It is happening! r/place goes out with a bang

3 minutes later
- Lol
  I was against giving them the engagement but this is goooood
  
  The engagement is fleeting but the spoiling of the narrative is forever.
- That’s incredibly awesome. What a fantastic way to end it!
  
  Honestly i’m sure this is the best thing that could happen for the reddit execs in terms of user engagement. Writing “fuck spez” on reddit is like shouting “save the planet” from a cruise ship.
- How much coordination did this take? You're only able to do a certain about of pixels right? Or did it freefall at the last minute?
  
  i had this question a couple of days ago and today fell totally down the fuck spez rabbithole.
  found myself on the main discord where the coordinators were talking to uruguay about doing the "u" after columbia (?) declined. guess hearing that, both uruguay and equador wanted in.
  there was discussion of not stepping over the swiss flag in one of the letter because they were part of the coalition.
  these folks are dedicated - many commented they hadn't really slept since it went live. kudos to all of them for the passion they showed today.
  tbh it was impressive and one of the best executed operations i've seen in a long time. very fun to see up close.
  working for a global multinational company i only wish we were this efficient internally ❤️
  
  There was clearly a large bot net which started stencilling the outlines of the letters, but then it was magic, everybody understood the assignment. The letters filled out in a handful of minutes. Then, then the whiteout slowed - the apes (mostly) agreed the job was done. It took another half an hour or so for the white fog to finally take hold.
- I love this, lol
- What's the difference?

... And just like that, Reddit is down site-wide. Awfully convenient.
- Just a small database patch, don’t mind spez doing some deleteItem calls.
- I have a problem with Reddit
- "I" broke it.
- Hugged to death by robots ?

We all want to have an immortal legacy. Any good he's ever done is going to be overshadowed.
You can build 1000 bridges and fuck one clown. You won't be known as a bridge builder but a clown fucker.
- Always heard it as goats. There's probably some sexy clowns out there.
  
  stupid sexy clowns
  
  I mean, if you view clowns as the opposite alignment of goths, in theory big tiddy clown gfs should be just as viable.
  
  The Ace Attorney community would absolutely agree
  
  I heard it was ostriches. Allegedly.
  
  I'm sure I've seen a video with clowns in it.
- Even clowns need a little lovin'
  
  H o N k! h O n K! *

It also successfully distracted the userbase and isolated their protests from the rest of the site.
People make fun of Place but I think they knew exactly what they were doing.
- Certainly drove their use statistics up a lot, which helps more than the incendiary messaging hurts them (IMO).
  
  Eh, I think this can work like sponsored messages on YouTube videos: probably not immediately a lot of clicks on the product but over time more and more people recognize it and know what it is. And I like to think that over time Spez will be recognized as the soulless fucker who is hated by the very community he is trying to sell. Reddit lost a lot of charm in the last couple of months, even more than was already lost before and his name is tied to the whole thing. I hope!
  
  And critically, more ad hits.
  
  Especially with the massive number of bots, it helps get user and activity numbers up a lot
- They also screwed themselves over by playing the r/place trump card so soon after the last iteration in 2022. Rather than doing it to create a cool event to experience once every few years, they did it to drive engagement on Reddit. That's made people lose interest and even if it's another 5 years before the next one, many of them won't come back. It's a self-acknowledgement that the peak reddit era is finished and wouldn't have happened without the prior backlash against their enshittification. It's the type of thing that sets up the conditions for a death spiral, because they've resorted to tricks to get people to use the site and eventually they'll run out of tricks.

Reddit admins right now
- Gaius was the best part of BSG
  
  Me after accidentally deleting my hard drive.
  
  Swarmy ole gaius
  
  He was a very good part at least. The whole show was so good without a single bad character I don't think. It's hard to pick a favorite.
- If only he had another typist or two, he could have out hacked them.

A cat beat everyone to it.
- Dang those thangs are thanging.

Well the join lemmy ad made it until the end at least
- From day 2 to the very end (0,0). No better advertisement possible. Don't even dare to try to change my mind.

The final hour: https://piped.video/watch?v=UnrnLd4tzGM
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=UnrnLd4tzGM
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- That is just beautiful to watch.
- I like how it started with a smaller Fuck Spez until some group clearly went "nah, we need to go bigger"

Nice and all, but pretty pointless if you stay there after.

