[HN Gopher] How We Built r/Place (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
How We Built r/Place (2017)
Author : mynameismon
Score : 133 points
Date : 2022-04-05 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.redditinc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.redditinc.com)
| zhte415 wrote:
| Was it a honeytrap for spotting bots and alts I wondered?
|
| Having carefully placed a pixel childishly contributing to the
| humour of a banner depicting a favourite football club, I noted
| it was replaced by a very serious user within seconds named
| 'ProBiotic587' or something similar.
|
| I was not alone in my contributions, as others were rewriting the
| very serious banner in a manner similar to scratching out parts
| of a 'Please mind your head sign' to 'Fleas in your head'. Seeing
| that sign on the train as a 10 year old was a reminder both that
| were I a few years younger there may indeed be fleas in my head
| and headlice shampoo was no fun, and that a small act of
| rebellion by someone anonymous makes a monotonous train ride pass
| with a little humour.
|
| Just as the fleas in your head sign was restored every few months
| on seat pairings, so were user contributions of 'art' to this
| football club's banner. Both by very serious anonymous people.
| While I never knew the names of train maintenance staff, Reddit
| made the names of these people known, but made them no less
| anonymous. A bot army of _3-8 letter word_ + _3-8 letter word_ +
| _2-4 digits at the end_.
|
| Fine, some people take their football club vary seriously, and
| would likely not be much fun in the terraces. To each their own.
|
| But it wasn't just a serious fan of a football club. There were
| numerous examples of a voice shouting disproportionately and
| artificially louder over, well, over a lot of pixels. Ego? Other?
|
| And that was entirely disengaging.
|
| Reddit is, by subreddit definition, a place of sharing common
| interest, herding, or denying others' contribution to common
| interest through such herding. But Place was not just a place for
| herding, of tuning into and manipulating a group for one's own
| aims, it was an affirmation of the dominance of bots, alts as
| magnifiers of this, in discussion and voting in all but the most
| resilient subreddits, or subreddits of the most inert subject
| matter.
| blamazon wrote:
| Highlight of /r/place this year for me was Canada narrative.
|
| Initially that community struggled to decide on cannabis leaf or
| maple leaf, just like 5 years ago, leading to inevitable griefing
| campaigns taking advantage of the internal volatility to
| successfully turn it into "Bananas" with a yellow flag and a
| banana in place of the leaf for a short time.
|
| But then the Canadians prevailed in the last hour, with Canada
| spelled correctly and the maple leaf and even all their
| provincial flags were added.
|
| At some point during the volatile Canadian flag period the
| Germans made a perfect maple leaf inside the German flag in about
| 3 minutes which was amusing.
|
| You can see the Canadian leaf was one of the most volatile map
| areas on this pixel volatility heatmap:
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/Mehdi_Moussaid/status/15112531929...
| jeromegv wrote:
| Even more interesting, Quebec got their shit together in a
| better way than Canada and had a larger physical presence on
| the board.
| kannanvijayan wrote:
| I did not participate in the reddit place event, but I did
| witness this drama play out as I was browsing the site.
|
| The psychological response to this was also fittingly Canadian.
| Ultimately the chaotic symbol was dubbled the "merple lerf",
| and accepted in the good humour that it deserved to be.
|
| Now allow me to take 20-50 minutes to dissect what this event
| means to the Canadian identity, and how the chaotic aspect of
| the symbol may reflect deeper schisms and currents that
| underscore the Canadian experience.
|
| Tonight at 8:00pm on CBC Radio. 7:30pm in Newfoundland.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yeah, r/place generated so many miniature dramas it was wild.
|
| The US flag drama was also an interesting lesson in
| coordination. Obviously it drew a lot of attack / defense,
| beefs, etc, but a lot of the early support was uncoordinated
| and _also_ hindered bringing the artwork to the next level. The
| hivemind was good at local fixes but bad at global fixes -- our
| equivalent of the merple leaf was that the flag would always
| tend towards 100 stars in a grid instead of 50 stars in
| staggered rows. Attempts to add artwork or remove & fix stars
| were rejected by the hivemind trying to defend the flag. I'm
| embarrassed to admit that I may have put 2 or 3 reverts against
| what, in hindsight, was an attempt to add Iwo Jima to the lower
| left.
