seconds. It’s not limited to Instagram — you can get followers on FaceBook, YouTube, and Twitter, too. The hardware consists of a Raspberry Pi 3B+, an Arduino, coin acceptor, a few character LCDs running over I2C, and somewhat surprising for a one-off ‘art installation’, a lot of DIN rails mounted to a real industrial enclosure. Someone here knows what they’re doing;  there’s something resembling cable management inside this box and this vending machine is built to last.

Using this vending machine is as easy as sticking a few Euro coins in the slot and selecting the number of followers or likes you’d like. In a few minutes afterward, hundreds of notifications pop up on your phone. There’s no mention of the software in this vending machine aside from it being written in Python, which makes us wonder where these Instagram bots are based. Check out the video below.

18 thoughts on “The Automated Solution To Your Unpopularity

  1. “You feel that you’re unpopular and no one likes you. The bad news is that if that’s the case in the real world there’s no easy way to fix it.”

    Buy new friends.

  2. How about a real world popularity version of this? it could dispense beards, floral pattern clothing and vegan food. Or maybe it just gives you 100.000$ every time, that’ll make you real popular real fast.

  3. The box doesn’t have any Internet connection (as far i can see on the pictures at the supplied link) so how would this work?
    It seams to be just made as not really working art installation.

  4. Someone here knows what they’re doing;

    No, someone probably bought the enclosure with the power supplies / rails preinstalled. Dupont wires everywhere, nothing properly secured. Worse, the chained zip-ties pull on the big mess of wires, adding to the chances something will eventually unplug. The Arduino used only as a serial input seems very wasteful, that coin acceptor can be used in pulse mode and it looks like the RX pin on the PI is wasted as a button input.

  5. “The hardware consists of a Raspberry Pi 3B+, an Arduino, coin acceptor, a few character LCDs running over I2C, and somewhat surprising for a one-off ‘art installation’, a lot of DIN rails mounted to a real industrial enclosure.”

    It’s a piece of artwork, a statement about how shallow people tend to be on social media, perhaps a little lazy as well. There is no way to verify most of social media content, and a good portion is just imagination, or copy/paste.

    I don’t doubt there are bots, written to boost social media scores. Just like I don’t doubt that product reviews, both good and bad, are false, bot created.

    Should have made more room for the money collected, I’m sure it will be filled quickly… Not just people who need something like this, but people simply curious to see if it’s a real thing, and actually works.

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