
Clickbait in the Physical World: A Social Experiment - anishathalye
http://www.anishathalye.com/2015/02/20/clickbait-in-the-physical-world/
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ozh
Fun stuff :)

IMHO the fact that "mocha" got the highest engagement also shows that it's the
most easy word to type, as opposed to, say, "macchiato"

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pbhjpbhj
Yes, I'm wondering if "mocha" was just most guessed.

Also, didn't anyone at CSAIL write a simple bot to try all the coffee types
(eg the list here -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coffee_drinks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coffee_drinks))?
Or perhaps the most prolific link follower did but just disguised it well??

In order to rule out _simple_ guesses you could have used a code after the
coffee name - "/mocha64", "/espresso42", etc.. Without that any analysis of
the geographic preference is immediately muddied. Could have chalked the
entire board as a giant QR code .. obviously you'll need to design a chalk
board plotter first.

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ArekDymalski
QR was also a first thought that came to my head. You could also use simple,
popular and _unrelated_ words, i.e.: sock, mind, late etc. as well as provide
hints that it's actually Chalk (!) Chase not guessing game.

It all boils down to the fact the you "didn’t really have any concrete
hypotheses".

However it's interesting. It would be great to find out the conditions in
which people will be most engaged in looking for the next info. But there
would be sooo many variables to control ...

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anishathalye
Yeah, in hindsight, it would have been a good idea to have hard-to-guess URLs
to help with controls. I like the idea of using URLs like "/mocha64" \-- could
have kept the theme of coffee while filtering out some noise in the data.

There are so many variables to control, things that I hadn't thought about
before writing the URLs. The guessable URL part was perhaps one that I should
have caught, but there were so many other things. I know that people did
things like taking pictures of the boards and sending them to social group
chats that they were part of, which is something I never thought of before
seeing/hearing about it happening on Friday.

