r/Place was such a beautiful thing. It only lasted like 3 days. But I've missed it ever since. Final version: https://i.redd.it/wc436nf7fdpy.png And here there's a timelapse where you can notice...
r/Place was such a beautiful thing. It only lasted like 3 days. But I've missed it ever since.
And here there's a timelapse where you can notice the blue empire, the void and the American flag the author was talking about: https://youtu.be/jWzjyL4yAe4
I find how the void moves amazing. It genuinely seems a live organism. And you see it creep out all over the place, only to get beaten and forced to move somewhere else. It also seems like the Void coordinated with the rainbow road to take over the American flag, but ended up unsuccessful. And how from the void, came a beautiful Pink Floyd logo. Also, notice the German flag at the bottom left, and how it quickly grows and eats up the French flag, which is forced upwards, but from their union, a flag of the European union is born, to which a white pigeon of peace is added. Plus somewhere on the upper part of the flag, there's a Turkish flag and a Greek flag with a heart in the middle (which is relatively common in the canvas, with Spain and Colombia/Venezuela/Ecuador being another example, their heart portraying a Ñ, and Norway and Sweden of course, whose banter is pretty funny at times).
I don't know, for all of Reddit's toxicity, Place seems like a very wholesome breath of fresh air.
Yea, /r/place was among the best things reddit has ever done, it's probably a good example for "rawness" in terms of letting people make up their own rules can work. I expected there to be some...
Yea, /r/place was among the best things reddit has ever done, it's probably a good example for "rawness" in terms of letting people make up their own rules can work. I expected there to be some giant swastika or something to provoke but while there's maybe some ugly stuff going on in some small corners, it's not at all the dominant vibe of the result.
I wonder what this says as an analogy towards how reddit operates as a whole. Maybe it's about people working towards a common goal (i.e. an image that represents a place they spend a significant amount of time on). Maybe, despite all the ugliness, people aren't dicks on average and things tend to fix themselves in the end (that would be good news for democracy). But then you look at these weird/hateful/racist subreddits that seem to actually have an impact. They're a small minority, by "5th biggest website in the US" standards, but they get witchhunts going, they spread stereotypes, they spread fake news that eventually lands on your uncle's facebook wall. Maybe it's that "1%" (or whatever) of the real world is more significant than "1%" of a random, funny internet picture. Or, more generally, that there's no common goal there anymore off what reddit represents so everyone just tries to cut out his corner and defend it.
My take on place is that by being a chaotic crowdsourced image that was only around briefly, sock puppeteers and bot coordinators hadn’t figured out how to game it. I think the great bulk of...
My take on place is that by being a chaotic crowdsourced image that was only around briefly, sock puppeteers and bot coordinators hadn’t figured out how to game it. I think the great bulk of people on the web have good hearts, but the platforms are easily gamed to make extremism look topical.
And then there was me and a bunch of nostalgic shits painting the start button. We started with the wrong shade of grey, so we had to start fixing it and messaging people who reverted our repairs...
And then there was me and a bunch of nostalgic shits painting the start button.
We started with the wrong shade of grey, so we had to start fixing it and messaging people who reverted our repairs to explain to them that we were not vandalizing
bilibili (Chinese video hosting platform) did two rounds of their own r/place during August of 2017. Final results of round 1. Time lapse of round 1. If you want to turn the scolling text off in...
bilibili (Chinese video hosting platform) did two rounds of their own r/place during August of 2017.
Weird, none of those links worked for me with my VPN set to anywhere in North America (tried NY, Chicago, Toronto) but worked just fine when I switched to Hong Kong. Regardless, those time lapses...
Weird, none of those links worked for me with my VPN set to anywhere in North America (tried NY, Chicago, Toronto) but worked just fine when I switched to Hong Kong. Regardless, those time lapses were neat and overall the themes were remarkably similar to what were on /r/place, but seemingly much more stable with less battling over space.
Oh then you haven't looked carefully enough. There was a lot of scripting going on in round 2, some people turned the entire screen blue: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av14006974/
seemingly much more stable with less battling over space
Oh then you haven't looked carefully enough. There was a lot of scripting going on in round 2, some people turned the entire screen blue: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av14006974/
don't have much time to flesh this one out this morning so apologies for that but this is a pretty decent deep delve into reddit from.earlier this year--these two bits stuck out to me as both...
don't have much time to flesh this one out this morning so apologies for that but this is a pretty decent deep delve into reddit from.earlier this year--these two bits stuck out to me as both amusing and somewhat revealing as to how reddit got to the place it is now
Steve Huffman, Reddit’s C.E.O., said recently. “These days, I tend to say that we’re a place for open and honest conversations—‘open and honest’ meaning authentic, meaning messy, meaning the best and worst and realest and weirdest parts of humanity.”
and
Implicit in his apology was a set of questions, perhaps the central questions facing anyone who worries about the current state of civic discourse. Is it possible to facilitate a space for open dialogue without also facilitating hoaxes, harassment, and threats of violence? Where is the line between authenticity and toxicity? What if, after technology allows us to reveal our inner voices, what we learn is that many of us are authentically toxic?
