Of the accounts that follow me on Twitter, half are spambots. About 15% are companies or organizations whose social media interns found me on a list somewhere, and another 15% are something in between: not definitely bots, but not exactly humans. Whatever they are, they’re not “listening” in any meaningful sense. Among the remaining group are some people I like, some people I like a lot, some people I don’t know, and a bunch of technology PR professionals who don’t really have a choice.

My “Follow” list, in contrast, is cultivated with great care — it’s almost exclusively people I think are funny. But the funniest account I follow doesn’t belong to a comedian. It isn’t a parody account and it doesn’t tell jokes. It’s a spam bot that sells shitty ebooks about horses, and it might be the best Twitter account that has ever existed.

Horse_ebooks is having a moment. It’s recently surfaced on Buzzfeed, Metafilter, and the Daily Dot, not to mention every social news site. It even got an on-air mention on Attack of the Show. This last weekend, it was conferred with one of the capital-I Internet’s few honors: NYT tech writer and resident meme sieve Jenna Wortham blogged about it on the paper’s site.

The coverage was oblique and indirect — it was about one of the many horse_ebooks-inspired projects on the Internet, not the account itself — but horse_ebooks fans seemed to know exactly what it meant. Lindsey Weber, Buzzfeed writer and longtime horse_ebooks booster, posted on Twitter: “#dontforgetmehorseE”

Here’s what I know about horse_ebooks, I think:

1. It is a spam account. It tweets snippets of semi-promotional text throughout the day and night. Unlike most spam accounts, which trawl for Tweets relevant to their pitch and automatically respond to buzzwords, horse_ebooks doesn’t respond to anyone. Horse_ebooks doesn’t mass-follow, another common spamming technique. (Since new follower notification emails — which contain profile information, including links — users receive aren’t stopped by spam filters, but most of the people followed by horse_ebooks are people who chose to follow it first.) The reason it hasn’t been shut down yet is the same reason it’s so hilariously terrible at its job: It doesn’t bother anyone who doesn’t want to be bothered.

2. It’s part of a much larger network of spam accounts, all controlled by the same entity, and all of which serve the same cause: To sell awful ebooks. The site linked to by the account, horse-ebooks.com, is registered to someone named Alexei (or Alexey) Kouznetsov. He owns roughly 170 other domains, nearly all of which are connected to current or defunct horse_ebooks-style spam accounts. His listed email address doesn’t work, and messages sent through his sites’ comment forms apparently go nowhere. The phone number linked to the registration does not connect. The address on the account points to a lovely looking neighborhood in the outskirts of Moscow:

The other accounts that list “11 Lenina” as home include company_ebooks, action_ebooks, and mystery_ebooks — a personal favorite. Most have been Tweeting unnoticed and undisturbed for a year or more, though never much more. Some have been suspended — rest in peace, @depressionbook — and a few, such as the fabulous @men_and_woman, have fallen into a state of disrepair. They don’t Tweet, but haven’t been banned. Maybe they were warned.

3. It basically can’t be working, at least not as it’s intended. Every few Tweets these accounts post a link to accounts on Clickbank, a shady-seeming affiliate marketing site. It’s supposed to work like this: You create (or select) some kind of digital product; you send it into one of Clickbank’s ecommerce site templates; you promote the product book and, in exchange for cross promotion, the books of others; you get money. These products are all digital (ebooks, PDF guides, etc) and, as far as I can tell, universally terrible. Horse_ebooks’ Tweets originally sampled from the books it was meant to promote, which, judging by their content, are mashed-together guides for raising, racing and betting on horses. I can’t imagine buying one, except out of novelty.

The awful presentation, the bumbling bot-speak, the unbuyable books — it can give the overall impression, despite the accounts’ prolific outputs, that they have been abandoned. Ebooks accounts seem as though they have lost their operator, not that he was ever really doing anything in the first place. It’s probably that @horse_ebooks uses some variation on one of the many programs designed to automate Clickbank promotions.

4. It was “discovered” in April of last year. Jon Hendren, known on Twitter as @fart and at work as Johnny “DocEvil” Titanium, posted a whole bunch of Horse_ebooks Tweets on the front page of SomethingAwful.com. (They probably came from the SomethingAwful forums before that.) His description of the account pretty well sums it up:

@Horse_ebooks is a Twitter bot designed and automated by apparently some Russian guy to sell worthless, horrible ebooks about horses. In order to avoid being detected as a spam bot, it occasionally posts a text snippet or two from one of its ebooks, chosen at random. I will never buy an ebook from it, but I will follow this Twitter account until I die or horses become extinct, whichever comes first.

Something Awful is the gravitational center for a small and loosely knit group of Twitterers, who in turn sit at the center of a larger absurd, surreal and mostly wonderful Twitter subculture. What they do is hard to describe, but these people — Twitter folks like @katienotopoulos, @agentlebrees, @cheesegod69 and @tricialockwood, to name a few — are of a know-it-if-you-see-it sort. If they have a single easily discernible trait, it’s that they know and love @horse_ebooks.

These are the kind of people that professional Internet-scrapers love and depend on. Their jokes and memes eventually manifest as Top 10 posts on one site or another, only sometimes with credit. (Here’s an example of how that process goes, from the other week.)

5. People love it. I don’t remember exactly when I became a fan — probably about June — but by then, @horse_ebooks & co were a regular fixture, via retweets, in my Twitter feed. Every few days I would get a message from some horse Horse. Usually it was a silly truncation:

[blackbirdpie id=”105708546729054211”]

Often it would be something close to a kōan:

[blackbirdpie id=”49625817868804097”]