Robin
redditblog.com
redditblog.com
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.
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'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
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.
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.
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.
2) No.
3) Until they are done shitposting.
4) Undetermined.
xNotch was also in the room. That was tons of fun.
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.
A lot of people took it as a game. You can grow, rumours of big rooms (100s even 1000s), how big can we grow to?
Few people were interested in chatting beyond trying to convince others to grow.
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.
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.
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).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/joinrobin
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11400112
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4cqyia/for_y...
Edit: formatting
Their standard MO.
Ergo, it's probably some kind of Skinnerian behavior experiment.
> 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.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/robintracking/comments/4czzo2/robin...
[1] Also, I'm in it.
https://github.com/dorfsmay/reddit_robin_commands/tree/maste...
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.
You need a massive volume for anything extraordinary good to emerge and you need the whole internet to judge.
'so gud Kappa'
It stinks of dynamic demand, or elastic compute...
...hopefully it helps in their quest to continue serving the drooling masses and being the 'front page' of the Internet.