Artists building tools to help other artists: a Q+A with Blockasaurus creator Joe Sondow

Earlier this month, the third most expensive artwork sale by a living artist happened on the blockchain in the form of an NFT, or non-fungible token. The excitement of innovation around selling fine digital art for fine analog art prices has flooded social media and offline conversations ever since. Now, truly anything can be minted and sold: images, text, and even *moments in time!* Of course, such excitement often arrives hand-in-hand with the valid fears of being taken advantage of, and that's for sure happening with NFTs; not only can anything be sold, but it seems like *anyone* can sell it, and that has left artists feeling vulnerable of theft that they already deal with in the conventional fiat market.

This lead to Joe Sondow creating Blockasaurus, a Glitch app that has allowed artists on Twitter to quickly block all of the bots that have been taking advantage of this NFT movement by minting their tweets and artwork. I talked to Joe about Blockasaurus, the why and how behind it, and the problem with the NFT movement that this project is helping to mitigate.

Jenn: What is Blockasaurus, and why did you create it?

Joe: Blockasaurus is a web app that lets any Twitter user quickly block a list of accounts that they paste into a form. I made it because the existing Twitter mass blocking tools didn't seem up to the task of quickly and easily blocking the growing list of hundreds of accounts that have started using automated services to mint NFTs of other people's intellectual property on Twitter. Blockasaurus accepts any text format that contains Twitter screen names with or without punctuation, and blocks as many of them as it can.

Blockasaurus has been one of the most widely shared Glitch apps on Twitter over the past week or so because of the explosion of crypto art and NFTs. What does blocking Twitter accounts even have to do with NFTs?

There are some new unethical Twitter bots that claim to automatically do the work of minting NFTs of the contents of any tweet. They then grant ownership of that NFT to any random person who first requests ownership, even if the requester is not the owner or publisher of the content. By making this type of art theft trivially convenient and free via Twitter, these bots enable an order of magnitude increase in the number of people who are trying to steal art profits. To mitigate this problem, a lot of artists and other creators are making their Twitter accounts private, deleting high quality old tweets, or swearing off using Twitter to promote their work. All of those solutions mean less success for creators and a weaker artistic culture for all of us. Blocking one NFT minting bot account is no guarantee that other bot accounts aren't working in a similar way, so people are sharing lists of the users of those NFT minting bot accounts, so creators can try to mass block the thieves themselves. But there are a lot of them. Artists have been tweeting about spending hours each day manually blocking each of the accounts on those lists. The purpose of Blockasaurus is to make it easy to block all the accounts on medium-sized block lists.

Can you talk a bit about the tech behind Blockasaurus (what it’s written in, any APIs you use, etc)?

It's written in Node with Express, because that's what https://poop-blocker.glitch.me/ used, and I wanted to build the new app as fast as possible to help artists facing an emergency. It uses the Twitter API to authenticate and block accounts.

*Side note: Joe is extremely prolific on Twitter and uses it a lot for his art and tech: he writes interactive fiction stories using Twitter polls (see: #ChaosRaccoon and #StarshipWonder) and has made a lot of novelty Twitter accounts, both automated and manual (see: @PicardTips, @RikerGoogling, @StarTrekHour, @WorfEmail, @EmojiTetra, @EmojiSnakeGame, @EmojiAquarium, @EmojiMeadow, @EmojiPrincesses, @TinyPettingZoo, @TrumpsVitals, @InaugCountdown, @realRealDukat.)

What made you choose Glitch as the platform to create and host Blockasaurus?

The short answer is that https://poop-blocker.glitch.me/ already existed and I knew I just needed to clone it and change a few things to make Blockasaurus quickly. The time between my first code change on Glitch and my launch tweet was 6 hours, including breaks for taking care of my sick cat. But the longer answer is more interesting.

I have more expertise in Java than JavaScript server-side development, but Glitch is unparalleled for facilitating getting a simple but useful free web app running quickly with a decent URL, without much research or boilerplate to go through. I've used Glitch before, to make a web app called Superblock, which is only usable by me. Superblock is for when someone is bothering me on Twitter enough that I want to quickly block them on all of my accounts at once so they won't try to harass me through my novelty accounts. I wrote the first working version of Superblock using just my phone when I was away from home and didn't have my computer. Not a development experience I recommend, but it is possible to do. That experience is connected to how I started writing Twitter interactive fiction ("Poll-Playing Games") to help myself get through my father's last few months of life, and how little patience I had for strangers online telling me not to retweet my own work during that time. So, Glitch genuinely helped me get through a very difficult period in my life.

@Rumpelcita's Poop-blocker, one of the apps that inspired Blockasaurus, is another popular Glitch app that's helped users improve their Twitter experience.

I was actually introduced to your work via your EmojiAquarium twitter bot! How is creating art with code different or the same as creating utilities like Blockasaurus with the same tools (ie. code, Twitter APIs)? Do you prefer creating one over the other?

What an interesting question. I think for me, creating art, games, or utilities with code are all connected to a desire to delight other people. Making art like EmojiAquarium is similar to making utilities like Blockasaurus in that they're both things I wanted to see in the world, but that didn't exist yet, so I made them. But there is a difference in making art that isn't to solve a known problem so much as just to add something good into the world that helps people feel a little better sometimes. I guess I prefer creating art and games, since I have a huge backlog of ideas still to implement. But when the situation calls for a utility that I know a lot of people need, it's gratifying to be able to provide it.

Usually I use AWS Lambda with Java to automate Twitter tasks on a timer for things like Twitter bots and certain custom retweet automation. The interface for Blockasaurus needed to be a web app, so Glitch worked perfectly for that. The Twitter API is a royal pain but I've gotten to know its ins and outs pretty well over the years. My stumbling block now tends to be that I'm a novice at Node.js.

Since your app is being widely shared and discussed on social media, I could imagine you’ve seen a lot of discourse about NFTs and other reasons users have taken to using Blockasaurus. Have your opinions on crypto art changed in any way since you tweeted the app?

No, NFTs are trash.

Were there any surprises for you after you launched Blockasaurus (ex. The response, the kinds of communities using it, etc)?

I'm pleased that a few other types of Blockasaurus uses have come up for some people, but I haven't seen people sharing public lists of accounts to block for any uses besides NFT art theft so far. One community that just found out about Blockasaurus yesterday is the BTS fan base, so for a while the profile pictures in my notifications were all hot South Korean guys.

So far I've been pleasantly surprised not to get any backlash against the existence of the tool itself, although some of the block lists that were going around have been questioned and deleted because they weren't made carefully enough so they included some artists that people didn't want to block.

**What can we expect next from you? **

A bunch of things...I'm working on a new version of Blockasaurus that will work better with Twitter's rate limit API to succeed in blocking more of the accounts a user requests in a larger batch. It will visually communicate better which block attempts succeeded and which failed, and it will retry failed attempts when Twitter allows them again, as long as the page stays open in the browser. I've started working on ongoing automation of collecting and sharing all the accounts that are attempting to mint NFTs for other people's work.

I'm aiming to do some of my coding in livestreams on Twitch like I used to, although I'm a bit out of practice in streaming. I'll also be live streaming some digital board game playthroughs with some of my Twitch streamer friends this month. And when I'm not too exhausted from pandemic life I plan to get back to making more Twitter games. One of the next ones might be about crossword puzzles.

Those are all unannounced things but they'll be on my Twitter as they go public.

_Thanks to Joe for talking to us about Blockasaurus, as well as the controversy behind the NFT minting bots that inspired it. If you build or see an app on Glitch that you want us to feature, we want to know! Tell us about it by emailing [email protected] or tweeting @glitch!