Reddit @lemmy.world

2y ago

Reddit is bringing back r/Place at perhaps the worst possible time

www.theverge.com Reddit is bringing back r/Place at perhaps the worst possible time

What could go wrong?

114 comments

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”
- I'm quite certain there are already people planning to do just that.
  
  That is absolutely going to happen. I suspect there will be a ton of Apollo and other 3rd party app logos too.
  
  Yep, r/PlaceAPI just dropped this template with this detailed docs
  
  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.
- Don't say "fuck u/spez," say "join Lemmy." The advertising worked out great for r/fuckcars last time.
  
  ...and change “r/...” to “c/...” for existing Lemmy communities
  
  Yeah looks much worse when they delete it as well
  
  ...and change “r/...” to “c/...” for existing Lemmy communities
- Something Like This ?
  
  It’s beautiful
- 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.
  
  Currently 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).

Reddit 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:
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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 20th
Past 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.

Watch 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.
- 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.)

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

Alright who wants to bet how big the percentage of bots will be this year. Maybe 95%?
- My money is on backend overrides of anti-spez collaborations.
- 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.
  
  I fucking hated it. So obnoxious the way they had all those bots keeping it up.

I'm not going back to Reddit.
I'm ESPECIALLY not going back to see u/chtorr and other admins cheat on r/place just because they don't like what someone else did with their master plan for it.
I hope it's covered in protest-themed art they can't erase fast enough. At least that way I'll get a good laugh out of it.
- I forgot they were actively blanking out things they didn't like. What was that cat mascot they were butthurt about?

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.
- 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.

This sounds desperate. Like, their monthly traffic stats must be bad and they recognize that r/place drove traffic and this will hide the dip in traffic.

I was there in 2017. It was glorious. I refused to participate in 2022. It was a cheap imitation. I won't even give it an ounce of thought in 2023. It's a disappointment.
- Swap your first date with 2010 and that's the Reddit experience in a nutshell, lol.

We're bringing back something many of you actually asked us for.
The fucking nerve of them lol

Reject r/place. Embrace pxls space
- I love projects like this, but I wish we could recapture the limited nature of place along with the sheer amount of engagement. I have no idea how it would work, but I'd love to see large scale limited time events like this take place with instance administrator support and integration into the fediverse somehow.
  
  I've seen it done at geek conventions, to excellent effect. They generally live on a big screen, in the bar, at such events.
  Though they can degenerate into ego wars, in amusing ways. One event had to ask people to limit using external systems to access the pixel wall in the bar. Someone used AWS to run animations on it. It tied up 2/3 of the entire event's fibre backbone, still they killed it's access. I think it was a 10Gb fibre setup. So they effectively DOSed it.
  
  I'd call it the FediCanvas. Could be a regular event from all over the fediverse.
- Real OGs remember drawball. the birthplace of polandball.

r/Place was insanely popular... Popular enough that people bitched for a few years before they brought it back. Now Reddit's in the corner and they're trying to bring r/Place back. On one hand I'm very curious how it'll turn out this year. On the other, I won't be doing anything to it because I really don't care for Reddit to use the community's art as a reason for them to generate more traffic and more profit.
- Just write "f*ck reddit, come to lemmy!"

How long until people employ bots to create burner accounts and deface r/place.
I'm expecting tonnes of "fuck Spez" graffiti, along with some NSFW stuff.

"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.

I got banned last time because I was helping draw naked ladies.
- Frankly, I think your artistic aspirations in this regard should be celebrated, not banned. But then again I'm not a Reddit admin, so there's that.

We should have our own /c/place
- With blackjack, and hookers!
  
  And the music from Twin Peaks!
  
  How can you have that place w/o coke?

This is hilarious, it's going to get the shit griefed out of it.

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.

Apollo users have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever
- former Apollo users.

I 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.

I have a Place for Reddit,
in my toilet

I thought r/place turned into BattleBots guarding their own pixels at the end, and you can get banned for placing the wrong pixel at the wrong place.
Maybe they are using this to bait out and ban any old accounts that will try to vandalize r/place before the IPO? The timing is very suspect, I don't think it's as simple as increasing user engagement.

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.
- They might be stupid.

They have jumped the shark, going the way of Digg, the death spiral. Bannings and mod replacements are the start. pr0n will be banned in 3... 2... 1...
tumblr 2.0 after they get their fat stacks of cash. But I think the VC's are now aware and spez won't get as much money has he hopes for that dead eye POS

Lmao the header image on their modnews post about it appears to have a pixelated dumpster fire.
- Can't make this shit up
- Right dead center. That had to be intentional.

What about a /c/place version on lemmy?
- That would require a bit of work to implement and might be hard on the server.

If 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

Shows how desperate they are.

Reddit is becoming a clusterfuck.
- Always has been

Next up they'll be bringing back r/Time at the worst possible place.

Let’s change “r/...” to “c/...” for existing Lemmy communities!
- Into "!"

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 use 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.

I imagine a programmer unaware of anything that's going on writing the code for the latest, greatest /r/place feature, getting so wrapped up on the project that they don't realize it's not April anymore, smiling proudly and announcing loudly when they deliver their pride and joy. Only to see it be transformed into a big penis that shoots out the letters API.

Activate the 'fuck spez' detection algorithm. Omg, it's full of dicks

Last year's r/place event was beautiful and just amazing overall. The communities all coordinated and I was really taken aback by the final product. How this year's one will turn out is anybody's guess. I'm pretty sure even Spez is aware of this, so this just looks like a desperate attempt to drive engagement, even if most of it is negative.

Is there a quick explanation of what place is? A scroll through here didn't reveal. In not gonna look on Reddit. Tx
- It is a pixel canvas where people can draw stuff collectively. But they have to wait a longer time between a user can draw pixels.
  Look at: https://lemmy.world/post/1865921
  
  Also the mods can cheat and don't follow the same rules.