Oh there's no way this doesn't get reset multiple times before being shut down entirely. It's going to be flooded with "fuck spez" and 3rd party app logos and spez is going to have a temper...
Oh there's no way this doesn't get reset multiple times before being shut down entirely. It's going to be flooded with "fuck spez" and 3rd party app logos and spez is going to have a temper tantrum. And once that happens I look forward to a new heap of embarrassing articles about reddit dropping by EOD Friday.
Huh. This just spark an idea. I wonder if any protest groups are accepting account donations. I love the idea of the rotted corpse of my 10+ year old account turning into a spam zombie. A fitting...
Huh. This just spark an idea. I wonder if any protest groups are accepting account donations. I love the idea of the rotted corpse of my 10+ year old account turning into a spam zombie. A fitting end i think.
Judging by the screenshots the article has (trying not to give reddit boosted traffic), it appears that the efforts to make the Canadian flag have fared just as well this year as it did last time...
Judging by the screenshots the article has (trying not to give reddit boosted traffic), it appears that the efforts to make the Canadian flag have fared just as well this year as it did last time around.
Also, the growing black and white fuckspez/void is pretty nifty.
Huh, well that's cool. When did it start? As I type this it's not quite noon on the west coast of the US where reddit is located so I gotta imagine r/place has been live for, what, three or four...
Huh, well that's cool. When did it start? As I type this it's not quite noon on the west coast of the US where reddit is located so I gotta imagine r/place has been live for, what, three or four hours?
If I recall correctly, it started at 8AM central. I joined a discord group of the people who are making the little /r/save3rdpartyapps graphic in the middle of the image, and they've been working...
If I recall correctly, it started at 8AM central.
I joined a discord group of the people who are making the little /r/save3rdpartyapps graphic in the middle of the image, and they've been working furiously all morning, ha. I certainly won't be opening new.reddit or verifying my email in order to participate, but it's been fun to watch other people talk about it.
/r/place made sense the first time. A surprise, random experiment, that captivated the attention of the community and fostered an incredible piece of artwork. The fact that it ended gave it a bit...
/r/place made sense the first time. A surprise, random experiment, that captivated the attention of the community and fostered an incredible piece of artwork.
The fact that it ended gave it a bit of magic - there are a million clones of the same concept, and yet none of them capture any relevant attention because it is a never-ending slog, where you know your contribution will be erased in due time.
The second time, yeah, ok. 5 years had passed, and the demographic of reddit's audience was different.
But now they're going to repeat it every year, or just every time they have a controversy? Yeesh. Maybe people will contribute, but it feels as if they're sucking the magic dry.
It's not even April 1st. (Something something Diablo "out of season April Fools joke.") /r/Place was just one of many annual weird events created for Reddit's April Fools thing, which fell by the...
It's not even April 1st. (Something something Diablo "out of season April Fools joke.") /r/Place was just one of many annual weird events created for Reddit's April Fools thing, which fell by the wayside years ago. Recycling them was kind of rubbing in the fact that Reddit wasn't what it used to be in the first place. This just smells like bread and circuses to deflect attention from recent (and upcoming?) bad behavior.
On that note, the disappearance of elaborate April Fools jokes by major web sites is another sad way that the web has become more corporate and boring.
It does feel like April Fool's were just creative ideas by singular engineers like Josh Wardle, and now that they've left, there just aren't creative minds anymore.
It does feel like April Fool's were just creative ideas by singular engineers like Josh Wardle, and now that they've left, there just aren't creative minds anymore.
The biggest difference was that by the second time, the scripts, bots and puppet accounts where fully ready on day 1. The first time felt organic, it really was collaborative art. The second time...
The second time, yeah, ok. 5 years had passed, and the demographic of reddit's audience was different.
The biggest difference was that by the second time, the scripts, bots and puppet accounts where fully ready on day 1.
The first time felt organic, it really was collaborative art. The second time was a bot arms race, and the only thing collaborative was people discussing what sprites to load into their bot and where to get more donated accounts for the bot to place pixels faster...
It's just the latest in a long list of evidence that the current leadership either doesn't know or doesn't care about what the users on their site want. They have recently had a huge controversy,...
It's just the latest in a long list of evidence that the current leadership either doesn't know or doesn't care about what the users on their site want. They have recently had a huge controversy, so to brush it under the rug they're going to bring back something that was popular. They either don't know or don't care that the circumstances that made the thing popular in the first place are gone.
I agree. They're going to the well too many times. This was supposed to roll out on June 23rd for reddit's "cake day' but the environment was not hospitable so it was postponed. This time around...
I agree. They're going to the well too many times. This was supposed to roll out on June 23rd for reddit's "cake day' but the environment was not hospitable so it was postponed. This time around it feels like they're trying to throw a band aid on a gaping wound.
Think of it as a reddit application. It was extra functionality added to both the reddit website and apps that was initially part of their April Fools tech demos. Basically theres a giant canvas...
Think of it as a reddit application. It was extra functionality added to both the reddit website and apps that was initially part of their April Fools tech demos. Basically theres a giant canvas and users are able to set one pixel of the canvas to one of 8? colors. Once you set a pixel, there is a timer until youre allowed to set another pixel
It turned into people cooperating, often along subreddit lines, to make small piece of pixel art and others ruining/covering that art with their own. Wars were raged and and truces formed. Beautiful works of art were attacked and defended in coordinated waves. Honestly the whole thing was an immense amount of fun but I agree with @DefiantEmbassy, it feels like the magic behind it is gone if they run it too frequerntly
Wikipedia has a good description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/place Here is an Atlas of the first iteration: https://draemm.li/various/place-atlas/
Basically a huge canvas that every user of the site can place a coloured pixel on every 10 mins or so. The idea was that communities could come together and draw something related to them. Worked...
