What could go wrong?
  • null@zerobytes.monster
    1·
    2 years ago

    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 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.

  • solrize@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    Is there a quick explanation of what place is? A scroll through here didn’t reveal. In not gonna look on Reddit. Tx

  • Mefek@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 years ago

    I saw some chat about just voiding it, only black pixels everywhere, I’m liking that idea

  • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Alright who wants to bet how big the percentage of bots will be this year. Maybe 95%?

      • kadu@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        I 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”

      • simple@lemm.ee
        0·
        2 years ago

        Oh man I remember the OSU! controversy. They made it smaller only after like a million people started harassing them.

  • LemmyLefty@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.)

  • desantoos@kbin.social
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • BarbecueCowboy@kbin.social
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • maess@feddit.de
        0·
        2 years ago

        I’d call it the FediCanvas. Could be a regular event from all over the fediverse.

      • cynar@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years ago

        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.

  • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Brudder Aaron@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years ago

      I forgot they were actively blanking out things they didn’t like. What was that cat mascot they were butthurt about?