Website Simulators
This is starting to become a trend. First one I noticed was Subreddit Simulator, a collection of bots that create a fully-automated subreddit that is entirely populated by bots that post Markov-chain generated comments using other subreddits as the source text. Which means that you get things like the Song of Ice and Fire Subreddit bot arguing with the Skyrim bot while the Crusader Kings bot offers strategy advice. The only human interaction is the ability to upvote the bots’ posts. People who accidentally stumble over the subreddit or its output are frequently confused.
(While the subreddit apparently uses Reddit’s API to grab live comment data, if for some unfathomable reason you wanted to build your own Reddit comment simulator, you could always grab the complete, 1TB public Reddit comment data.)
The Hacker News simulator, partially inspired by the above, also grabs past comments and feeds them through a Markov chain. While it’s not the first Hacker News simulator, it is the most through one I’ve seen, simulating not just the titles but also the comment threads.
In both cases, the context of the original site gives enough interest to the facsimile to elevate it above the chaos of the often unintelligible Markov chain output. The Hacker News title generation is particularly convincing, a glimpse at the click-bait news titles from the universe next door.