Basically a huge canvas that every user of the site can place a coloured pixel on every 10 mins or so. The idea was that communities could come together and draw something related to them. Worked great the first 2 times, but I don't think things are going to go so well now.
Its not the worst business move - they're able to turn all this stuff that looks great to investors Unique users, Page views, Time on page....all these things will theoretically skyrocket with an...
Its not the worst business move - they're able to turn all this stuff that looks great to investors
Unique users, Page views, Time on page....all these things will theoretically skyrocket with an r/place session. Most investors have no idea how Place will affect traffic or even what Place even is. Unless it hits the news cycle, theyll never know what was drawn on it. Theyll just see the numbers and think "wow, theyre the #9 (or whatever) site in the world and theyre still growing"
If you haven't yet seen any timelapses, check out https://www.reddit.com/r/TimelapsesofPlace/. There were some brilliant takeovers and reversals, including the animation of a fire being put out....
If you haven't yet seen any timelapses, check out https://www.reddit.com/r/TimelapsesofPlace/. There were some brilliant takeovers and reversals, including the animation of a fire being put out.
Edit: you can also see some on youtube if you don't want to drive traffic to reddit, but you can really, really zoom in on some of the gif versions to see details.
Honestly since the second time they ran it multiple other websites have tried to make clones of it, i.e. specific twitch streamers. Honestly it's just cheap and boring, I don't know what changed...
Honestly since the second time they ran it multiple other websites have tried to make clones of it, i.e. specific twitch streamers. Honestly it's just cheap and boring, I don't know what changed in the last 5 years or even the last year, but I don't want to spend my time making a collaborative art piece if they want to use it to advertise.
I guess back when anyone could get the data and create things themselves the relationship felt like a community rather than unpaid labor?
It's similar to Twitch Plays Pokemon. It's really a unique experiment you can do once before that novelty wares off. It sticks around too long and you have people start to metagame the magic out...
It's similar to Twitch Plays Pokemon. It's really a unique experiment you can do once before that novelty wares off. It sticks around too long and you have people start to metagame the magic out of the idea.
It was especially good the first time because it took time for people to coordinate and come together. Every other time it's just been bots fighting other bots.
It was especially good the first time because it took time for people to coordinate and come together.
Every other time it's just been bots fighting other bots.
They're doing it as a litmus test to see how many people are still engaging with the site, and to increase their traffic so they have something good to report to whoever is funding the nonsense...
They're doing it as a litmus test to see how many people are still engaging with the site, and to increase their traffic so they have something good to report to whoever is funding the nonsense (investors? not sure what their model looks like anymore). Their April 1st activities have always been about testing site traffic, and had the byproduct of creating delight within the community. This is pure and simple a meter stick - and any redditors who left because they disagree with the direction of the site but will go back to participate in r/place - even if they are drawing unflattering portraits of spez - will just add to their numbers.
The last time r/place happened, there was a "controversy", because a reddit admin removed a hate symbol from the canvas. But that was back before reddit started making a series of poorly advised...
The last time r/place happened, there was a "controversy", because a reddit admin removed a hate symbol from the canvas.
But that was back before reddit started making a series of poorly advised decisions to remove things users liked. Back then, most users had a more favorable view of the site than they do now. In thje context that we are operating in right now, I have a feeling that reddit is setting themselves up for another PR problem. This event has the potential to create more drama that will see the site shed even more users to the growing list of alternatives.
This time the canvas will have just one huge "API" written on it, and you bet an admin will again remove it, and there will be a "controversy" about it.
This time the canvas will have just one huge "API" written on it, and you bet an admin will again remove it, and there will be a "controversy" about it.
That would be funny. Is there a place where people might be coordinating something like this, preferably off Reddit so it can’t be banned by the site? edit: there's...
That would be funny. Is there a place where people might be coordinating something like this, preferably off Reddit so it can’t be banned by the site?
Since your link used www instead of old, Reddit won't let me view the subreddit due to “unreviewed content”. Proving the entire point of these protests.
Since your link used www instead of old, Reddit won't let me view the subreddit due to “unreviewed content”. Proving the entire point of these protests.
It wasn't a hate symbol, it was rdrama.net's marsey mascot. TBH the biggest mistake they made was doing it under a specific admin name - they should have known it'd be spotted and used a generic...
The last time r/place happened, there was a "controversy", because a reddit admin removed a hate symbol from the canvas.
It wasn't a hate symbol, it was rdrama.net's marsey mascot. TBH the biggest mistake they made was doing it under a specific admin name - they should have known it'd be spotted and used a generic reddit admin name.
Perhaps, but I'm hoping not. Iirc canvas requires coordination, and coordinating just for that seems wasteful. If it were to be deleted, it'd be trivial to rationalize. But if "API" gets deleted,...
Perhaps, but I'm hoping not. Iirc canvas requires coordination, and coordinating just for that seems wasteful. If it were to be deleted, it'd be trivial to rationalize. But if "API" gets deleted, media will pick it up and tear Spez a new one.
Legitimate hate symbols or just the logo for a trolling website willing to engage in high-effort pranks to highlight how gullible Redditors are? I don't remember there being drama over swastika...
Legitimate hate symbols or just the logo for a trolling website willing to engage in high-effort pranks to highlight how gullible Redditors are? I don't remember there being drama over swastika removal, but I also do not have a comprehensive knowledge of all drama across the whole internet.
