24 hours later, "Finger on the App" game down to 81 people

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I expect this could go on for weeks with the most die hard duck taping their finger to the phone and having friends swipe their other finger while they sleep.

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Does the app work with fingerprints? Having several people working in shifts is not allowed, is it?

Looking at the screen shot of the app, the current prize value is visible to the player-- so it wont be a They Shoot Horses deception; the player will know what they are getting.

The prize award scheme is reminiscent of an (apocryphal?) Russian parable:
Man is told he can have any gift, and incidentally whatever he gets will also be given to his neighbor two-fold. For his gift, Man's request is: "Poke out one of my eyes."
[Thanks, @alwayslurking]

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This is eliciting feelings deep inside me that even I cannot explain…

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Phone screens can’t read fingerprints, so no. Serious players would obviously run this in shifts.

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What a wasteful app.

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It is a big thing in Singapore too…

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Not all phones, yet, anyway,

and

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Not just swipe - they would also need a friend to wipe.

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The version of that story I’ve heard was that your worst enemy would get double, so the request is to blind one of my eyes.

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You are not alone.

Perhaps, but it’s going to be an average, I’m not great at math, but if 81 people remaining say the reward should be $25,000 and 1,000 other people (or however many were in it from the start) say it should be $0 or close to $0, that should cut down that $25k pretty quick. Add to that if the voting isn’t made public, the company can say the votes were whatever it wants.

Pettiness? I thought I already pointed that out.

I know not everyone is petty. I attended a few years of college and took a good chunk of my life paying off that debt – and just last year I finished helping my oldest daughter pay off hers – but I would be extremely thankful if the government would forgive student loan debt for everyone else, even though I wouldn’t benefit from it.

But the fact no traction has been made toward that attainable goal, even in a pandemic where people are losing their jobs left and right, tells me that enough people aren’t like me that I shouldn’t expect them to be.

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     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

As opposed to your BoingBoing BBS title which is a prizeless “Keep your posts on the BBS” game.

Sounds like a psychological experiment. I imagine somewhere there is a team of grad students compiling data on responses.

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Those aren’t actually reading your fingerprint either. It’s marketing fluff for a capacitance measurement.

Robert Sheckley’s story “The Same to you Doubled” has a character offered a 3 wishes deal by an agent of Hell going door to door. His worst enemy (who he considered his best friend until he thought about it…) would get double whatever he wished for.

I would quote his third wish but it really would be too much of a spoiler :grin:

The show would be a lot more interesting if the truck wasn’t stationary. Just sayin’!

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Like this?

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I don’t know, I don’t think anyone of those poor slobs are going to be winners in that game.

Also, I’m a runner. I can imagine how uncomfortable it would be running dressed like that, with those shoes, and for no actual purpose. If Kim Jong-Un’s limo got attacked, they wouldn’t be able to actually do much, so they’re essentially meat shields that will die tired, sweaty, and uncomfortable.

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Yah, this idea is very old. Back in the 1970s and 1980s seemingly every week a mall, county fair, or car dealership was running a promotion like this. I think they fell out of favor after people starting getting heatstroke, dehydration, etc from it.

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