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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Could anyone give a short description what this is about? Right now neither the submission title nor the page is very informative.

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> 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.

From https://m.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/4cwi9o/whats_up....

Basically it's another Reddit social experiment.

Has anybody discovered any new command?

https://github.com/dorfsmay/reddit_robin_commands/tree/maste...

I wonder how large the largest group is? I was in one yesterday that had 30 people in it, but then had to abandon and go to work.

The largest currently active group is 2084[0,1] and the largest known group ever was somewhere in mid-4k[0]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/robintracking/comments/4czzo2/robin...

[1] Also, I'm in it.

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.

How were you able to vote while you were asleep?

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.

How do you mute users?

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.

"I automated my role in a social experiment and didn't have fun, AMA."

I was in one at 3500 yesterday, checking /r/robintracking today it looks the biggest is probably down to 2500-ish

hmm...Whatsapp groups should implement this, cause I need a socially safe way to eject out of all of them.

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).

[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

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.

> It seems Reddit has been intentionally vague as to what this is all about.

Their standard MO.

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.

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