I cannot find anything about it at all. In fact, when I Google that the first post that comes up is this Tildes post, which is the first time I've actually seen Tildes in a Google search. So we've...
I cannot find anything about it at all. In fact, when I Google that the first post that comes up is this Tildes post, which is the first time I've actually seen Tildes in a Google search. So we've got that going for us, which is nice.
As an ex-mod of a national subreddit I hate r/place with passion. It also makes sense that reddit will do it more often in the future. r/place brings a massive influx of new users who are not...
As an ex-mod of a national subreddit I hate r/place with passion. It also makes sense that reddit will do it more often in the future.
r/place brings a massive influx of new users who are not interested in content traditionally associated with reddit. We've seen unheard of spikes of subscriptions but it was driven solely by people interested in penis flag measuring contest. Those people created new reddit accounts, flooded our subreddit with calls to action and low effort screen shots of the canvas and mostly left immediately after the event ended.
The amount of new users and traffic this brings must be very attractive to reddit.
The only good thing that came out of it was that we opted to temporarily disable image submissions which increased content and discussion quality by a ton. Unfortunately the community wanted images back.
Why right now? They know they've squandered their reputation amongst power users, and their removal of awards didn't go well with the general public either. I'm sure they know /r/place is going to...
Why right now?
They know they've squandered their reputation amongst power users, and their removal of awards didn't go well with the general public either.
I'm sure they know /r/place is going to be covered in API/spez related stuff and that the press is going to report on it.
Memes aside, what's Reddit's goal here with having /r/place again so soon? I don't see how generating more negative press is going to help them for their IPO.
Jesus, that icon is hideous. I'm not a designer, but I'm pretty sure if they're going to do a stylized pixel icon, they should use bigger pixels so it looks obvious and quirky, instead of......
They're even going as far as to paywall the original app icon.
Jesus, that icon is hideous. I'm not a designer, but I'm pretty sure if they're going to do a stylized pixel icon, they should use bigger pixels so it looks obvious and quirky, instead of... whatever that is.
Also, it's practically satirical that they've paywalled the regular icon. The icon of the brutally and senselessly murdered Alien Blue is icing on the cake.
I don't think Reddit is being steered by people who are doing a particularly good job, so I think the goal is very straightforward. They want people to be engaging with the site more - since...
I don't think Reddit is being steered by people who are doing a particularly good job, so I think the goal is very straightforward. They want people to be engaging with the site more - since March, the pageviews have dropped by about A BILLION, going from ~5.5B to ~4.5B per Semrush so they are releasing something to drive engagement and increase pageviews. That's it. If it also makes people slightly happier, then I think they would accept that as well.
Or to be even more reductive, I imagine that in some steering committee, someone said something like, "How do we salvage something before this IPO? Our estimated valuation is tanking!" and someone else said, "People liked r/place, could we do that again?" and that's what they're trying out.
Edit: I read another comment that puts a bit of a more intelligent spin on it from Reddit's governing board:
I am a two-time Place-r and will not be participating. This, unfortunately, is a "Hail Mary" to show investors that even despite the Spez hate, they can still generate a huge audience.
Spez could care less if the entire thing was voided black with a single "F Spez" dead center. In fact, he's banking on it.
If millions of people engaged despite the rage, it tells investors something.
As an android user this is the most bizarre monetization scheme I've ever heard of. IOS users really pay to change the look of their app icon? Every Samsung user has that feature natively, and...
They're even going as far as to paywall the original app icon.
As an android user this is the most bizarre monetization scheme I've ever heard of. IOS users really pay to change the look of their app icon? Every Samsung user has that feature natively, and there's plenty of 3rd party apps to let you edit them yourselfs if you care strongly (non-root apps).
what's Reddit's goal here with having /r/place again so soon?
At this point I think they believe they can downplay the PR issues and simply need a surge of traffic to show off to shareholders. That's my only explanation.
I was so surprised by the specific icons that reddit chose to put behind a paywall that I didn't even realize how strange the concept is in the first place. I looked it up and it seems that you...
As an android user this is the most bizarre monetization scheme I've ever heard of. IOS users really pay to change the look of their app icon?
I was so surprised by the specific icons that reddit chose to put behind a paywall that I didn't even realize how strange the concept is in the first place.
I looked it up and it seems that you can technically use your own icons on iOS, but only on a shortcut version of the app rather than the app itself, and it's a bizarre cumbersome 17 step process. So essentially, you can't use your own icons. I swear, I will never stop randomly learning about weird limitations that iOS users deal with! All of my app icons are custom, I thought that was a given on any modern phone.
Ha. Funny thing is that this all legitimately would have blown over if they simply delayed all this to September or so and remained radio silent (as they usually do for most of the year). But no,...
Ha. Funny thing is that this all legitimately would have blown over if they simply delayed all this to September or so and remained radio silent (as they usually do for most of the year). But no, they decided to reveal their next attempt at rent seeking not even 2 weeks after rebelling against the moderators because "people come to reddit for community"... then remove a community feature without replacement.
At this rate the anger may not truly die down until summer ends.
I think I'll prepare some special homemade popcorn for this event. It's astonishing, I did not think reddit was going to make another unbelievably foolish announcement for at least a few more...
I think I'll prepare some special homemade popcorn for this event.
It's astonishing, I did not think reddit was going to make another unbelievably foolish announcement for at least a few more weeks or months. They just can't stop delivering drama and embarrassment, it's amazing.
