As with the button last year, people set up factions, appoint leaders and then abandon them as fast as they are created. But now, every time a majority in a room votes to GROW, two microcultures clash together. In most cases, they merge and grow further, which makes it difficult to retrace how some memes and behaviours originated. It also shows how the quality of the conversation decreases as more and more random people join in.
Hours since Robin was published, scripts for automation were made - pressing buttons, counting people, ignoring spammers. By now there are all kinds of bots, doing quizzes and creating word clouds, but mostly spamming. Some people started drawing on other websites, created new subreddits or wrote down their name and history in shared documents.
This was an eye opening experience for me, because it shows what may be possible with VR and what might happen once BCIs are perfected.
Exactly. To me, this experiment made it clear that the speed with which information is exchanged, new ideas are formed and behaviours adapted will increase drastically the more people are intimately connected to the internet. Not even half of the world population are connected yet. Virtual reality will remove further barriers, BCIs may completely remove them.
Looking back, the experience seems remarkably alien, but in the moment of action, you were part of a hivemind. In large rooms, only powerful ideas could propagate, no matter how meaningful they were.
I wonder what rude shocks we are in for .. BCI+VR may give us some sort of super-being, a multi-dimensional entity to deal with.
Just another annoying passenger on the bus, or supreme overlord of entire universes? Still a very thin line, or at least .. one can hope it will still be easy to unplug when this hits us.
That is what I'm wondering about, too. Not only how the external relationship between this "hivemind" and those that are not a part of it would look like, but especially what kind of effect this would have on the human brain.
Is the plasticity of the brain sufficient to adapt to these new "senses"? What is the perceptual relationship between the content of the message and the modulation? And what happens to consciousness, when two or more brains are closer and closer connected? One fascinating case is that of craniopagus twins, conjoined at the head. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniopagus_twins
"when Krista started drinking her juice Tatiana felt it physically going through her body."
The hard problem of consciousness is still elusive. I recently found http://integratedinformationtheory.org/, which takes an axiomatic approach, but estimating the effects for large networks seems to be too difficult as of now.
Assuming they have stellar data collection, they'll have answers to some interesting questions:
1) How many random people does it take for a chat room to turn into spam/shitposting/etc?
2) Does a persons reddit commenting behavior match their chatroom behavior? (discussion topics, spamming, shitposting, etc)
3) How long do people participate, how long till they go afk?
4) Does comment frequency, karma, subreddit participation correlate with any Robin behavior? Ex. People on r/TrueGaming stay in a room longer due to gamification.
1) In my experience, it's correlated to the Dunbar number. Seriously, once you get close to 150, it starts to break down, over that number, it's lost.
2) To my knowledge, nobody is looking them up. At least nobody I encountered is.
3) Most people seem committed to at least 4 rounds, and then once it gets to 31 minutes/round it trails off
4) A lot of people who seem really into it seem to also be really into COD or Hitler memes. No joke.
I actually was in a chat room with /u/powerlanguage (the admin that submitted the original announcement) and I pressed him for stats. All he said was that people love to grow.
xNotch was also in the room. That was tons of fun.
I was also in this room, merged in from powerlanguage's side into Notch's group. The group ended up convincing about 40-50 members to vote to Stay, and when the vote passed it created a private subreddit for the group with random members as admins (including Notch). This was before auto-vote scripts and bots became common.
The subreddit is currently coming up with a theme for itself (based on part of the name that was automatically generated for us), and has seen users sharing spare copies of games and introducing themselves.
Unfortunately /u/powerlanguage chose to grow on without us.
I ended up in a group of four, of whom two were initially inactive. One of them eventually started chatting (apparently the desktop notifications hadn't worked) and we voted 3/4 to grow again. The next batch of people to join us started slinging slurs around, at which point I closed the tab.
I'll have to have another go at this tomorrow, if it's still up.
The problem with this experiment, from my own experience, is that you really have no reason to be there other than the novelty of it.
There's nothing binding your "community" other than finding out about the robin or something like that.
