Automate the Boring Stuff With Ai Like Twitter Annoyances

2024-06-19 476 words 3 minutes

I wanted to remove all the clutter in my Twitter profile, and found the interests section. A massive number of detected interests are there, and most aren’t actually anything I care about. (Yahoo, eCommerce Technology, and more)

Each click sends an API request to remove, and there’s no way I was going to go through years of content to click. I pasted in the div from inspect element and with a few additional prompts to improve it, generated a snippet to past in the Chrome developer console that:

Clicks each item for me, with some graceful cooldown logic since API throttling nearly immediately occurred.
Logs the total items to process at the start.
Logs the start of each request with the format Starting request x/y.
Logs a successful uncheck with a ✔ emoji and the format ✔ Successfully unchecked x/y.
Logs if an item is already unchecked.
Estimates the remaining time to complete the process and logs it after each action.
At the end of the process, logs that all items have been processed.

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(function() {
    const checkboxes = document.querySelectorAll('input[type="checkbox"]');
    let total = checkboxes.length;
    let index = 0;
    let delay = 500; // Delay between uncheck actions to allow for UI updates and not to trigger rate limits

    console.log(`Total checkboxes to process: ${total}`);

    function scrollToElement(element) {
        element.scrollIntoView({ behavior: 'smooth', block: 'center' });
    }

    function uncheckCheckbox() {
        if (index >= total) {
            log('Completed processing all checkboxes.');
            return;
        }

        const checkbox = checkboxes[index];
        scrollToElement(checkbox);

        if (checkbox.checked) {
            log(`Unchecking checkbox ${index + 1}/${total}`);
            checkbox.click();

            // Wait for any potential dynamic updates
            setTimeout(() => {
                if (checkbox.getAttribute('aria-checked') === 'false' || !checkbox.checked) {
                    log(`Successfully unchecked checkbox ${index + 1}/${total}`);
                    index++;
                    delay = 500; // Reset the delay after successful uncheck
                } else {
                    log(`Failed to uncheck checkbox ${index + 1}/${total}. Retrying...`, 'error');
                    delay += 500; // Increase the delay before retrying
                }
                setTimeout(uncheckCheckbox, delay); // Move to next checkbox
            }, delay);
        } else {
            log(`Checkbox ${index + 1}/${total} is already unchecked.`);
            index++;
            setTimeout(uncheckCheckbox, 0); // Move to next checkbox
        }
    }

    // Listen for 503 requests from Twitter
    window.addEventListener('fetch', (event) => {
        if (event.request.url.includes('twitter.com') && event.response.status === 503) {
            log('503 error detected from Twitter. Retrying...', 'error');
            delay += 500; // Increase the delay before retrying
        }
    });

    function log(message, type = 'log') {
        console[type](`[TwitterCleanup] ${message}`);
    }

    uncheckCheckbox(); // Start the process
})();

Considering I don’t want to spend the time to dive into javascript, I love how it gives options to quickly knock out automation I wouldn’t make the time to do manually.

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