|
| In the end, what rallied the troops was a retreat.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/tvhtgv/american_flag...
|
| After seeing the US flag disappear, supporters flocked to the
| subreddit and the discord. This tipped the balance away from
| self-sabotaging hivemind and towards coordination. There was a
| dynamic of "minimum viable change," where the hivemind would
| stop fighting artwork only once it could recognize it, so the
| key was to organize enough people on discord to push out an
| identifiable chunk (say, the space shuttle) in a single wave.
| I'm sure this dynamic played out in hundreds of communities,
| but in the end good art and organization won:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericanFlaginPlace/comments/twg11p...
|
| I'd love to hear the French story. They rotated through a few
| designs and look heavily contested on the heatmap:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/twryzd/frequency_of_...
| yannoux wrote:
| The big French flag (bottom left) was mostly drawned and
| defended by the French streamers. There were more than 400k
| viewers last night on Kameto Twitch channel to defend the
| area (probably 600-700k for all French streamers) and they
| were regularly attacked by Spanish + US streamers who were
| trying to destroy the flag.
| mirceal wrote:
| the whole thing was hilarious. the memes that came out if it
| were also hilarious. at some point i saw a meme with a minion
| complaining that the Canadians are trying to take over his
| country's flag.
| theyeenzbeanz wrote:
| I participated and constantly had to fight against flags that
| keep severing and overriding our artwork and coordinators
| threatening to erase it entirely. We managed to make do, but the
| white only pixel at the end felt like a slap in the face after
| all the effort.
| istorical wrote:
| I mean, the entire dataset should become available so you can
| look at any particular instance of the map, if you want, just
| create a snapshot of the map right before the white erasure
| started. Or find a high quality recording of a timelapse and
| screenshot your preferred moment.
| wingerlang wrote:
| > but the white only pixel at the end felt like a slap in the
| face after all the effort.
|
| I'm not invested at all in Place, but to me it seems like the
| whole point of the event is that things are not permanent. The
| inevitable time-lapses is the ACTUAL artwork, not the final
| state of the canvas.
| blamazon wrote:
| Long ago I visited a Tibetan Buddhist temple in my town in
| the USA and they explained to me the significance of the Sand
| Mandala, [1] which is an intricate image drawn with colored
| sand on a square board by a group. There was one in progress
| and it was stunning to behold, clearly so many hours put into
| it.
|
| Once the Sand Mandala is complete, it's ceremoniously swept
| into a bin and returned to nature. The idea, as I understand
| it, is to demonstrate how even actions that are impermanent
| have meaning, symbolic of our transitory lives on this
| planet. Or, stated another way, "maybe the real Mandala was
| the friends we made at the sand table."
|
| Then I pointed at a Sand Mandala that was visibly hanging on
| the wall and asked what's that. They explained that that
| Mandala was present during a visitation by the Dalai Lama to
| their temple so they glued the sand in place and hung it up.
|
| I was like, wait, doesn't that invalidate the premise of the
| Mandala? To which they just kind of shrugged and smirked and
| said "not really. That one is special, but it too will be
| destroyed someday."
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala
| david422 wrote:
| Ha. Turns out we are all human after all.
| wolpoli wrote:
| >I'm not invested at all in Place, but to me it seems like
| the whole point of the event is that things are not
| permanent.
|
| That's probably the reason why they made it fade away back to
| white in the end. For many participants through, they were
| motivated to spend the entire weekend on this just to ensure
| that their creation ended up in the final snapshot and that
| would feel like a slap in the face.
| matsemann wrote:
| Last time, wasn't there someone here saying it was easy to do and
| they could do it in a weekend, and then actually delivered? Can't
| find it, but perhaps someone here remember more about it?