You're entering a chat room to chat about the chat. It predictably becomes "spammy" absolutely fast with few people because they're going to be trying to entertain themselves somehow.
It's too meta to be of much use to the outside world, imho.
> When you press the button, it leads you to a page with a button that says "participate". Pressing this button puts you in an IRC chat with another user. Along with being able to chat, there are three buttons to press. These are Abandon, Stay, and Grow. This is actually a voting system. When joining a room, a small text will be output by the server saying how long you have to vote, calculated by 2level - 1 and output in minutes. The vote runs on majority rule.
> When the timer runs out:
> If you voted Abandon, you will be kicked from the room. You can hit the participate button again to start from the beginning.
> If the majority voted Abandon, everyone is kicked from the room.
> If the majority voted Stay, the room is closed and a new subreddit is created, with the name of the chat room being the sub name. Up to 5 random people in the room are granted moderator permissions in this sub. It should be noted that the chat room name is a mashup of the current room users.
> If the majority voted Grow, they will be merged with another group of about the same size in a new chat room. You can vote again from there.
Every time it grows, the "level" variable from earlier goes up by one.
When I went to sleep last night the group I was in had just grown from ~800 to ~1500 after a merge. In my absence it grew to ~2500 and then ~4400 before Reddit crashed and the room was abandoned.
Just a few hours into the experiment several Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey userscripts were released that enabled auto-voting, among other features. The ability to mute users was also welcome, given how spammy the big rooms got.
There are auto-voting scripts that can be installed as plugins in Chrome and Firefox to help with this. I did exactly this last night and woke to find myself in the largest of the groups. It was entirely unfulfilling.
It seems Reddit has been intentionally vague as to what this is all about. Theories abound in /r/joinrobin[1]
Interesting to note the icon is a red bird, right after Reddit removed its NSL canary[2] (yellow bird), and joined an amicus brief in support of Twitter[3] (blue bird).
The icon reminds me of one of the Egyptian glyphs that would show up in LOST whenever someone failed to reset the Apple II in the hatch every so often.
Ergo, it's probably some kind of Skinnerian behavior experiment.
If you click on the robin, and again on the next page, you'll get in a chatroom with a random stranger. Everyonce in a while, you will get to vote for either growing the chatroom to include more people, abandoning the chatroom, or keeping it like it is. Seems to be reddit's social experiment of the year.
Yesterday I managed to stay in group PrictsGo (since I abandoned they grew to #1 with more than 200 participants), it took me about 8 hours.
When we were like 20 or 30 a member from another merged group suggested to play 20 Questions and that was really fun. The conversation was very vivid until we grew to about 100 users and were joined by people with scripts.
I still dont understand the 140-symbols limit and a Twitter-like bird as a logo.
I don't like it. I liked the Button from last year A LOT. I really followed that. But this is too isolated, you can't really see what's going on elsewhere, just your own boring little room.
You need a massive volume for anything extraordinary good to emerge and you need the whole internet to judge.
Seems like another one of their abstract experiment things. I was taken to a sort of chat room where I had three buttons which all did nothing. Umm, fascinating.
Savor some sensible discussion while you're in a small chat... I felt some strange camaraderie with the original group of people I started with. Then got a bit sad when they got lost in the crowd and dropped out over time.
As with the button last year, people set up factions, appoint leaders and then abandon them as fast as they are created. But now, every time a majority in a room votes to GROW, two microcultures clash together. In most cases, they merge and grow further, which makes it difficult to retrace how some memes and behaviours originated. It also shows how the quality of the conversation decreases as more and more random people join in.
Hours since Robin was published, scripts for automation were made - pressing buttons, counting people, ignoring spammers. By now there are all kinds of bots, doing quizzes and creating word clouds, but mostly spamming. Some people started drawing on other websites, created new subreddits or wrote down their name and history in shared documents.
This was an eye opening experience for me, because it shows what may be possible with VR and what might happen once BCIs are perfected.