Heh. This is so futile. There's a reason we keep hateful fringe groups out of the mainstream. It never ends well. You don't have to ban these people from the internet but there is no reason to...
What if, after technology allows us to reveal our inner voices, what we learn is that many of us are authentically toxic?
Heh. This is so futile. There's a reason we keep hateful fringe groups out of the mainstream. It never ends well. You don't have to ban these people from the internet but there is no reason to give them a place on the table where the grown ups are sitting. A website like facebook, twitter or, indeed, reddit, should not feel a moral obligation to give them a voice.
this reddit changemyview thread i was just linked feels oddly pertinent to this discussion as an example some of glaring problems reddit has that this article highlights--namely, the fact that...
this reddit changemyview thread i was just linked feels oddly pertinent to this discussion as an example some of glaring problems reddit has that this article highlights--namely, the fact that bizarre, completely irrational and terrible sentiments like the one in this thread feel completely in character with the community that's been cultivated on reddit to the point where it's at best difficult and at worst impossible to tell if it's just someone trolling or if someone genuinely believes that women aren't sentient.
it's preaching to the choir i'm sure, but still, it's somewhat telling of reddit--and absolutely, categorically a bad sign--that i have to actually consider the possibility that it's a completely serious thread.
Watchpeopledie is surprisingly non-toxic, dark (very dark) jokes aside. The occasional racism (okay, it's not that occasional) is often called out. And the mods do a great job of keeping threads...
Watchpeopledie is surprisingly non-toxic, dark (very dark) jokes aside. The occasional racism (okay, it's not that occasional) is often called out. And the mods do a great job of keeping threads civil. I'm actually far more comfortable there than on any thread remotely political (coincidentally, on WPD, when it gets kind of ugly, it's often when it gets political, too).
I strongly disagree it's a cesspool. (At least when I last visited a few weeks ago).
how can you be more comfortable somewhere where people share and often enjoy videos of people being killed or dying horrible painful deaths? It takes a really sick person to think that IMHO
how can you be more comfortable somewhere where people share and often enjoy videos of people being killed or dying horrible painful deaths? It takes a really sick person to think that IMHO
I don't think you're judging something you know about. Most people on WPD don't get off on it. They don't enjoy it, they aren't happy about all the horrible shit that's happening around the world...
I don't think you're judging something you know about.
Most people on WPD don't get off on it. They don't enjoy it, they aren't happy about all the horrible shit that's happening around the world at all times. They just, unlike most people, disagree it's something to completely ignore.
You can always find people there talking about how life is fragile and you should make the most of it, or how the drunk guy in the video only died because he made a stupid decision, or how it's unfair that innocent people die because of drunk drivers, or how we have it easy in the west compared to Brazil, China or Mexico and we should appreciate it. Of course, when a person is being cruel to their partner or a child you can always see people calling for karma and justice and get a bit worked up about it (not unlike the rest of subreddits).
Plus, not all are horrible deaths. Most aren't even graphic. And there are a lot of people there who don't even click on the more gorey ones and exclusively watch the mild accident ones. It's a really complex community that outsiders tend to misunderstand (because they never really made an effort to understand it).
It's not this horrible place you are making it out to be.
I've been there a few times, I've been all over the place on the internet, and I still find it strange that anyone could be more comfortable with that stuff versus people talking about politics.
I've been there a few times, I've been all over the place on the internet, and I still find it strange that anyone could be more comfortable with that stuff versus people talking about politics.
It's hard for me to put into words how wrong I think it is for that subreddit to exist. Watching people's lives end just for entertainment and morbid curiosity seems wrong when you know nothing...
It's hard for me to put into words how wrong I think it is for that subreddit to exist. Watching people's lives end just for entertainment and morbid curiosity seems wrong when you know nothing about the people's life. It's so invasive and the people are not around to defend themselves.
Jesus. Just reading your description of that (about a half hour ago) is still haunting me. I can't imagine watching that; I can't imagine being the mother coming home to that. I know my comment is...
Jesus. Just reading your description of that (about a half hour ago) is still haunting me. I can't imagine watching that; I can't imagine being the mother coming home to that. I know my comment is off-topic, but I had to say something. Get it off my chest a bit, I guess.