I wish I had somewhere to discuss it though. Tildes is appropriate for a "hey this is happening" post like this, but I want a trashy drama thread to actually make fun of what transpires (and I have absolutely no desire for Tildes to be that place.) Squabbles will discuss it, but it's ... squabbles. I've lost all respect for /r/subredditdrama. My migration from reddit to Tildes has left me with an overall higher quality experience, but I need something else for some good internet drama, satire, pop culture discussion, and reality TV discussion. But I guess the /r/placeAPI subreddit/discord will be good enough for this event.
You can go to KBin's RedditMigration magazine if you don't mind the fediverse. That's more or less been my SubredditDrama replacement these past few months. (and ofc KBin is part of the...
but I want a trashy drama thread to actually make fun of what transpires (and I have absolutely no desire for Tildes to be that place.)
You can go to KBin's RedditMigration magazine if you don't mind the fediverse. That's more or less been my SubredditDrama replacement these past few months.
(and ofc KBin is part of the "threadiverse", so if you have Lemmy or some other instance you use you can connect that way instead of making a KBin account).
Without an API to coordinate large art pieces, id imagine its going to be a lot less cohesive. Also not to mention how the community is feeling about reddit admin. Overall, I just cannot see this...
Without an API to coordinate large art pieces, id imagine its going to be a lot less cohesive. Also not to mention how the community is feeling about reddit admin. Overall, I just cannot see this going as well as it did in the past.
Part of me really hopes it gets astroturfed with graffiti of 'fuck spez', pixel art of John Oliver and as much crudely drawn genitalia as possible, but Reddit's admins already have a precedent of...
Part of me really hopes it gets astroturfed with graffiti of 'fuck spez', pixel art of John Oliver and as much crudely drawn genitalia as possible, but Reddit's admins already have a precedent of breaking the event's rules for their own benefit and will undoubtedly override their own limits to censor protest. Don't be surprised if anybody seriously protesting the API changes gets a perma ban either.
Nonetheless, Spez has some serious fucking nerve to do /r/place again.
I never really cared about r/place, since I was never so deeply embedded into any community on Reddit that I felt inclined to coordinate any contributions. That said I was very happy when I got to...
I never really cared about r/place, since I was never so deeply embedded into any community on Reddit that I felt inclined to coordinate any contributions. That said I was very happy when I got to witness the Hello Internet flag war break out (nail and gear ftw!). I have a feeling that all the predictions of drama and chaos for this time around are damp squibs. From what I can tell, most of the people that cared about the API shenanigans have left Reddit, and the people that remain are either uncaring, or supremely hacked off that their subs haven't been fully reopened yet (r/unixporn is my best example of this). There might be a little bit of shitposting anti-Spez and anti-API sentiments, but generally I don't see this being the disaster that everyone is predicting/hoping it will be. And as has been pointed out: all publicity is good publicity.
Anyway, wake me up when they bring back r/thebutton.
If anyone else is salty at reddit for taking away 3rd party apps and your in the EU you should request your data from them, I requested mine a little over a month ago and it never showed so I made...
If anyone else is salty at reddit for taking away 3rd party apps and your in the EU you should request your data from them, I requested mine a little over a month ago and it never showed so I made a gdpr complaint against them.
Someone who's already participating in one of these "fuck spez" or that "never forget what they took from you [API]" projects (or any other "protest" projects) should set up some sort of...
Someone who's already participating in one of these "fuck spez" or that "never forget what they took from you [API]" projects (or any other "protest" projects) should set up some sort of livestream so we don't give reddit any traffic while observing how it's changing.
Oh wow. I'm glad they managed to pull it off. I've been following one of the discords coordinating their r/place efforts. And Bad Apple did keep getting attacked from time to time.
Oh wow. I'm glad they managed to pull it off. I've been following one of the discords coordinating their r/place efforts. And Bad Apple did keep getting attacked from time to time.
Place was originally an April fools event. You could go to /r/place and there was a giant canvas. You were allowed to place 1 pixel on the canvas every few minutes, so you had to coordinate with...
Place was originally an April fools event. You could go to /r/place and there was a giant canvas. You were allowed to place 1 pixel on the canvas every few minutes, so you had to coordinate with others to create some picture on the canvas. It was a bunch of chaos initially but turned into a mosaic of great art. There were battles and alliances over different sections of the canvas, and it was pretty fun and unique for the few days it lasted.
They brought it back for April fools again 5 years later, which was actually last year in 2022. The second time was still fun but more organized at the start. A long time had passed and none of the other April fools events were quite as good, imo, so this was a welcome return of /r/place. This time they also doubled the canvas size two times over the course of the event, so in the video you see it start in the top left corner (original canvas size), then expand to fill the top half (first doubling), and then expand to the entire screen (second doubling). At the end they disabled input and slowly turned all pixels to white. There was some controversy about them censoring some inappropriate portions of the canvas (I can’t recall the details).
Now if they are bringing it back again just a year later and not on April fools, it seems out of place (pun intended) and probably sort of desperate to drive traffic to the site. I’m not visiting Reddit to find out more, but I wonder if this means they’ve lost more active users and site traffic than they let on.
With all due respects, seeing Reddit mentioned here in light of recent events, leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. While it's nice for users to be in the know, purely for the sake of Tildes and...
With all due respects, seeing Reddit mentioned here in light of recent events, leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. While it's nice for users to be in the know, purely for the sake of Tildes and other users in the same boat, I personally would discourage Reddit-centric topics because, you know, this is Tildes after all. Is there a way to mute tags? I haven't been a user here for the longest time, coming from The Great Migration(TM), myself.
