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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
[+] [-] 7373737373|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soared|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PaulRobinson|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spyspy|10 years ago|reply
xNotch was also in the room. That was tons of fun.
[+] [-] isaacremuant|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] themagician|10 years ago|reply
2) No.
3) Until they are done shitposting.
4) Undetermined.
[+] [-] xg15|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] traek|10 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] apeace|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] levesque|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riffic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forlorn|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Implicated|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neals|10 years ago|reply
You need a massive volume for anything extraordinary good to emerge and you need the whole internet to judge.
[+] [-] lowglow|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorfsmay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tychuz|10 years ago|reply
'so gud Kappa'
[+] [-] mianosm|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dorfsmay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riffic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draw_down|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxpert|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kordless|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkmartinez|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cing|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kevin_S|10 years ago|reply