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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand.

Are other people in the elevator operated by other actual users online, or are they randomly generated? Honestly, it's indistinguishable from random.

Are you supposed to be "conversing" with the other thought bubbles that appear? Using the 10 phrases you're allowed to use, which because they're meaningless you cannot tell whether someone is actually responding to your input or just a bot putting up phrases?

The sentiment is nice, but I have to say, 4 weeks to build this seems... unfortunate.

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my understanding is that "indistinguishable from random" and "meaningless ... bot putting up phrases" is the critique of small talk that this art piece is trying to get at?

Yes that's true -- but if the authors of this spent 4 weeks coding up something to allow people to input phrases and have them appear to others dynamically and have them "respond" (all of the complexity of a chat interface and backend), only to not be able to tell the difference between that and random non-interactive output... what was the point of all that work?

Maybe I'm not getting something about the UI that is obvious.

It was definitely a challenge to communicate that everyone was a human in there. (As far as humans can be trusted ;)

Later in the design we added some details to hopefully get that across to as many people as possible. The biggest being "connect to other humans" that bounces in over the elevator button before you can call it. The others are maybe a bit too tucked away in the info (?) area.

I think with the amount of traffic in the last 12hrs everyone does start to look like a bot though!

I mean, thanks for your effort, but I still am puzzled as to the purpose of making this a complex interactive conversation platform... when the phrases are not able to convey a conversation and it appears random to the participants. It's a lot of behind-the-scenes work / infrastructure for something that is... not useful as a conversational tool.

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