I don't see that as proof of the sub being a cesspool. (And there are far worse examples of graphic content is your only measure for it being a cesspool). It's a thing that happens. I believe...
I don't see that as proof of the sub being a cesspool. (And there are far worse examples of graphic content is your only measure for it being a cesspool).
It's a thing that happens. I believe sweeping it under the rug is more harmful than showing it.
There's a lot to be learned from the sub's content. And it often leads people to reconsider life and how to face its fragility.
Saying it's a cesspool just because it shows graphic content is a bit narrow minded in my opinion.
Ironically, r/2meirl4meirl (and similars) which downright encourages suicide (unlike WPD) all the time doesn't get the bad rap WPD does, only because the content in there isn't graphic.
That isn't what I meant. And I don't think normalizing it is harmful. Encouraging it, yes. Normalizing it in the sense that it allows people to open up about it, specially using humor, which makes...
but I'm with you on 2meirl, it's very harmful to normalize suicide as humor.
That isn't what I meant. And I don't think normalizing it is harmful. Encouraging it, yes. Normalizing it in the sense that it allows people to open up about it, specially using humor, which makes it easier? I don't see what's so wrong about it. As I said in reference to WPD, I'm not okay with sweeping taboo topics under the rug.
People go there to be sad together. Which is better than being sad alone. There are pieces of advice here and there, some take it, some don't.
In the end, it's a coping platform. Humor makes it a bit easier.
99% of the people in there are suicidal themselves. If making it seem trivial and unimportant helps them through their depression, then I don't have an issue with it.
99% of the people in there are suicidal themselves. If making it seem trivial and unimportant helps them through their depression, then I don't have an issue with it.
The worst part of it is: I totally understand that, I can relate to it. I too, love the thrill of feeling like I've poked a sore spot and gotten somebody all worked up. In fact most of my posting...
The worst part of it is: I totally understand that, I can relate to it. I too, love the thrill of feeling like I've poked a sore spot and gotten somebody all worked up. In fact most of my posting on Reddit was tuned almost entirely towards that (along the just non-stop streams of garbage I usually produce in the process). But when I was put in roles of responsibility towards a community my attitude was to try and leave that behind as much as possible, to 'straighten up' and try and be a better community member for everyone's sake.
Being a troll or a provocateur is fine in a context where you're not really having an effect on overall policy safe maybe the occasional incisive comment. It's (arguably) ok to be a troll if you're playing the fool, but fools don't actually make for good kings, nor advisors. And when you're in a position where your words are taken seriously and affect from tens all the way to millions of people you have to rethink what you do and say.
I trolled more as a mod than I ever did as a normal user. Drama gets more people to pay attention. If someone came to modmail acting like an asshole, I had no problem returning the same civility....
I trolled more as a mod than I ever did as a normal user. Drama gets more people to pay attention. If someone came to modmail acting like an asshole, I had no problem returning the same civility. Or if people played dumb about clear rule violations I enjoyed playing dumb as well. That said, if people were civil, I would do what I could to help them out.
Steve's personal views make a lot of sense when you reconcile them with how reddit is managed. He may not harbor toxic views per se, but they certainly enable toxic views to run rampant on the...
Steve's personal views make a lot of sense when you reconcile them with how reddit is managed. He may not harbor toxic views per se, but they certainly enable toxic views to run rampant on the site. Makes me wonder how differently the site would have evolved in the last 3-4 years had Ellen Pao or someone with similar ideas about eradicating intolerance been CEO.
i think the bigotry that is so prevalent on reddit would be less obvious and less prominent today with someone like pao at the helm, but honestly it's such a systemic problem in reddit communities...
Makes me wonder how differently the site would have evolved in the last 3-4 years had Ellen Pao or someone with similar ideas about eradicating intolerance been CEO.
i think the bigotry that is so prevalent on reddit would be less obvious and less prominent today with someone like pao at the helm, but honestly it's such a systemic problem in reddit communities that i'm not confident it'd look that much different, short of an overhaul of what mods are able to do and the extent to which admins step in. mods are the main shapers of the site's community and there's only so much that you can do with the set of tools reddit gives you.
r/Place was such a beautiful thing. It only lasted like 3 days. But I've missed it ever since.
