I was not very impressed with Group Hug, but I only perused the most recent of posts. Those were of bad taste and awful grammar. I'm sure there are reasons to find it addicting. Perhaps because the posts are so bad? Hm...

This sort of thing always reminds me of the system described in the first Cyberpunk novel, John C. Brunner's Shockwave Rider. It was a nationwide electronic communication system called Delphi which tapped into the national consciousness via a wagering and opinion polling system. Almost anything at all can be fed into the system and all citizens could weigh in with their opinion on the item. The government was using the system to be aware of the public opinions, many citzens were using it as a massive talk-show audience for feedback on their quotidian problems. The wagering portion of it allowed one to place such bets as "the mugging-per-adult rate in New York City would break ten percent this year" at double or treble figure odds.

Here's a quote from the book:

"It works, approximately, like this.

First you corner a large - if possible, a very large - number of people who, while they've never formally studied the subject you're going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct answer, are nonetheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.

Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epedemic which followed World War I, or how many loaves of bread were condemned by the EEC food inspectors as unfit for human consumption during June 1970.

Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded in almanacs, yearbooks and statistical returns.

It's rather as though this paradox has proven true: that while nobody knows what's going on around here, everybody knows what's going on around here.

Well, if it works for the past, why can't work for the future? 300 million people with access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees.

Unfortunately the most of them are running scared from the awful specter of tomorrow. How best to corner people who just do not want to know?

Greed works for some, and for others hope. And most of the remainder will never have any impact on the world to speak of."

You may recall that the U.S. government revealed back in July of 2003 that they had allocated nearly one million dollars to the prototyping of a system that would act as a futures market for terrorist attacks under the office of Total Information Awareness. The project was officially cancelled almost immediately after it was covered in the media, but I imagine there are similar things in development.

While E-admit is like the Delphi system, grouphug is actually closer to another artifact of Shockwave Rider, a toll-free anonymous confession line staffed by a secret group who promised to only listen to your confession and not give advice or call any authorities.

There are some obvious security risks with both systems of course, but going into those might spoil the book :)

I'm interested in this wabsite

The government was using the system to be aware of the public opinions, many citzens were using it as a massive talk-show audience for feedback on their quotidian problems.

s'ok. i've got another addiction now.