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| I'm sure it's not too difficult to build if you don't need to
| scale it up to a similar number of users (especially bots). How
| would you test that it's actually capable of that? Even the
| article mentions they ran into unexpected issues despite all
| the load testing.
| pg_bot wrote:
| Given the right tools, you should be able to handle double
| the max load that they are expecting given a beefy enough
| server. Their architecture is a bit too complex for my taste,
| but given that reddit is written in python it is not
| surprising that this was the direction that they took. You
| could use tsung (http://tsung.erlang-
| projects.org/1/01/about/) to test workloads at that level.
| This would be a pretty straightforward project to build with
| erlang/elixir's gen_server abstraction.
| zild3d wrote:
| it's not really a ton of code to write (around 3400 lines)
| https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit-plugin-place-openso...
|
| the harder part is scaling the number of requests and active
| websockets
| hghmn wrote:
| The challenge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14111143,
| and the follow-through:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124934
| matsemann wrote:
| Thanks!
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| There are probably a lot of programs that could be built in a
| weekend. I imagine any competent full-stack developer could
| make a Twitter clone in an afternoon.
|
| The challenge is making it scale. That developed-in-an-
| afternoon Twitter clone probably won't be able to handle an
| active user count in the 4 digits, let alone the 7+ digits
| Twitter has now.
| [deleted]
| mirceal wrote:
| this sounds like a good system design question.
|
| how would you build r/place?
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| I would probably be the last person to suggest this, but why
| not put it on the blockchain? It would be a pointless display
| of conspicuous consumption, almost as bad as the monkey NFTs!
| mirceal wrote:
| you can't get the required tps for this. observability would
| also be bad between blocks and you would also have states
| where you could end up with different pixels based on the
| block that won.
|
| so nope. wouldn't work with blockchain
| sushid wrote:
| Are you talking about a specific blockchain or
| categorically condemning all L1s? Solana could definitely
| handle the level of tps for something like this. A cache
| could handle the observability issues and you can just keep
| the old pixel until the transaction goes through.
| mirceal wrote:
| i was thinking bitcoin. really exciting if Solana could
| do it
| sushid wrote:
| Other L1s can also probably handle it. Not at the latency
| that Solana could but I see a lot of other low cost high
| tps L1s handling something like this easily.
| [deleted]
| deelowe wrote:
| Article is "How We Build r/Place," not "We built r/place." And,
| as others have commented, this is from 2017.
| netrus wrote:
| The "How" is removed automatically on HN, if I remember
| correctly. I never understood how that is helpful. Maybe it is
| to "disarm" Buzzfeed-like "How to ..." headlines, but more
| often than not it just creates (slightly) misleading titles.
| skilled wrote:
| It was nice to have it back, though I hope they will stick to
| that 5 year gap. On day 2, the streaming community at large
| caught up with the project and there were a lot of "wars"
| happening for space. If you are a small Reddit community, you
| don't stand a chance against 300,000 people using Tampermonkey to
| recreate a gigantic drawing in 10 seconds.
|
| Having said that, I also hope that the next time it does happen -
| Reddit developers will implement at least some protection against
| this kind of brigading. I wouldn't be surprised it was also the
| reason they decided to wipe out the whole thing in the end.
| haskaalo wrote:
| During the first version of /r/place, there was some mechanism
| in place to reduce the use of bots such as a CAPTCHA and not
| allowing newly created accounts to place pixels.
|
| However, this year I feel like they gave up on all of that
| simply to gain more users.
| blamazon wrote:
| Notably, Reddit is planning to IPO this year. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-announces-
| confidential...
| MonkeyIsNull wrote:
| oh no.
| toper-centage wrote:
| That explains why they allowed new accounts to participate.
| There were probably hundreds of thousands of new bot
| accounts created over the weekend.
| yreg wrote:
| Also hundreds of thousands human accounts as well to be
| fair. Whether they will stick around remains to be seen.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| There was a reddit admin using both their admin power (no
| cooldown) and a bot.
|
| The whole thing jumped the shark, big time.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| The botting makes it more boring, in my opinion, it's just a user
| count system at that point.
|
| It would be more interesting (in my opinion) if somehow you could
| get your OWN pixel by being the one who claims it, something like
| if you change a pixel, others can't change it for 5+x minutes
| where X increases each time you "defend" it or something.
| [deleted]
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Doesn't really solve botting though. In fact, this might make
| it even worse, if you ``own'' a pixel longer than the cooldown
| to set a pixel, once you get a pixel, you set up a bot to
| refresh it every 5 minutes. The map becomes mostly static very
| quickly, and if no art got in quickly, I mean static in both
| senses of the term.