Final version: https://i.redd.it/wc436nf7fdpy.png
And here there's a timelapse where you can notice the blue empire, the void and the American flag the author was talking about: https://youtu.be/jWzjyL4yAe4
I find how the void moves amazing. It genuinely seems a live organism. And you see it creep out all over the place, only to get beaten and forced to move somewhere else. It also seems like the Void coordinated with the rainbow road to take over the American flag, but ended up unsuccessful. And how from the void, came a beautiful Pink Floyd logo. Also, notice the German flag at the bottom left, and how it quickly grows and eats up the French flag, which is forced upwards, but from their union, a flag of the European union is born, to which a white pigeon of peace is added. Plus somewhere on the upper part of the flag, there's a Turkish flag and a Greek flag with a heart in the middle (which is relatively common in the canvas, with Spain and Colombia/Venezuela/Ecuador being another example, their heart portraying a Ñ, and Norway and Sweden of course, whose banter is pretty funny at times).
I don't know, for all of Reddit's toxicity, Place seems like a very wholesome breath of fresh air.
Yea, /r/place was among the best things reddit has ever done, it's probably a good example for "rawness" in terms of letting people make up their own rules can work. I expected there to be some giant swastika or something to provoke but while there's maybe some ugly stuff going on in some small corners, it's not at all the dominant vibe of the result.
I wonder what this says as an analogy towards how reddit operates as a whole. Maybe it's about people working towards a common goal (i.e. an image that represents a place they spend a significant amount of time on). Maybe, despite all the ugliness, people aren't dicks on average and things tend to fix themselves in the end (that would be good news for democracy). But then you look at these weird/hateful/racist subreddits that seem to actually have an impact. They're a small minority, by "5th biggest website in the US" standards, but they get witchhunts going, they spread stereotypes, they spread fake news that eventually lands on your uncle's facebook wall. Maybe it's that "1%" (or whatever) of the real world is more significant than "1%" of a random, funny internet picture. Or, more generally, that there's no common goal there anymore off what reddit represents so everyone just tries to cut out his corner and defend it.
My take on place is that by being a chaotic crowdsourced image that was only around briefly, sock puppeteers and bot coordinators hadn’t figured out how to game it. I think the great bulk of people on the web have good hearts, but the platforms are easily gamed to make extremism look topical.
I agree. The short-lived nature of the experiment was its saving grace. Imagine what it'd look like by now if it were still going on...
And then there was me and a bunch of nostalgic shits painting the start button.
We started with the wrong shade of grey, so we had to start fixing it and messaging people who reverted our repairs to explain to them that we were not vandalizing
bilibili (Chinese video hosting platform) did two rounds of their own r/place during August of 2017.
Final results of round 1.
Time lapse of round 1.
If you want to turn the scolling text off in the video player, click this part.
Final results of round 2.
Time lapse of round 2.
Weird, none of those links worked for me with my VPN set to anywhere in North America (tried NY, Chicago, Toronto) but worked just fine when I switched to Hong Kong. Regardless, those time lapses were neat and overall the themes were remarkably similar to what were on /r/place, but seemingly much more stable with less battling over space.
Oh then you haven't looked carefully enough. There was a lot of scripting going on in round 2, some people turned the entire screen blue: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av14006974/
don't have much time to flesh this one out this morning so apologies for that but this is a pretty decent deep delve into reddit from.earlier this year--these two bits stuck out to me as both amusing and somewhat revealing as to how reddit got to the place it is now
and
Heh. This is so futile. There's a reason we keep hateful fringe groups out of the mainstream. It never ends well. You don't have to ban these people from the internet but there is no reason to give them a place on the table where the grown ups are sitting. A website like facebook, twitter or, indeed, reddit, should not feel a moral obligation to give them a voice.
this reddit changemyview thread i was just linked feels oddly pertinent to this discussion as an example some of glaring problems reddit has that this article highlights--namely, the fact that bizarre, completely irrational and terrible sentiments like the one in this thread feel completely in character with the community that's been cultivated on reddit to the point where it's at best difficult and at worst impossible to tell if it's just someone trolling or if someone genuinely believes that women aren't sentient.
it's preaching to the choir i'm sure, but still, it's somewhat telling of reddit--and absolutely, categorically a bad sign--that i have to actually consider the possibility that it's a completely serious thread.
Watchpeopledie is surprisingly non-toxic, dark (very dark) jokes aside. The occasional racism (okay, it's not that occasional) is often called out. And the mods do a great job of keeping threads civil. I'm actually far more comfortable there than on any thread remotely political (coincidentally, on WPD, when it gets kind of ugly, it's often when it gets political, too).
I strongly disagree it's a cesspool. (At least when I last visited a few weeks ago).
how can you be more comfortable somewhere where people share and often enjoy videos of people being killed or dying horrible painful deaths? It takes a really sick person to think that IMHO
I don't think you're judging something you know about.