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-Dylan Thomas

And spez will always be a hurensohn no matter what.
- SPRICH
  
  ICH SPRECHE.
  (Im all worried I didn't conjugate that right)

Based! Hopefully everyone can abandon Reddit soon

Worked for me, quit Reddit and in the lemmyverse now. They did this to themselves.

Thanks for everybody helping us. Glad to be a a part of it. For those who don't know. Lemmy got a nice banner at the center of the map. We also took part of the Fuck Spez project.
\
\
\ https://lemm.ee/post/2028359
You can check our history of posts from !place@lemm.ee
- Ribbit

When does place end?
- Now. You can only place white pixels currently
  
  Racist reddit.

Every time anything negative towards reddit has gone up on place, mass unattributed changes have happened. I expect the same will happen here.

All the images are so clean. Like if they were all created by well coordinated robots.
- They are largely the result of scripts battling other scripts.
- r/place brings all the bots to the yard.
- I don't think I saw one account that had more than a few karma putting points up on the super clean images. It really was just a bot fest.

I wonder what the federated version of r/place would look like. It should not be too hard to create a collaborative pixel board and accept input from anywhere in the fediverse. But we would need to come up with some cool fedi spin. A chessboard, maybe, where every server has a square?
In the future, when the fediverse is more mature, it would be cool to create something.
- It should not be too hard to create a collaborative pixel board and accept input from anywhere in the fediverse.
  That's a super optimistic viewpoint. Handling that kind of stuff is actually a pretty challenging technical problem. Reddit themselves wrote a nice technical blog post about the how they built r/place and the challenges associated with it. Dealing with synchronization issues across federated instances makes the problem quite a bit more difficult.
  
  Huh, I didn’t know that the code base for r/place was open sourced.
  
  Thanks for the interesting article.
  There is no way the fediverse can reimplement r/place feature by feature. A federated Place would have to be different. It could be a month long project ora even permanent one, probably with a slower update rate.
  I like the idea of people seeing different things depending on the server they use and who that server federates with or blocks (https://lemmy.world/comment/1749093).
  But maybe the fediverse should look for its own thing rather than try to imitate.
- The way the Lemmy version of r/place would look like would depend on which other servers your server is federated with. It's a very postmodern approach where there is no single view of the thing for everyone
- There is already a non-reddit one, , it's like place but the board is infinite and has been running since 2017, although reactionary bots have overran the spawn area, so do be aware.
  
  Link?

Lmao! they thought we can't create art with just white pixels

That...is impressive.

Lol is this why Reddit has been flaky for the past hour?
Trying to view some posts and get random “community not found” errors or page loading errors.

Thank you to everyone that contributed to this beautiful piece of art🫡

This is gold

Did r/place always increase the canvas size after a certain amount of time?
- I don't remember if it always did every time from the beginning, but it did last time.

Best possible way to end

fuck them for shadowbanning me, but allowing most bots to roam free.

Glorious.

HAHAHAHAHA

I can only imagine transitioning from the 2022 whiteout to the 2023 start, and then if r/place happens in 2024, transition from the 2023 whiteout to that.

LMAO🤣

I guess spez won't do another one
- So many people used reddit just to create this. Looks like success to me.
  
  A lot of people, but a motherboard more bots.

This is actually amazing.

beautiful

This is very much a real thing. Hope spez grows a braincell tho, reddit was a fun thing to lurk in.

It's finally habbening

Waiting to see how they gonna spin it when (if) they make a post about how great r/place was this time around.

got what he deserved.

Hope spez fades from reddit like his name in this pic

I allow it

Think about it for a minute, do you really believe it's true? It's just something people say

- You don't really get PR, do you?
  
  Any publicity is good publicity
- You know it’s just bots right?

Man they really showed Spez who is boss by contributing to all the engagement KPIs they’re going to use to position the opening valuation of the IPO. Truly the most epic prank of all!
- At least it ruins their ability to advertise with r/place like they wanted to. At this point, making as much of reddit as useless as possible is the last way to make them listen
  
  I mean, all they have to do is take a screenshot / stop timelapses just before the giant fuck spez showed up and they’re golden