mastermindReddit is bringing back r/Place at perhaps the worst possible time
simpleAlright who wants to bet how big the percentage of bots will be this year. Maybe 95%?
Very generous to assume non-admins won’t experience technical difficulties.
My prediction is users that contribute to sections they don’t like will get shadow banned from at least place
My money is on backend overrides of anti-spez collaborations.
kaduI don’t think this “oh subreddits can now pin coordinates” is a coincidence. They’ll simply take the biggest subreddits that also got the new mod teams, the ones cherrypicked by their “Moderator Code of Conduct” account, fill the board with their segments by essentially pinning the entire thing, and everybody else will get pushed away. Any coordinated protest will be killed with the excuse of “oh but you see this was pinned by this big subreddit and you couldn’t compete with their users oh well how organic and fun and natural”
Then, to the casual observer, it will look like everything is fine and dandy, furthering the astroturfing propaganda
They’ll be keeping the huge ugly ass OSA! logo again 100%
Oh man I remember the OSU! controversy. They made it smaller only after like a million people started harassing them.
Literally just a huge pink blob, it’s not even a nice logo
I fucking hated it. So obnoxious the way they had all those bots keeping it up.
nullReddit is bringing back r/Place — a collaborative project where individual users can edit pixels on a giant canvas — at a time when users are still furious over things like Reddit’s API pricing that forced beloved third-party apps to shut down, the company’s decision to remove chat history from before 2023 with hardly any warning, and its recent announcement that it would be sunsetting the current system to give Reddit Gold. The 2023 version of r/Place kicks off on Thursday, July 20th.
As you might expect, users are already using the announcement post to air their grievances toward the company. The current top comment in reply to the post just says “fuck u/spez” (“spez” is CEO Steve Huffman’s Reddit username), and many of the other comments say only “API,” so I wouldn’t be surprised to see that sentiment show up in some way on this year’s r/Place canvas.
I think even Reddit might be aware that the timing isn’t great. In a short announcement video, the company’s tagline for the event is “right place, wrong time.” In a different post, a Reddit admin (employee) shared a series of pushed dates for when r/Place would kick off — it was supposed to go live at the beginning of April but kept getting delayed:
April 1st (the previous two r/Place events were April Fools’ Day events) Then April 20th, two days after Reddit first announced the API changes (but didn’t announce pricing) Then May 4th Then June 15th, which was in the thick of the subreddit blackouts and coincidentally became the same day we had a contentious interview with Huffman Then June 23rd, which was one week before apps were set to shut down And now, July 20thPast r/Place experiments took place in 2017 and 2022. (Josh Wardle, who would later go on to create and then sell Wordle, thought up the idea for r/Place, according to Newsweek.) The final canvases for each (2017, 2022) are honestly fascinating pieces of work, with things like art, country flags, memes, and video game iconography all smashed together into colorful pixel collages.
For the 2023 edition, Reddit is letting subreddit moderators “pin” coordinates on the canvas to help community members more easily navigate to certain areas. While that does sound useful, I imagine some communities will use the feature to help focus their protest efforts.
Reddit declined to comment. It’s unclear exactly how long this year’s version of r/Place will be open to contributions; the 2017 version took place over 72 hours, while the 2022 edition was made over four days.
By the way, this announcement helped me solve where the ugly pixelated Reddit app logo is from: you can see it in Reddit’s r/Place announcement video. For some reason, that video also includes pixelated images of a fire in a garbage can.
Wow, the guy that created wordle came up with the idea for r/place? TIL.
The concept has been around way longer, in the 90s there were a few websites where you could buy pixel space on their page.
Most famous as I recall was: www.milliondollarhomepage.com
Thank you, I couldn’t for the life of me remember the names of any of them but yeah this was definitely one of them
My art teacher showed it to us in class, over a decade ago and it burned in my mind.
The only good news may be that the change to the pixelated logo is probably temporary, to hype /r/place . But making that change at the same time as unlocking premium logos was an extremely bad decision. They are very good at making bad decisions, though.
StreetdogYou should have Premium to participate. Keeps al sane folks away.
If it wouldn’t direct traffic to Reddit I would suggest we create a team and map to make the whole place just a simple “FUCK /U/SPEZ”
MetarightI'm quite certain there are already people planning to do just that.
Sota4077That is absolutely going to happen. I suspect there will be a ton of Apollo and other 3rd party app logos too.
Lmao I bet they are going to follow up by manipulating their own thing and pretend that the are a lot of dedicated pro Reddit users rather than just being left with the users that just accept things even if they are shit.
Nixdo you know how they made that template? Would be great if we coordinated a template that pointed to a lemmy thread with all the third party apps and info
Knowing that guy, he’ll use his elevated admin permissions to remove it like he edited other people’s comments.
“Protesting” a site by using it even more. I don’t get it. If people are upset at reddit, the best way to demonstrate that is to STOP USING REDDIT.
It’s beautiful
Don’t say “fuck u/spez,” say “join Lemmy.” The advertising worked out great for r/fuckcars last time.
