4chan apparently faked bieber having cancer and got some fans to cut their hair off.
On 4chan, I just saw someone say “We rolled to see which celebrity’s fans we’d troll into thinking said celebrity had cancer. One thing lead to another.”
That got me thinking about the whole “rolling” thing. If you’re not familiar, on 4chan every post has a sequence number. The /b/ board is fast enough that you can’t really predict the numbers. Having an authoritative common-knowledge source of randomness available for literally zero effort has led to some interesting coordination strategies and community norms.
There’s lots of interesting ways that gets used, but right now, the coordination thing is what interests me. Some interesting observations:
People second ideas, quote them, edit them, etc, such that there is an evolving pool of ideas with probability of winning proportional to popularity (bypasses a lot of the crap in voting systems).
The cost of creating new ideas or minor variations is zero.
Absence of the normal incentives to vote strategically; you put forth your best idea. (There is the consideration of optimizing your idea for getting seconded.)
No complex counting algorithm. As soon as the winning idea is posted, everyone knows it and starts acting on it.
Anways, I thought that might be interesting. I’d like to see some more work on this.
Probabilistic Voting
4chan apparently faked bieber having cancer and got some fans to cut their hair off.
On 4chan, I just saw someone say “We rolled to see which celebrity’s fans we’d troll into thinking said celebrity had cancer. One thing lead to another.”
That got me thinking about the whole “rolling” thing. If you’re not familiar, on 4chan every post has a sequence number. The /b/ board is fast enough that you can’t really predict the numbers. Having an authoritative common-knowledge source of randomness available for literally zero effort has led to some interesting coordination strategies and community norms.
There’s lots of interesting ways that gets used, but right now, the coordination thing is what interests me. Some interesting observations:
People second ideas, quote them, edit them, etc, such that there is an evolving pool of ideas with probability of winning proportional to popularity (bypasses a lot of the crap in voting systems).
The cost of creating new ideas or minor variations is zero.
Absence of the normal incentives to vote strategically; you put forth your best idea. (There is the consideration of optimizing your idea for getting seconded.)
No complex counting algorithm. As soon as the winning idea is posted, everyone knows it and starts acting on it.
Anways, I thought that might be interesting. I’d like to see some more work on this.