I can't parse the title of this post: "In the wider context of removing things users like it there could be drama" Should this say "Removing this well liked feature could upset users"? But if...
I can't parse the title of this post: "In the wider context of removing things users like it there could be drama"
Should this say "Removing this well liked feature could upset users"? But if that's the intention, why would it's return be upsetting?
I'm just going to remove that whole piece of the title. It's editorializing, and the OP mentions the same thing in their comment that's near the top of the comments section anyway.
I'm just going to remove that whole piece of the title. It's editorializing, and the OP mentions the same thing in their comment that's near the top of the comments section anyway.
They removed most third party apps. So adding a way for users to express their displeasure by something like r/place means some users are going to do just that.
They removed most third party apps. So adding a way for users to express their displeasure by something like r/place means some users are going to do just that.
Basically, there's a lot of very mad reddit power users right now because of recent changes to the API, awards system, and certain admin/mod interactions. Bringing back r/place is giving a canvas...
I can't parse the title of this post: "In the wider context of removing things users like it there could be drama"
Basically, there's a lot of very mad reddit power users right now because of recent changes to the API, awards system, and certain admin/mod interactions. Bringing back r/place is giving a canvas to those users, who will organize to vent their spleens all over it.
In previous iterations, this resulted in things like r/miata coordinating to create an image of a miata with their sub name under it. This time? I'd expect the coordinated art to be a bit more... colourful.
That's not what's happening. They stopped selling reddit coins last Thursday. And existing Reddit coins are about to be useless on September 12th so redditors are burning through their supply. So...
edit: I find it ridiculous reddit users are paying for the stupid awards just to tell the admin of the site to fuck off.
Big brain plays, for sure.
That's not what's happening. They stopped selling reddit coins last Thursday. And existing Reddit coins are about to be useless on September 12th so redditors are burning through their supply. So it's all from existing reddit premium subscriptions or coins they received for being awarded by other users. No new money has been spent.
Does anyone have any thoughts as to why the awards system and coins and all that are being removed? Seems like a loss of revenue for reddit. Even if it doesn't bring in much money, still seems...
Does anyone have any thoughts as to why the awards system and coins and all that are being removed? Seems like a loss of revenue for reddit. Even if it doesn't bring in much money, still seems like an arbitrary change, and I can't see how it would be worth the effort to remove.
"While Reddit hasn’t specified what the new system might look like, Android Authority may have dug up some clues. Based on code in the Reddit’s Android app, Reddit appears to be working on a “contributor program” that would let users cash out gold or karma (basically, points you get for posts, comments, or giving awards) they receive into real money."
Oh there's no way this doesn't get reset multiple times before being shut down entirely. It's going to be flooded with "fuck spez" and 3rd party app logos and spez is going to have a temper tantrum. And once that happens I look forward to a new heap of embarrassing articles about reddit dropping by EOD Friday.
There are already lots of groups coordinating it in discords.
Huh. This just spark an idea. I wonder if any protest groups are accepting account donations. I love the idea of the rotted corpse of my 10+ year old account turning into a spam zombie. A fitting end i think.
Well, Day 1 is going about as expected.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23801716/reddits-r-place-protest-art
Judging by the screenshots the article has (trying not to give reddit boosted traffic), it appears that the efforts to make the Canadian flag have fared just as well this year as it did last time around.
Also, the growing black and white fuckspez/void is pretty nifty.
I wish I still had a reddit account just to contribute to this. I have no idea how they think this is going to go any other way.
I think they know, but they don't care. This is all about boosting engagement metrics pre-IPO.
Oh yeah, there's like a whole... 8th? of the screen that just says fuck spez repeatedly.
Huh, well that's cool. When did it start? As I type this it's not quite noon on the west coast of the US where reddit is located so I gotta imagine r/place has been live for, what, three or four hours?
If I recall correctly, it started at 8AM central.
I joined a discord group of the people who are making the little /r/save3rdpartyapps graphic in the middle of the image, and they've been working furiously all morning, ha. I certainly won't be opening new.reddit or verifying my email in order to participate, but it's been fun to watch other people talk about it.
There was at one point a guillotine with spez's name on the shopping block at the left side on a french flag.
/r/place made sense the first time. A surprise, random experiment, that captivated the attention of the community and fostered an incredible piece of artwork.
The fact that it ended gave it a bit of magic - there are a million clones of the same concept, and yet none of them capture any relevant attention because it is a never-ending slog, where you know your contribution will be erased in due time.
The second time, yeah, ok. 5 years had passed, and the demographic of reddit's audience was different.
But now they're going to repeat it every year, or just every time they have a controversy? Yeesh. Maybe people will contribute, but it feels as if they're sucking the magic dry.
It's not even April 1st. (Something something Diablo "out of season April Fools joke.") /r/Place was just one of many annual weird events created for Reddit's April Fools thing, which fell by the wayside years ago. Recycling them was kind of rubbing in the fact that Reddit wasn't what it used to be in the first place. This just smells like bread and circuses to deflect attention from recent (and upcoming?) bad behavior.
On that note, the disappearance of elaborate April Fools jokes by major web sites is another sad way that the web has become more corporate and boring.
Honestly them using r/place outside of April 1st screams of desperation for positive PR and new users and traffic.
It does feel like April Fool's were just creative ideas by singular engineers like Josh Wardle, and now that they've left, there just aren't creative minds anymore.
/u/powerlanguage is Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle? Holy shit, I had no idea.
Sadly the account doesn't seem to be active anymore. He's probably busy cruising the Caribbean off all that sweet, sweet NYT money.
