• zcd@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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”

      • Sota4077@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That is absolutely going to happen. I suspect there will be a ton of Apollo and other 3rd party app logos too.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • Nix@merv.news
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          1 year ago

          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

      • limelight79@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        “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.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Don’t say “fuck u/spez,” say “join Lemmy.” The advertising worked out great for r/fuckcars last time.

    • BarbecueCowboy@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Korne127@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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).

  • null@zerobytes.monster
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    1 year 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.

  • LemmyLefty@lemmy.world
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    1 year 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
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      1 year 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.)

    • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They’re emptying the closet for anything they can release right now to save face and their precious valuation

  • simple@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

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

  • Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Teppic@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      But r/place is ruled by bots… I bet the kind of people who develop bots are reeeeaaaly pleased about the API changes…

      • JDubbleu@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Teppic@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Oh absolutely, but the venn diagram of people who can do this, and people who value open APIs is pretty close to a circle.

    • JGrffn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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    1 year 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
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      1 year ago

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

  • danc4498@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • The Stoned Hacker@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • can@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    We’re bringing back something many of you actually asked us for.

    The fucking nerve of them lol

    • BarbecueCowboy@kbin.social
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      1 year 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.

      • cynar@lemmy.world
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        1 year 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.

      • maess@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

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

  • Brudder Aaron@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • RedstoneValley@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    “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.