Most people on WPD don't get off on it. They don't enjoy it, they aren't happy about all the horrible shit that's happening around the world at all times. They just, unlike most people, disagree it's something to completely ignore.
You can always find people there talking about how life is fragile and you should make the most of it, or how the drunk guy in the video only died because he made a stupid decision, or how it's unfair that innocent people die because of drunk drivers, or how we have it easy in the west compared to Brazil, China or Mexico and we should appreciate it. Of course, when a person is being cruel to their partner or a child you can always see people calling for karma and justice and get a bit worked up about it (not unlike the rest of subreddits).
Plus, not all are horrible deaths. Most aren't even graphic. And there are a lot of people there who don't even click on the more gorey ones and exclusively watch the mild accident ones. It's a really complex community that outsiders tend to misunderstand (because they never really made an effort to understand it).
It's not this horrible place you are making it out to be.
I've been there a few times, I've been all over the place on the internet, and I still find it strange that anyone could be more comfortable with that stuff versus people talking about politics.
It's hard for me to put into words how wrong I think it is for that subreddit to exist. Watching people's lives end just for entertainment and morbid curiosity seems wrong when you know nothing about the people's life. It's so invasive and the people are not around to defend themselves.
Jesus. Just reading your description of that (about a half hour ago) is still haunting me. I can't imagine watching that; I can't imagine being the mother coming home to that. I know my comment is off-topic, but I had to say something. Get it off my chest a bit, I guess.
Yeah, I definitely could have used a content warning before reading that. I probably should have seen it coming considering the topic, but... 😵
I don't see that as proof of the sub being a cesspool. (And there are far worse examples of graphic content is your only measure for it being a cesspool).
It's a thing that happens. I believe sweeping it under the rug is more harmful than showing it.
There's a lot to be learned from the sub's content. And it often leads people to reconsider life and how to face its fragility.
Saying it's a cesspool just because it shows graphic content is a bit narrow minded in my opinion.
Ironically, r/2meirl4meirl (and similars) which downright encourages suicide (unlike WPD) all the time doesn't get the bad rap WPD does, only because the content in there isn't graphic.
I don't like WPD, but I'm with you on 2meirl, it's very harmful to normalize suicide as humor.
That isn't what I meant. And I don't think normalizing it is harmful. Encouraging it, yes. Normalizing it in the sense that it allows people to open up about it, specially using humor, which makes it easier? I don't see what's so wrong about it. As I said in reference to WPD, I'm not okay with sweeping taboo topics under the rug.
People go there to be sad together. Which is better than being sad alone. There are pieces of advice here and there, some take it, some don't.
In the end, it's a coping platform. Humor makes it a bit easier.
A joke is not an open and safe debate. No one said anything about sweeping under the rug. Joking about it makes it seem trivial and unimportant.
99% of the people in there are suicidal themselves. If making it seem trivial and unimportant helps them through their depression, then I don't have an issue with it.
Ohh, never mind then.
That sentence explains so much.
The worst part of it is: I totally understand that, I can relate to it. I too, love the thrill of feeling like I've poked a sore spot and gotten somebody all worked up. In fact most of my posting on Reddit was tuned almost entirely towards that (along the just non-stop streams of garbage I usually produce in the process). But when I was put in roles of responsibility towards a community my attitude was to try and leave that behind as much as possible, to 'straighten up' and try and be a better community member for everyone's sake.
Being a troll or a provocateur is fine in a context where you're not really having an effect on overall policy safe maybe the occasional incisive comment. It's (arguably) ok to be a troll if you're playing the fool, but fools don't actually make for good kings, nor advisors. And when you're in a position where your words are taken seriously and affect from tens all the way to millions of people you have to rethink what you do and say.
I trolled more as a mod than I ever did as a normal user. Drama gets more people to pay attention. If someone came to modmail acting like an asshole, I had no problem returning the same civility. Or if people played dumb about clear rule violations I enjoyed playing dumb as well. That said, if people were civil, I would do what I could to help them out.
Steve's personal views make a lot of sense when you reconcile them with how reddit is managed. He may not harbor toxic views per se, but they certainly enable toxic views to run rampant on the site. Makes me wonder how differently the site would have evolved in the last 3-4 years had Ellen Pao or someone with similar ideas about eradicating intolerance been CEO.
i think the bigotry that is so prevalent on reddit would be less obvious and less prominent today with someone like pao at the helm, but honestly it's such a systemic problem in reddit communities that i'm not confident it'd look that much different, short of an overhaul of what mods are able to do and the extent to which admins step in. mods are the main shapers of the site's community and there's only so much that you can do with the set of tools reddit gives you.
Those T_D posts were hard to read.