|
| If the ownership is shorter than the cooldown, then the botting
| game just becomes clicking every pixel until you own one, then
| finding someone (really a bot on a different account) to take
| over for you.
| yreg wrote:
| The original /r/Place was created (invented?) by /u/powerlanguage
| who recently rose to prominence again when he created Wordle.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| He didn't invent pixel wars any more than he invented
| Mastermind.
| [deleted]
| yreg wrote:
| I added the invent word to clarify that I don't mean "this
| guy created it, not the folks who wrote the article in the
| original post". How would you phrase it? :)
| s_dev wrote:
| They went from /r/Button to /r/Place -- it really felt like
| this was /r/Place sequel rather than another original
| experimental sub for reddit.
|
| Wordle would have been perfect -- every reddit account getting
| the little green and black squares display.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I remember at least one that existed years before r/place.
| Drawball was created in 2005 and was probably better.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| The OP's post was written the engineering team behind r/place.
| Wardle was indeed Reddit's product manager at the time. He
| wrote this blog post about 2017 r/place
| https://www.redditinc.com/blog/place-part-two/
| ssn wrote:
| Very interesting post.
|
| Where can we find posts like these -- e.g. architectural and
| technological analysis and decisions in real word contexts?
| jrockway wrote:
| What did the bot situation look like this year? I know that the
| stock-related areas and Osu! were accused of botting (and faded
| to white very quickly when Place ended last night, sort of
| confirming the accusations), but it seemed like coordination
| through popular streamers seemed to cause the most aggressive
| edits to succeed.
|
| I initially imagined that communities that cared to bot would
| have some sort of coordination server, and users would add
| compute power to that from their local machines. The local thing
| that each user ran would get a pixel to change from the
| coordination server, then use their auth credentials and IP
| address to make the edit. Reading some comments below, though, it
| seems like there was no IP rate limiting and no requirement to
| use an active account. So instead of needing a coordination
| server, I'm guessing that interested users just made a lot of
| accounts and cycled through them locally to make the desired
| edits. Does anyone know for sure? (The main reason I didn't bot
| this was because I assumed having a pool of residential IPs and
| high-karma accounts would be mandatory. I guess I was wrong,
| though!)
|
| Some other comments below imply that this was an intentional
| decision to boost user numbers before an investment round / IPO.
| I hope the investors that are looking to get in on that get
| access to the database to determine whether or not the numbers
| are legitimate. I'm surprised investors are OK with spam accounts
| being counted as legitimate users. They aren't going to buy
| anything that's advertised or invite their friends ;)
| Macha wrote:
| Absolutely rampant. I think most communities that were still on
| the canvas day 2 and on either had a huge inbuilt following or
| resorted to bots.
|
| I think Osu, the superstonk people and France probably were
| botting, but unless those bots were incredibly poorly written,
| I don't think were the cause of the sudden erasure - the bot
| code I saw shared most widely was definitely looking up which
| colour to pick based on the rendered colour code, and one
| discord I was in that was using it was definitely alerted to
| the white starting because the bots started erroring out for
| being unable to find the desired colour. I think it's more
| likely hostile bots were the cause of the swift erasure. If
| they're just picking a random or first colour to try wipe it
| out, they'd still function and contribute to swift deletion
| jrockway wrote:
| That's interesting. I didn't look into the API in detail. I
| took one edit request and did "copy as curl" and played with
| that a bit (it's just GraphQL, and I enjoyed how some fields
| are "snake_case" and others are "CamelCase"). I was kind of
| surprised that I could reuse the various authorization
| headers between requests, I assumed they would really want to
| validate that you were actually using a browser and not
| replaying requests with curl, but it didn't seem to cause any
| problems.
|
| I guess my underlying assumption that was completely wrong
| was that they wanted to avoid bots this time around. It
| doesn't seem like they did, and I don't understand why. On
| one side of the spectrum if you add some defenses then the
| people that break them are good people to offer a job to. On
| the other side of the spectrum, it's a lot more fun for
| humans when they aren't competing with machines. Having no
| bot mitigation just means the computer savvy users get to
| stomp on the actually creative communities. It makes me a
| little sad.
