> 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.
> 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.
From https://m.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/4cwi9o/whats_up....
Basically it's another Reddit social experiment.