Free spins?

I actually thought the Reddit context was quite helpful. I wouldn’t have guessed that this would be particularly meaningful for people with a binge eating disorder.

Looks like a riff of the fake online shopping site. Kinda funny that the premise could be legit: All the novelty seeking and exploration behaviour and none of financial burden (or in this case, calories)

What fake online shopping site?

I like to tip my delivery person so they do not spit in my food.

God damn, the AI-generated pics.

Well, since it's a site for Artificial Food Ordering, why not use AI images.

I wonder how Baudrillard would think about all this.

I somehow want to make a brick and mortar shop with products with 5-digit price tags and the famous brands, but they're all fake, and visitors can pick and choose all the fancy products they want. They can then go to the cashier and go through a simulation of the purchase of all those products, but walk out with nothing... Or maybe even a receipt so you can look at it and pretend you just bought those things, hah.

"The keys to the Lamborghini Aventador, and a Louis Vuitton bag. That'll be 350,000 dollars. How will you pay, ah with the made-up cheque? Certainly sir!".

Charge $40 for half an hour of this sort of entertainment (or more for a virtual chequebook with a bigger account behind it), rake in the bucks...

There’s a thing with dopamine where it’s not actually about receiving the reward, it’s about doing the things that lead to the reward.

As weird as it sounds, going through the ordering process is all you need.

Well the context is that it was posted to a subreddit for people who struggle with binge eating. So I guess you can think of it as the equivalent of sucking on a lollipop when you're craving a cigarette.

NFTs instead of nothing? equally worthless, but you can pretend otherwise

That would be a fantastic art installation. In some places, landlords allow empty storefronts to be used for art.

You might get people to contribute satirical spins on different trends or designers.

I hope you or someone does it.

think window shopping

which upon writing I realized may not even be something folks born after 2010 have even heard of...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_shopping

Do you get anxious when you order at a restaurant? There is the same exact uncertainty there compared to ordering ahead by 10 minutes while you are on the way there.

The link is to the BingeEatingDisorder subreddit. From the link,

> I know that at least for me, the actual process of ordering food delivery is part of the addiction

So effectively a downtime session of D&D where everyone levels up and goes shopping for gear.

Whaaaaat?? In a world where brick and mortar retail has been almost completely replaced by Amazon and a handful of mega big-box retailers there's a market for people going through literally all of the steps required to shop local retail (including spending money)....to end up having purchased nothing? Are y'all on drugs??

There is a very different uncertainty with a far shorter loop to remedy any problems. I have never sat in a restaurant thinking that [any food delivery-specific failure mode] will arise.

We used to call that window shopping and it was free. Now get off my lawn!

shopping LARP

I'm seeing a business opportunity for a gambling site where it is extremely cheap to play, but the payout is always 0 dollars.

You've just invented the mobile games industry.

Hm, or even a gambling site that uses real money but where you always get your money back, eventually.

That would be interesting. Probably works best as a non-profit with donations or grants. Be a normal gambling setup, but with the expected value of all the games zero instead of negative. Advertise to existing gambling addicts. You might also be able to invert some of the dark patterns to encourage less addictive behaviour.

I expect the main threat would be that it might be possible to extract money with the system with clever statistical tricks.

There were fintechs that did this, I think yotta and one other that was acquired by a big bank. I think it was (is?) popular but if I remember correctly they lost customer funds because of Synapses failure and the way the customer funds were organized they weren’t insured.