
Robin - Garbage
http://www.redditblog.com/2016/04/robin.html
======
7373737373
An incredible idea. This is memetics in action.

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
What's a BCI, and how does VR affect this?

~~~
iyn
I'd assume that in this context, BCI stands for Brain Computer Interface.

~~~
7373737373
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'm reminded of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number)

~~~
fit2rule
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.

~~~
7373737373
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](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/](http://integratedinformationtheory.org/),
which takes an axiomatic approach, but estimating the effects for large
networks seems to be too difficult as of now.

------
soared
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.

~~~
spyspy
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.

~~~
famfamfam
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.

~~~
mintplant
That sounds like a lot of fun!

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.

------
xg15
Could anyone give a short description what this is about? Right now neither
the submission title nor the page is very informative.

~~~
traek
> 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...](https://m.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/4cwi9o/whats_up_with_the_robin_button_on_rall/d1m1dvc).

Basically it's another Reddit social experiment.

~~~
randycupertino
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.

~~~
sahara
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.

~~~
vectorpush
How were you able to vote while you were asleep?

~~~
sahara
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.

~~~
dorfsmay
How do you mute users?

------
riffic
Pretty sure that this was named and inspired by Robin Dunbar, of Dunbar's
Number fame -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Dunbar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Dunbar)

------
forlorn
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.

------
Implicated
I had enough attention span to make it to a room of 4 before I bailed. Even
after we had all voted we had to wait out the ballot timeout.

------
neals
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.

------
lowglow
Chat roulette for reddit?

~~~
dorfsmay
Wasn't chat roulette one on one only?

~~~
lowglow
Yeah, now I get it. It's like progressively larger group chat roulette.

------
tychuz
So, wait 1 hour (while channel grows) to get twitch chat?

'so gud Kappa'

------
mianosm
There is a pi symbol on the bottom right of every page.

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
That link is at the bottom of every reddit page.

------
draw_down
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.

------
maxpert
Already growing :D

------
kordless
BRUSH DID 911. CLEVE THE MEME.

------
monkmartinez
Room I am in is up to 4... YYYUUUGGGEEE!

~~~
cing
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.

~~~
jedberg
Every time I played the discussion devolved into "dank memes" after we hit
about 10+ :(

~~~
Retra
The world is ruled by children.

