Picking Random Comments On Instagram

Illustration by loornicolas

So this friend of mine, who is a personal trainer, has a bussiness Instagram account. He did a contest where any follower could comment a picture of his to have a chance to win a pack of training equipment.

The comment needed to:

• Include the phrase ‘I participate’.
• Mention 3 other users.
• Also, only one comment per user was allowed.

A problem arised when, after more than 200 people commented, he had to, somehow, randomly pick a comment that also passed these conditions.

So I did a quick search for available options and I didn’t find anything acceptable. Some were paid services and some other even required you to give them your credentials… which doesn’t make sense since pictures and comments are public unless the account is private. And I don’t think many private accounts do contests adressed to gain more followers.

That’s why I built a small app to solve this problem. It features a conversational UI to get the rules for a given contest and, at the last step, it creates a snippet that gets copied to the user clipboard. Then, this can be pasted in the JavaScript console in the picture page and the winner comment will be highlighted.

The app is available here.

In the future I might do a post about the decisions and the findings that features this little project. If I have to take one thing out of this is that conversational UI is super fun to work with!