An excerpt from the Washington Post -
See the cool kids lined up outside that new restaurant? This app pays them to stand there.
By Peter Holley
Pretend for a moment that you’re walking through your neighborhood and notice a line of people wrapped around the block outside a newly opened restaurant.
Local food bloggers haven’t written about the venue, so you assume the trendy-looking crowd must be the result of contagious, word-of-mouth buzz.
There was a time when that may have been undoubtedly true — when you could trust that a crowd of people was, in fact, a naturally occurring mass of individuals.
But that time may be passing thanks to Surkus, an emerging app that allowed the restaurant to quickly manufacture its ideal crowd and pay the people to stand in place like extras on a movie set. They’ve even been hand-picked by a casting agent of sorts, an algorithmic one that selects each person according to age, location, style and Facebook “likes.”
They may look excited, but that could also be part of the production. Acting disengaged while they idle in line could tarnish their “reputation score,” an identifier that influences whether they’ll be “cast” again. Nobody is forcing the participants to stay, of course, but if they leave, they won’t be paid — their movements are being tracked with geolocation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/08/16/see-the-hipsters-lined-up-outside-that-new-restaurant-this-app-pays-them-to-stand-there/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories-2_surkus-110pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.1c5a42e841a7
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