| Macha wrote:
| Oh, I don't know how many of the bots were actually using
| the API, versus just userscripts running in
| TamperMonkey/ViolentMonkey. The ones I saw were
| userscripts, so they were browser based.
|
| They did try _some_ prevention, there was a guy running 20
| accounts who had his timers escalate up to like 18000
| minutes, and also if you placed too many black pixels in
| sequence you'd get errors for a while before you could
| place again. But it definitely didn't kick in until way too
| late.
| winrid wrote:
| When I broke my ankle I actually built a "live" version of
| r/Place for Android without ever hearing about r/Place. People
| just called it a "place clone" :p
|
| It supports much larger images though!
|
| You can find it on Android called "Pixmap".
|
| How I built it:
|
| Server: Client side websocket load balancing against NodeJS
| servers. Client connection location stored in DB. Separate
| service to route events between the client facing servers.
| Separate service which pulls change events from the DB and
| applies to images and also keeps track of the most popular areas
| of rooms, so the client can auto zoom you to those areas when you
| join.
|
| Changing pixels involves two things. 1. Broadcasting the
| immediate event, and 2. Processing the image. When someone joins
| a room, they just fetch the image. The image processor is in Node
| too.
|
| Client architecture: App is in pure Java. There are two rendering
| engines that we switch between based on zoom level. When you zoom
| out far, we mostly use the GPU, and individual pixel changes
| update a bitmap which is then pushed to the GPU. When you zoom
| in, it mostly uses the CPU and just a canvas as it feels more
| responsive this way. Also allows us to do things like add
| annotations to show who is drawing. Getting the transition
| seemless is tricky.
|
| There's also a whole matchmaking system, which was a fun thing to
| build.
|
| Anyway my ankle healed and I switched to other projects... :)
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I don't like /r/place - I spend time in several regional
| subreddits, and they've transferred their nationalistic identity
| wars to Reddit. They're constantly fighting to build and rebuild
| their flags.
|
| Now those regional subs are littered with one post after another
| of "come on, we need your help to defend our flag" nonsense.
|
| It's all pointless and divisive.
| nsilvestri wrote:
| It's a game. Games can have competition. Sometimes that's what
| makes them fun.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| And flags are some of the few pixel arts that most people can
| casually coordinate for, once the intended size is apparent.
| moffkalast wrote:
| One might call it a "capture the flag"
| badkitty99 wrote:
| colordrops wrote:
| it's a game that overtakes many subreddits for a significant
| period of time.
| fullshark wrote:
| The first time was really fun and exciting, one of the last
| times reddit felt like an actual community and not an agitprop
| botspam amplifier.
| Loughla wrote:
| Honestly, Robin was the last time I felt like reddit was
| actual people, instead of bots and bullshit. The random chats
| that grew or died was a fascinating way to talk to new
| people. it was genuinely fun.
|
| Now they have a chat feature apparently (I'm always on RIF
| now) but I'm betting that's just awful.
| treesknees wrote:
| It was divisive everywhere. I saw so many posts from folks
| arguing why X or Y shouldn't be on the board, or shouldn't use
| up so much space, or how flags were too boring. I stopped
| playing after the first day because of all the anger around it.
| zeven7 wrote:
| I saw a lot of people having fun and didn't see people
| getting really angry. Though I'm sure there were people
| actually getting angry, that happens with every game. Maybe
| those people should relax more, but -\\_(tsu)_/-. I was part
| of a community maintaining a small logo that got attacked a
| few times, and we repaired it - part of the fun. I agree with
| the people who think a canvas full of flags is kind of boring
| and wish people didn't jump so quickly into nationalistic
| identities as a way to express themselves, but -\\_(tsu)_/-.
| _jesseb wrote:
| Yeah I was part of a community that coordinated several
| logos/art pieces and it was a lot of fun. Almost all of the
| communities in the area we were in banded together into an
| alliance and we beat off a bunch of attacks, mainly
| streamers who thought we looked like easy pickings.