Yeah looks much worse when they delete it as well
ChaoticNeutralCzech…and change “r/…” to “c/…” for existing Lemmy communities
…and change “r/…” to “c/…” for existing Lemmy communities
The last r/place was already heavily monitored by moderators with the ability to place pixels without timers, indiscriminately ban anyone thought to be placing pixels in certain locations from participating, and bury discussions talking about either.
Not sure if they'd bother for this, I'd say it's 50/50 that any attempts to protest will be blacked out and the threads about them buried and/or isolated.
Korne127Currently there is a huge “u/spez ist ein Hurensohn” on the German flag, meaning “u/spez is a son of a bitch” (but exclusively derogatory).
yumpoplalaThis is hilarious, it's going to get the shit griefed out of it.
LemmyLeftyWatch people build a graveyard of dead 3rd party apps, which gets wiped every so often by admins.
Which then gets covered up by a vague drawing that oscillates between a middle finger and a pixelated penis.
Meanwhile /r/Canada struggles with their leaf for the entire event
I just want someone to set up a loading bar beneath them that varies depending on how complete/fucked up the flag is.
You mean r/Bananas
All the while Türkiye are creating a masterpiece right next door
JshKlsnThere are 4 Canada flags on last years place
Pretty sure they’ll be more subtle with the censorship this time, the community didn’t and won’t take sudden large black rectangles well. A couple of admins with the privilege to place unlimited pixels, which they have done before, could be enough to vandalize our banner to oblivion; they might also use bots or “shadowban” some of us. Luckily, I kept my 3-year-old Reddit account after overwriting its content with Lemmy links so I can join the fight. (I won’t be engaging with any subreddit, though, no matter their stance or my previous relationship with it. I’ve been happier since I went Reddit-free.)
“sunsetting” is such an ugly euphemism for “killing”. On the other hand, I am sunsetting Reddit right now. Deleted all my posts and comments, left all the subreddits apart from the drama ones to keep informed about the latest Reddit Inc fuckups. I have a feeling they are not done alienating their userbase yet.
I get all my news about reddit inc fuckups from the fediverse now.
Wolf Link 🐺It boosts traffic during a time a lot of ex-redditors scraped/nuked worthwile content and left. If people are annoyed and want to show that off, but they can only change a single pixel every-so-often, then they will refresh / check the site VERY often to make sure their hard-earned single-pixel contribution isn’t overwritten by someone else.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that was one of the reasons, trying to profit from the agitated masses somehow.
But r/place is ruled by bots... I bet the kind of people who develop bots are reeeeaaaly pleased about the API changes...
I haven’t done so, but r/place would be extremely easy to write a bot using Selenium to place pixels without an API. It is a giant grid, and once you write a function to place at coordinates on the grid (which would be the hardest part, but still trivial) you can parallelize it and do whatever you want.
Oh absolutely, but the venn diagram of people who can do this, and people who value open APIs is pretty close to a circle.
Yeah honestly it’s pretty appealing of an idea to go back just to make a mess on the canvas or send a coordinated message, but - and I know most won’t do this - the best strategy is to just…not engage. Avoid participating, avoid going to check the canvas or the site… just pretend it isn’t happening.
Sadly, it’s pretty much a fact that this will bring back tons of traffic, even if the event itself results in popcorn-worthy drama. Spez seems to be subscribed to the notion that any kind of publicity is good publicity, and it might just work out for him and his IPO.
At this point, the best that we can do is just care for our mental health and let things be. It’s what I plan on doing, and I can’t put “sticking it to reddit” as a priority while doing so, it’s for me and for me alone.
Oh they are desperate for engagement.
They’re emptying the closet for anything they can release right now to save face and their precious valuation
Their going hard on the whole “bad publicity is also publicity”
Th4tGuyIIIf for one will definitely not be partaking, as I don't want any of my traffic going to Reddit if I can help it.
However, I would be interested to see the result. I suspect there will be at least some references to the protests, if not censored, and a couple of "Fuck u/Spez"s for completeness
Metal Zealot I have a Place for Reddit,
in my toilet
Mario BarišaReddit trying to get remember people of the times when Reddit was good 🥲
WirrvogelI will leave that r/Place completely alone and not even look at it. I am close to 5 weeks sober from Reddit and nothing that will happen there will bring me back. The best thing that can happen is no one participating, not even a f*ck spez picture, just an empty white page, not even Canada trying to get their flag on it.
I have less discipline than you, and still check periodically, specifically /r/news and /r/worldnews but I see that in doubt it less and less and it feels like lemmy/kbin communities is growing and posts are becoming more active.
I think though, that because it is decentralized, there should be a mechanism to group communities to prevent the fragmentation. So then subscribing to the group would subscribe to multiple communities.
itscozydownhereOh this is gonna be hilarious. I bet it was an idea of some rogue employee and dum dum management thought mmmh great idea
Kalkaline You know what, who gives a fuck about /r/place. I’m done with Reddit until Baconreader is back the way it was.
I just RiF, but I certainly won’t go back if they don’t reinstate Apollo.
That dev did nothing wrong other than defend himself by revealing Reddit’s lies. And now Spez has a grudge over being called out. Well fuck Spez.
They aren’t stupid. They are absolutely counting on the engagement from people flooding back to turn the whole thing into a giant Fuck Spez canvas. That’s the only reason they’re bringing it back, guaranteed.