I didn't even check if there was a Tildes account! But I remember him from his time at reddit.
I used to look forward to Blizzard's April Fools announcements. I don't even check anymore, they're usually so dull now.
The biggest difference was that by the second time, the scripts, bots and puppet accounts where fully ready on day 1.
The first time felt organic, it really was collaborative art. The second time was a bot arms race, and the only thing collaborative was people discussing what sprites to load into their bot and where to get more donated accounts for the bot to place pixels faster...
It's just the latest in a long list of evidence that the current leadership either doesn't know or doesn't care about what the users on their site want. They have recently had a huge controversy, so to brush it under the rug they're going to bring back something that was popular. They either don't know or don't care that the circumstances that made the thing popular in the first place are gone.
I agree. They're going to the well too many times. This was supposed to roll out on June 23rd for reddit's "cake day' but the environment was not hospitable so it was postponed. This time around it feels like they're trying to throw a band aid on a gaping wound.
What was the content on r/Place? I never heard of it before.
Think of it as a reddit application. It was extra functionality added to both the reddit website and apps that was initially part of their April Fools tech demos. Basically theres a giant canvas and users are able to set one pixel of the canvas to one of 8? colors. Once you set a pixel, there is a timer until youre allowed to set another pixel
It turned into people cooperating, often along subreddit lines, to make small piece of pixel art and others ruining/covering that art with their own. Wars were raged and and truces formed. Beautiful works of art were attacked and defended in coordinated waves. Honestly the whole thing was an immense amount of fun but I agree with @DefiantEmbassy, it feels like the magic behind it is gone if they run it too frequerntly
Wikipedia has a good description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/place
Here is an Atlas of the first iteration: https://draemm.li/various/place-atlas/
Thanks for the link.
I was there. Good times.
Basically a huge canvas that every user of the site can place a coloured pixel on every 10 mins or so. The idea was that communities could come together and draw something related to them. Worked great the first 2 times, but I don't think things are going to go so well now.
I went to r/Place to see and almost all of the comments I saw were "API" or "Fuck u/Spez." So, yeah, not going too well.
predictable. But I guess reddit is currently operating off of "no such thing as bad publicity" lately.
Its not the worst business move - they're able to turn all this stuff that looks great to investors
Unique users, Page views, Time on page....all these things will theoretically skyrocket with an r/place session. Most investors have no idea how Place will affect traffic or even what Place even is. Unless it hits the news cycle, theyll never know what was drawn on it. Theyll just see the numbers and think "wow, theyre the #9 (or whatever) site in the world and theyre still growing"
If you haven't yet seen any timelapses, check out https://www.reddit.com/r/TimelapsesofPlace/. There were some brilliant takeovers and reversals, including the animation of a fire being put out.
Edit: you can also see some on youtube if you don't want to drive traffic to reddit, but you can really, really zoom in on some of the gif versions to see details.
Honestly since the second time they ran it multiple other websites have tried to make clones of it, i.e. specific twitch streamers. Honestly it's just cheap and boring, I don't know what changed in the last 5 years or even the last year, but I don't want to spend my time making a collaborative art piece if they want to use it to advertise.
I guess back when anyone could get the data and create things themselves the relationship felt like a community rather than unpaid labor?
It's similar to Twitch Plays Pokemon. It's really a unique experiment you can do once before that novelty wares off. It sticks around too long and you have people start to metagame the magic out of the idea.
It was especially good the first time because it took time for people to coordinate and come together.
Every other time it's just been bots fighting other bots.
They're doing it as a litmus test to see how many people are still engaging with the site, and to increase their traffic so they have something good to report to whoever is funding the nonsense (investors? not sure what their model looks like anymore). Their April 1st activities have always been about testing site traffic, and had the byproduct of creating delight within the community. This is pure and simple a meter stick - and any redditors who left because they disagree with the direction of the site but will go back to participate in r/place - even if they are drawing unflattering portraits of spez - will just add to their numbers.
The only winning move is not to play.
The last time r/place happened, there was a "controversy", because a reddit admin removed a hate symbol from the canvas.
But that was back before reddit started making a series of poorly advised decisions to remove things users liked. Back then, most users had a more favorable view of the site than they do now. In thje context that we are operating in right now, I have a feeling that reddit is setting themselves up for another PR problem. This event has the potential to create more drama that will see the site shed even more users to the growing list of alternatives.
This time the canvas will have just one huge "API" written on it, and you bet an admin will again remove it, and there will be a "controversy" about it.
That would be funny. Is there a place where people might be coordinating something like this, preferably off Reddit so it can’t be banned by the site?
edit: there's https://www.reddit.com/r/PlaceAPI/ on reddit now and https://discord.gg/KeH5PzUN on discord
Since your link used www instead of old, Reddit won't let me view the subreddit due to “unreviewed content”. Proving the entire point of these protests.
https://old.reddit.com/r/PlaceAPI/
Odd, it works for me in a private window. I've never seen an "unreviewed content" error before, is this a new thing?
Are you on desktop or mobile? I got the error when in the Safari view inside the Surfboard app.
I just got it on mobile.
Using Firefox on Android. Get the error in normal and private tabs.
There's a Discord supposedly.
Make it a gallery of cute orange kittens all meowing the word API.
It wasn't a hate symbol, it was rdrama.net's marsey mascot. TBH the biggest mistake they made was doing it under a specific admin name - they should have known it'd be spotted and used a generic reddit admin name.
Edit: link. Site is definitely NSFW. https://rdrama.net/h/museumofrdrama/post/57538/drama-on-place-complete-recap
I am expecting a collection of biologically infeasible references to Spez, myself.
