Once again, on my Discord server, I hosted a new thing that I’ve wanted to try, called a social experiment thank you YouTube for ruining these two words where I would bring the entire server that are used to everything being as anarchy as possible according to Discord Terms of Service, in to chaos with a bot that can predict your words using Perspective API. Afterwards, I had a survey with the people involved where they got questioned about the experiment, how they felt and so on. In total, 15 people took the time to answer, so let’s dive in to the answers.

Wait.. isn’t the server anarchy?

Yes, it is, however I wanted to test how the server with almost no rules would behave if a Discord bot with in-built rules joined in and just started punishing people for being bad. Short summarize, it went both good and bad. Many people protested by just getting the lowest score possible (350) while some other people joined in and wanted to keep a high score, in order to not lose permissions to things like Read Message History, Upload image, Embed URL, etc. (yes, there were actual punishments for being bad).

You can say that pretty much 33% of the people involved either enjoyed, hated or was unsure of how to feel about this.

Why even bother with the experiment?

I wanted to bring the situation of China implementing a system that scores people to attention in the server. Even if it was a bad taste in my part to punish people and just being an out-right dick of just letting the bot stay for days, I think the message pretty much got out about how terrible such system could particularly be in real life. You can read a bit more about that topic here (Wired.co.uk) if you’re interested.

How did the bot work in public

Simply put, if you behaved good, the bot complimented you and gave you a role higher (aka. level system).

However if you didn’t behave at all, the bot would give you minus points and warn you if you went down a level.

So what’s the results then…

Here are the results from people who answered no on the previous chart shown above:

As seen above, a lot of people did indeed hate the system of having a government bot have a virtual score on you as to how you behave, while people also hated the bot a lot for even being there, few still thought it was a great/interesting experiment to involve in the server.

Later on in the survey, I also asked the user on What's your honest opinion about the bot?. Every 15 users responded to this very question, and I will list them bellow in a text form with the user who wrote the “quote”.

I didn’t really care about it. Server felt the same to me, except people sometimes trying to farm credit for fun.
- VAC Efron#0001

Its shit
- bustnut33#6969

It was fun to see some people get to the bottom and then they couldn’t post anything >:D
- DrGrunt#9537

Annoying
- Soheab_#5757

I think it almost perfectly replicates the social system implemented in China, however it could be abused. Personally, it didn’t really matter to me as it didn’t affect my way of speaking, however I feel like many others were restricted by it. This does not correspond to my belief that everyone should have free speech (as long as it is within the law).
- PoroLovesSnacks#4269

It’s a good bot, well made, good idea to stop toxicity, you’ve put it on an anarchy server though
- vali.#1335

it was not too much of a deal for me, however it does create like a split in the servers society, as some people reach the bottom and can’t do shit, while others are just fine and enjoy the reward of being almost alone in #general_integrity
- Regaus#3007

I liked the bot on discord, testing to see how people will behave on a score based system. However… Having this in a whole country and it being exposed to the public on how you do, sounds terrible and exposing.
- mateo.#8929

Conclusion

In the end, the social credit system which would be implemented in China, is a horrible idea, letting people have a small taste of how it could possible be has in my opinion, brighten up a few people about how a country with such system could go badly.

According to the survey as well, people would love to have more experiments in the future, so if you would love to be a part of it, don’t hesitate to join here. 😊