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inconsistently reward people

plan for world domination #487.63b
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Every good pickupartist / guru / conperson knows that the best way to gain a dupe's alligiance is to inconsistently reward them for playing your game, kind of the way computers incosistently... oh well there goes the game.

So this is a design principle for software that exploits this already present aspect of web systems. There is always going to be some lag. But effectively lag works best if there are conflicting messages on the screen, moments of low latency, and mysterious freezes.

For instance, when you are downloading a printer driver and it is taking a long yime and tbe dialog says 75 minutes left and then all of the sudden you are rewarded with a sonorous bell and a flurry of motion on the screen and the download is completed and installed all in thr space od 15 seconds, you will feel a religious sence of privilagedness, rather than if the dialog had just said 30 seconds to download.

So this design principle for software takes a cue from the tradition of con artistry, social psychology and religious cult studies and builds allegiance with its users through a slow degradation of identity via inconsistancy of reward.

JesusHChrist, Oct 02 2013


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Annotation:







       // plan for world domination #487.63b //   

       [marked-for-tagline]
Alterother, Oct 02 2013
  

       You know, that would explain a lot about early versions of Windows. They conditioned you to expect it to crash on a regular basis, so you feel rewarded when it actually works for any period of time.
MechE, Oct 02 2013
  

       ... "early" versions ?
FlyingToaster, Oct 02 2013
  

       Initially I read pickupartist as pick-u-apart-ist. I think I'll coin that term for something.   

       And the war against Eastasia is going well, I presume?
RayfordSteele, Oct 03 2013
  

       I'm not bunning this until I see #.63a
Voice, Oct 05 2013
  

       63a was inconsistently lay off people as a way to get them to vote for your party, but that didn't play out well.
RayfordSteele, Oct 05 2013
  

       .63a was to inconsistently punish people as RS has stated. I tend to come out of the egg conservatively and then gain my wings on the second go round. A's are security-minded and B's are more liberal.   

       Parenthetically, as I was attempting to add this annotation, the browser froze 3 times, I had to restart the computer, I suffered unaccounted latencies and screen time outs, and then, all of the sudden, before I could hit the OK button, my favorite song started playing, gratuitous pornography videos popped up on screen without obscuring the annotation window, and my teledildonics device kicked into high gear, AND the OK button activated automatically, submitting this annotation without any manual action on my part, so either someone has already implemented the idea or we are just par for the course, and I can't tell which, but I dont care, praise the lord.
JesusHChrist, Oct 05 2013
  

       Jarod Lanier says in "You are not a Gadget" that some of the inconsistency of the interface (on the iPhone) that I am talking about here is due to Unix. Is that true? What would the solution be? He says Unix was an "open" solution to the closeness of Lisp, but brought with it issues, like the lag and inconsistency. Would Lisp style programming have given the iPhone a more reliable interface -- (thereby sacrificing the opportunity to use this "inconsistency of reward" scheme for world domination?)
JesusHChrist, Oct 10 2013
  

       Dunno about Lisp, but the first line of the last paragraph develops a speech impediment somewhere around "traditiin".
not_morrison_rm, Oct 12 2013
  


 

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