Perhaps, but I'm hoping not. Iirc canvas requires coordination, and coordinating just for that seems wasteful. If it were to be deleted, it'd be trivial to rationalize. But if "API" gets deleted, media will pick it up and tear Spez a new one.
Legitimate hate symbols or just the logo for a trolling website willing to engage in high-effort pranks to highlight how gullible Redditors are? I don't remember there being drama over swastika removal, but I also do not have a comprehensive knowledge of all drama across the whole internet.
I cannot find anything about it at all. In fact, when I Google that the first post that comes up is this Tildes post, which is the first time I've actually seen Tildes in a Google search. So we've got that going for us, which is nice.
https://rdrama.net/h/museumofrdrama/post/57538/drama-on-place-complete-recap (NSFW)
As an ex-mod of a national subreddit I hate r/place with passion. It also makes sense that reddit will do it more often in the future.
r/place brings a massive influx of new users who are not interested in content traditionally associated with reddit. We've seen unheard of spikes of subscriptions but it was driven solely by people interested in
penisflag measuring contest. Those people created new reddit accounts, flooded our subreddit with calls to action and low effort screen shots of the canvas and mostly left immediately after the event ended.The amount of new users and traffic this brings must be very attractive to reddit.
The only good thing that came out of it was that we opted to temporarily disable image submissions which increased content and discussion quality by a ton. Unfortunately the community wanted images back.
Why right now?
They know they've squandered their reputation amongst power users, and their removal of awards didn't go well with the general public either.
I'm sure they know /r/place is going to be covered in API/spez related stuff and that the press is going to report on it.
They're even going as far as to paywall the original app icon.
Memes aside, what's Reddit's goal here with having /r/place again so soon? I don't see how generating more negative press is going to help them for their IPO.
Jesus, that icon is hideous. I'm not a designer, but I'm pretty sure if they're going to do a stylized pixel icon, they should use bigger pixels so it looks obvious and quirky, instead of... whatever that is.
Also, it's practically satirical that they've paywalled the regular icon. The icon of the brutally and senselessly murdered Alien Blue is icing on the cake.
I...what. Who does this?
...Oh, right, a company that went in hard on NFTs, that's who.
I don't think Reddit is being steered by people who are doing a particularly good job, so I think the goal is very straightforward. They want people to be engaging with the site more - since March, the pageviews have dropped by about A BILLION, going from ~5.5B to ~4.5B per Semrush so they are releasing something to drive engagement and increase pageviews. That's it. If it also makes people slightly happier, then I think they would accept that as well.
Or to be even more reductive, I imagine that in some steering committee, someone said something like, "How do we salvage something before this IPO? Our estimated valuation is tanking!" and someone else said, "People liked r/place, could we do that again?" and that's what they're trying out.
Edit: I read another comment that puts a bit of a more intelligent spin on it from Reddit's governing board:
As an android user this is the most bizarre monetization scheme I've ever heard of. IOS users really pay to change the look of their app icon? Every Samsung user has that feature natively, and there's plenty of 3rd party apps to let you edit them yourselfs if you care strongly (non-root apps).
At this point I think they believe they can downplay the PR issues and simply need a surge of traffic to show off to shareholders. That's my only explanation.
I was so surprised by the specific icons that reddit chose to put behind a paywall that I didn't even realize how strange the concept is in the first place.
I looked it up and it seems that you can technically use your own icons on iOS, but only on a shortcut version of the app rather than the app itself, and it's a bizarre cumbersome 17 step process. So essentially, you can't use your own icons. I swear, I will never stop randomly learning about weird limitations that iOS users deal with! All of my app icons are custom, I thought that was a given on any modern phone.
Regular /r/tildes invite threads just started back up... now we're probably going to have to turn them off again for a couple of weeks. :/
Ha. Funny thing is that this all legitimately would have blown over if they simply delayed all this to September or so and remained radio silent (as they usually do for most of the year). But no, they decided to reveal their next attempt at rent seeking not even 2 weeks after rebelling against the moderators because "people come to reddit for community"... then remove a community feature without replacement.
At this rate the anger may not truly die down until summer ends.
I think I'll prepare some special homemade popcorn for this event.
It's astonishing, I did not think reddit was going to make another unbelievably foolish announcement for at least a few more weeks or months. They just can't stop delivering drama and embarrassment, it's amazing.
I wish I had somewhere to discuss it though. Tildes is appropriate for a "hey this is happening" post like this, but I want a trashy drama thread to actually make fun of what transpires (and I have absolutely no desire for Tildes to be that place.) Squabbles will discuss it, but it's ... squabbles. I've lost all respect for /r/subredditdrama. My migration from reddit to Tildes has left me with an overall higher quality experience, but I need something else for some good internet drama, satire, pop culture discussion, and reality TV discussion. But I guess the /r/placeAPI subreddit/discord will be good enough for this event.
You can go to KBin's RedditMigration magazine if you don't mind the fediverse. That's more or less been my SubredditDrama replacement these past few months.
(and ofc KBin is part of the "threadiverse", so if you have Lemmy or some other instance you use you can connect that way instead of making a KBin account).
I was thinking that would probably be the direction to head, and I have nothing against the fediverse, but I didn't know where to start. Thanks!
Without an API to coordinate large art pieces, id imagine its going to be a lot less cohesive. Also not to mention how the community is feeling about reddit admin. Overall, I just cannot see this going as well as it did in the past.
Did Place ever have an official API, or did people just reverse-engineer it? I distinctly remember it being the latter.
