Finally, the Creator of @Horse_ebooks Has Been Unmasked

Though it's certainly a small subset of the Internet, the roughly 43,000 folks who follow @horse_ebooks are probably pretty interested to know that the creator of their much-loved Twitter spambot has at long last been outed by Adrien Chen at Gawker.

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Chen published a 2,172-word post detailing how he came to discover Alexey Kouznetsov, the Russian genius behind the much-riddled over meme, that had follower wondering who was behind the spambot, or even if it was instead some very clever Dadaist art project.

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Chen claims to have ID'd Kouznetsov at the @horse_ebooks mastermind through another Website he hosted, after about a month of Internet sleuthing. And although he wouldn't respond to Chen's several interview requests (we suggest he reconsider!), Chen was able to profile Kouznetsov based on his Internet presence:

Alexey Kouznetsov a 30-something Russian web developer. He looks not unlike a scrawnier Mark Zuckerberg. (He spells his name Alexey on his own sites, so I will too.) Kuznetsov been designing websites since at least 2002, and on his portfolio site, he markets himself with this modest tagline: "If… you want your pages to be more impressive and dynamic than before, contact the author of this site to order elaboration, introduction and development of new graphic effects on your pages."

...

Alexey likes snowboarding and God. He graduated from Tula State University's intriguingly-named "cybernetics" department, which is, as far as I can tell, Russian for computer science. His web design and ebooks pursuits have provided him with enough income to travel widely throughout Europe, judging by numerous vacation albums.

Kouznetsov sounds more or less like your average Internet nerd. In any case, we just appreciate Chen's longform dive into this particular rabbit hole.

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Read his entire piece here.