|
| Agreed on the flags though, they're just so boring. At
| least a lot of the flags ended up with artwork on them this
| time though. Some of the big streamers were pretty
| irritating too, they just seemed like they wanted to ruin
| peoples fun. I don't mind chaos but it's more interesting
| if it's a swarm like the void and not just some guy
| screaming into a mic to attack a random spot.
| distances wrote:
| I think the flags with artwork were brilliant. People
| coming together and deciding plus coordinating what
| should be the cultural piece they wanted to be
| immortalised in the limited space. I didn't participate
| in placing the pixels but spent some good time just
| browsing the flags and deciphering the references placed
| on them.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| A good chunk of that anger was because of trolls. People
| extending someone else's flag over other's artwork, random
| streamers calling their followers for vandalism, and general
| griefing. Since regular users are limited to one pixel every
| five minutes, it can be exasperating to see their effort
| erased in a few seconds.
| istorical wrote:
| You might be missing the point of those who disagree with
| your take, which is to call those who want to do different
| things on /r/Place than you 'trolls' or 'griefers' is
| itself just you projecting your own value judgment onto
| them, or acting as if you are the judge of what is right
| and wrong.
|
| From the perspective of someone who likes /r/theblackvoid,
| the pixel artists coloring over the void are just trolls
| and griefers.
|
| So the parent would refer to anyone 'complaining' about
| other users as unnecessarily angry. Whether it's a flag
| person mad that some other flag or art or void or whatever
| is drawing over their flag, or whether it's a void person
| mad at the flag person, or whether its a pixel artist mad
| at the flag person, it's all just people projecting their
| own preference as if its some moral imperative.
|
| Who are you to say that streamers shouldn't use their
| followers to leave a mark? Or that chaos and randomly
| placing pixels isn't a valid goal? You may personally find
| it really stupid and annoying. I personally find baseball
| really stupid and annoying. But I wouldn't refer to people
| who enjoy baseball as trolls.
|
| Dr. Seuss' butter battle is the perfect illustration.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| r/Place is inherently organized chaos, so anyone can
| leave their mark if they are able to. Unfortunately
| there's a sizable subset of people that don't want to
| leave a mark, and only want to vandalize other's marks,
| participating solely to draw funny eyes, broken teeth,
| penises, or simply erase whole sections.
|
| I'd go as far as to qualify people who practiced
| r/TheBlackVoid in the canvas as antisocial, since filling
| a single-color void requires very little cooperation
| between themselves.
| esperent wrote:
| > It's all pointless and divisive.
|
| Seems unfair to blame this on a game. It's more a sign of the
| times we live in.
| kps wrote:
| > _It 's all pointless and divisive._
|
| It's not pointless. Divisiveness drives engagement; engagement
| drives ad money.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| I wonder if they count all the bots as active users
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| A theory that's been floating around is that they might
| intentionally not have implemented anti-bot measures, in
| order to pump up user numbers for their IPO.
| steelframe wrote:
| I wondered WTF was happening on my alma mater's subreddit when
| suddenly the whole front page became "we have to defend/win back
| our r/place space!!1!" I checked a few other college subreddits,
| and yup, this has become a spam scourge.
| blamazon wrote:
| Oh no. Increased engagement in your online community for a
| whole 4 days. How did you survive? Please share tips and
| tricks.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of content that I really love. A lot of
| people are decrying the streamers but I feel like they added a
| lot more fun to the project. There was a giant 1v8 that "France"
| fought for in the bottom left corner and they ended up winning
| and keeping their flag. The bronies got attacked consistently
| over the course of 3+ days and ended up with more space than they
| started with.
|
| It's fun reading over the different arguments. Flag haters, bot
| haters, territorial arguments, etc. This is the best kind of art!
| It's also kinda funny watching people complain about bots when
| the first iteration had just as much botting. I wouldn't be
| surprised if the exact same scripts were used now that existed
| then. I think the only big difference this time around was
| streamers using overlays to 50K+ viewers.
| treesknees wrote:
| I didn't care for /r/place this time around. It felt like a lazy
| and uninspired move by Reddit to just copy the exact same idea
| from 5 years ago. As pointless as their other events were, like
| /r/the_button, at least they were unique.