I must be misremembering then. Thanks for pointing it out.
Part of me really hopes it gets astroturfed with graffiti of 'fuck spez', pixel art of John Oliver and as much crudely drawn genitalia as possible, but Reddit's admins already have a precedent of breaking the event's rules for their own benefit and will undoubtedly override their own limits to censor protest. Don't be surprised if anybody seriously protesting the API changes gets a perma ban either.
Nonetheless, Spez has some serious fucking nerve to do /r/place again.
r/place's 2022 return already seemed like a huge "let's recapture the good old days" thing, but this is a whole new level.
I never really cared about r/place, since I was never so deeply embedded into any community on Reddit that I felt inclined to coordinate any contributions. That said I was very happy when I got to witness the Hello Internet flag war break out (nail and gear ftw!). I have a feeling that all the predictions of drama and chaos for this time around are damp squibs. From what I can tell, most of the people that cared about the API shenanigans have left Reddit, and the people that remain are either uncaring, or supremely hacked off that their subs haven't been fully reopened yet (r/unixporn is my best example of this). There might be a little bit of shitposting anti-Spez and anti-API sentiments, but generally I don't see this being the disaster that everyone is predicting/hoping it will be. And as has been pointed out: all publicity is good publicity.
Anyway, wake me up when they bring back r/thebutton.
If anyone else is salty at reddit for taking away 3rd party apps and your in the EU you should request your data from them, I requested mine a little over a month ago and it never showed so I made a gdpr complaint against them.
r/place has begun and there's a lot of fuck spez already
Someone who's already participating in one of these "fuck spez" or that "never forget what they took from you [API]" projects (or any other "protest" projects) should set up some sort of livestream so we don't give reddit any traffic while observing how it's changing.
I just looked at the subreddit and saw Bad Apple recreated in r/place. Even if it was made only by bots, I can't help but feel in awe.
Oh wow. I'm glad they managed to pull it off. I've been following one of the discords coordinating their r/place efforts. And Bad Apple did keep getting attacked from time to time.
They are so tone deaf at this point that it’d be hilarious if it wasn’t this sad.
They just really want to do their PR-disaster hole ever so deeper.
As a 10-year Reddit user, somehow I never stumbled into /r/place. Can someone give me an ELI10?
Place was originally an April fools event. You could go to /r/place and there was a giant canvas. You were allowed to place 1 pixel on the canvas every few minutes, so you had to coordinate with others to create some picture on the canvas. It was a bunch of chaos initially but turned into a mosaic of great art. There were battles and alliances over different sections of the canvas, and it was pretty fun and unique for the few days it lasted.
Here is a timelapse video: https://youtu.be/-dKb81sdAK4
They brought it back for April fools again 5 years later, which was actually last year in 2022. The second time was still fun but more organized at the start. A long time had passed and none of the other April fools events were quite as good, imo, so this was a welcome return of /r/place. This time they also doubled the canvas size two times over the course of the event, so in the video you see it start in the top left corner (original canvas size), then expand to fill the top half (first doubling), and then expand to the entire screen (second doubling). At the end they disabled input and slowly turned all pixels to white. There was some controversy about them censoring some inappropriate portions of the canvas (I can’t recall the details).
Here’s a timelapse from 2022: https://youtu.be/DYWLXqQLA5I
Now if they are bringing it back again just a year later and not on April fools, it seems out of place (pun intended) and probably sort of desperate to drive traffic to the site. I’m not visiting Reddit to find out more, but I wonder if this means they’ve lost more active users and site traffic than they let on.
With all due respects, seeing Reddit mentioned here in light of recent events, leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. While it's nice for users to be in the know, purely for the sake of Tildes and other users in the same boat, I personally would discourage Reddit-centric topics because, you know, this is Tildes after all. Is there a way to mute tags? I haven't been a user here for the longest time, coming from The Great Migration(TM), myself.
You want this page: Define topic tag filters
Big thank you, mat!
I can't parse the title of this post: "In the wider context of removing things users like it there could be drama"
Should this say "Removing this well liked feature could upset users"? But if that's the intention, why would it's return be upsetting?
I'm just going to remove that whole piece of the title. It's editorializing, and the OP mentions the same thing in their comment that's near the top of the comments section anyway.
They removed most third party apps. So adding a way for users to express their displeasure by something like r/place means some users are going to do just that.
Basically, there's a lot of very mad reddit power users right now because of recent changes to the API, awards system, and certain admin/mod interactions. Bringing back r/place is giving a canvas to those users, who will organize to vent their spleens all over it.
In previous iterations, this resulted in things like r/miata coordinating to create an image of a miata with their sub name under it. This time? I'd expect the coordinated art to be a bit more... colourful.
"In the wider context of removing things users like, there could be drama."
I logged into Reddit to upvote the top comment, then left.
Bread and circuses?
I find it ridiculous reddit users are paying for the stupid awards just to tell the admin of the site to fuck off. Big brain plays, for sure.That's not what's happening. They stopped selling reddit coins last Thursday. And existing Reddit coins are about to be useless on September 12th so redditors are burning through their supply. So it's all from existing reddit premium subscriptions or coins they received for being awarded by other users. No new money has been spent.
Does anyone have any thoughts as to why the awards system and coins and all that are being removed? Seems like a loss of revenue for reddit. Even if it doesn't bring in much money, still seems like an arbitrary change, and I can't see how it would be worth the effort to remove.
Here is the relevant text from this article:
Oh, huh. Consider me educated.
Tbh it was quite stupid for anyone to even buy those in first place, but hey, hindsight and all.