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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, this discord server just dropped this template with this detailed docs
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.
do 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.
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
…and change “r/…” to “c/…” for existing Lemmy communities
…and change “r/…” to “c/…” for existing Lemmy communities
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:
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: http://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.
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.
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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
There 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.)
They cheated the last time so dont expect any worthwhile images
Summary from top comment: Reddit admins have the ability to bypass the timer on r/place. Reddit admin and mod of r/place Chtorrr was caught using this to delete a pixel version of Marsey the Cat. A post calling this out was made, and was removed and locked, with some users reporting being banned for talking about this.
They blotted out the nudity and banned everyone involved from further participation. They’ll do the same again
Pretty cunty website innit tho.
They had to be selling botted ad spots too. Look at how perfect the Dr Pepper can showed up right at the end. I watched it happen irl and couldn’t believe it.
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.
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Then, to the casual observer, it will look like everything is fine and dandy, furthering the astroturfing propaganda
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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.
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.
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.
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.
What about “Canverse?”
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.