|
| Not only that, it spoiled the treasured memory and experience of
| 2017. This year was so full of hate and fighting over flags,
| stream raids, bot scripts floating around, none of it felt
| genuine except maybe people keeping up with the Ukraine flag on
| day 1. In 2017 it closed with me thinking Reddittors came
| together to make some cool art, this year it closed with me
| wondering whether any humans were involved by the end.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It was tweaked quite a bit. Canvas expansion over time, palette
| expansion over time, wait time modified to a flat 5 minutes,
| and a completely different ending come to mind. Of course this
| time there were also ~5x as many tiles placed per hour as well.
| If all that counts for is a lazy uninspired move to copy the
| exact same thing then sign me up for more lazy uninspired
| events.
|
| Your memory of 2017 seems to be more nostalgia than reality as
| much of the same occurred in regards to both good sentiment and
| bad during it - it was only looking back that everything seemed
| perfect. Many people hated rainbowroad, thebluecorner, flags,
| and similar groups just the same in 2017. Bots weren't the
| invention of the last 5 years either. If you look at the 2022
| canvas and the only genuine interaction you see is the
| Ukrainian flag then you're simply ignoring the good parts to
| leave focus on the bad. If I had to focus on the biggest
| difference between 2017 and 2022 I'd actually say it was the
| amount of attention large streamers drove to it all. There were
| plenty of streamers in 2017 but in 2022 pretty much all major
| view count streamers were treating it as a multi-day content
| event between each other instead of really being tied to what
| was being coordinated from Reddit communities interacting.
|
| I hope they do another one in another 5 years. My favorite part
| of this year was seeing placestart manage to get the XP start
| menu in after the final expansion. It was my favorite part of
| the first one and it was good to see it get some tweaks as
| well.
| badsoftware wrote:
| Bottling was an issue in 2017 too.
| MisterBiggs wrote:
| From the linked article:
|
| > The API should be generally open and transparent so the
| reddit community can build on it (bots, extensions, data
| collection, external visualizations, etc) if they choose to
| do so.
|
| They specifically made r/place (at least in 2017) to be easy
| to bot. Without botting I don't think individual users could
| coordinate well enough against spam to build some of the more
| complex art.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Not to mention the reddit admin who was constantly overwriting
| squares with no cooldown.
|
| They were doing it so much that it was clear they weren't just
| abusing their admin power but using a bot as well.
| colordrops wrote:
| why was an admin overwriting squares?
| snarkerson wrote:
| Some images were not permitted. Like the American flag
| linked above. They rebuilt it but the original was wiped
| out by an admin user.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _original was wiped out by an admin user_
|
| This isn't true at all. As I was following it, the
| original American flag was just being griefed.
| asfbfbino wrote:
| kuraudo wrote:
| The exposing of the cheating didn't help.
| silisili wrote:
| For those unaware, https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/tv
| 3hin/a_reddit_mod_...
|
| This -completely- ruined the entire narrative. It's not
| organic content, it's not even user generated content. It's
| whatever the employees wanted it to be. Gross.
| treesknees wrote:
| Apparently the cat being overwritten here has been in use
| as a mascot by a group of folks who were banned from
| Reddit. So I'm not sure it's as simple as stating that
| admins wanted to control the board, there could have been
| some abuse going on that we don't know about.
|
| >The Admins are currently at war with r/drama's offsite
| forum, who have been brigading Reddit. Last week the Admins
| banned lots of them permanently. So yesterday those
| brigaders drew their cat mascot in r/place, and the Admins
| used their powers to erase it.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/tv2lmx/com
| m...
| marcofiset wrote:
| Why is this tagged 2021? It's an article from 2017.
| jasode wrote:
| I don't know why it's "(2021)" but I noticed the HTML source
| does have a tag with "2021" in it. Somebody would have to do a
| diff between some previous Wayback Machine snapshots and the
| current page to try and determine what got updated.
| <a href="https://www.redditinc.com/blog/how-we-built-rplace"
| rel="bookmark" tabindex="-1"> <time class="entry-date
| published" datetime="2017-04-13T00:00:00-04:00">April 13,
| 2017</time> <time class="updated"
| datetime="2021-08-30T16:09:26-04:00">August 30, 2021</time>
| </a>
| dang wrote:
| Fixed above. Thanks!
| [deleted]
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