18 ms·

Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

430 points by camtarn 10y ago

camtarn 10y ago
Hm. I agree the original title from the article was clickbait, but ... could it perhaps be titled something that emphasizes the cooperative nature? It's not really an April Fools' gag as much as a social experiment.
- superkuh 10y ago
  And only the most recent, large scale, implementation of the concept. I recall these pixel wars pages being popular in the early 2000s. Back then you made perl scripts to automate it. Now they (r/place teams) use python. Not much has changed. And I don't know if the author of the ars piece was just ignoring them or not, but there were plenty of dongs and other typical vandalism throughout.
- dang 10y ago
  We'll s/gag/experiment/ above.
  - camtarn 10y ago
    Cheers :)
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  Earlier I tried posting a timelapse video of the experiment with the title "Timelapse - Reddit users each place 1 pixel / 5 minutes on a 1000x1000 grid", but it got deduped to a post with a much less descriptive title which, as a result, never really took off.
- mhink 10y ago
  Reddit's April Fools projects [1] have been social experiments for a few years now, and I really appreciate their willingness to actually build the kinds of interesting ideas which you can really only accomplish with such a large and engaged userbase. /r/thebutton was a lot of fun two years ago, and while I never really used /r/robin, I thought the concept was brilliant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#April_Fools_subreddits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#April_Fools_subreddits
gallerdude 10y ago
I can't think of many examples, but I do like these sort of projects - Twitch Plays Pokémon comes to mind. Interesting how an entire subculture can develop: inside jokes, wars, and more. It's amazing because it's a microculture, but it develops far faster than any "regular" culture would.
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  Other examples include the Bob Ross reruns and SeeBotsChat on Twitch.
  - tcdent 10y ago
    Twitch installs Arch Linux was an interesting ride, too.
  - andrewflnr 10y ago
    You're thinking of this w.r.t. Bob Ross? https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2015/11/02/how-dead-painter-bob-ross-is-bringing-positivity-to-the-internets-most-cynical-community/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2015/11/02/how-dea...
    - Ajedi32 10y ago
      Yep. Though it feels a bit strange to be reading a Forbes article about it. Seems more like the kind of thing you'd read about on Know Your Meme: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/bob-ross http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/bob-ross
beefhash 10y ago
It's worth nothing that the admins did actively ban users trying to make swastikas. /b/ tried and found that out the hard way. Reddit's content policy[1] was still applicable and was very much enforced. [1] https://www.reddit.com/help/contentpolicy/ https://www.reddit.com/help/contentpolicy/
- dugditches 10y ago
  Maybe it was even useful as bait, eliminating lots of accounts of those users from their userbase.
  - stouset 10y ago
    If so, even better IMO.
    - lacampbell 10y ago
      Shame they didn't get rid of all the commies as well.
    - Coincoin 10y ago
      Yes! Let's prevent them from expressing themselves so they will never debate their ideas and never realize they might be wrong. Let's ostracize them until they have no choice but fester their frustration, hidden from the rest of world. Let's make those ideas illegal so that any of our parents, sibling and children, if they ever entertain them, will keep it their most sacred secret, protected from scrutiny. All that, in the name of some people not wanting to be offended.
      - therealdrag0 10y ago
        Sure worked well with Trump supporters right?
      - dwaltrip 10y ago
        Not being able to express your idea without intense backlash is a pretty strong signal you might be wrong. Of course, there are many exceptions to this in history.
rmccoy6435 10y ago
I think this was a pretty neat experiment. For the first 24 hours everything was chaos, then it settled down in the middle as communities formed, then at the end it was just annoying as every subreddit was trying to take over real-estate, and far too many people were taking it way too seriously. It got annoying going to certain subreddits that I subscribe to for content started getting flooded with "Man the decks, we need to defend this!". The other thing this author tried to make this about was politics. I think the one thing this really showed was most people on reddit don't really care about politics, but the vocal minority on there makes it seem like it's the forefront of every issue. I don't think there is anything actually political on the final /r/place piece other than country flags. Maybe this was more about how disinterested the majority of redditors are with politics rather than how politics were being squashed out by other users?
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > I think the one thing this really showed was most people on reddit don't really care about politics, but the vocal minority on there makes it seem like it's the forefront of every issue. Isn't it also possible for the reverse to be true? That a very vocal minority cared very much about r/place, and that vocal minority happened to not care enough about politics to show up on Place?
  - the_watcher 10y ago
    It seems that given the restrictions on how often a single user could actually visibly change the image, coupled with the sheer volume of changes, no, the reverse is almost certainly not true.
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      As I understand it, most organizers used bots to help coordinate the process. People who care about politics on Reddit are no less likely to be tech savvy.
      - 10y ago
good_sir_ant 10y ago
Ah, the ample parallels you could draw with this and freedom.
- johnhenry 10y ago
  Please expand?
cjslep 10y ago
This experiment reminds me of an old website where visitors only had so much paint (and it would slowly regenerate over time), and would paint portions of a common canvas. I can't remember the name of the site, but I think it was active in the mid 2000's. Of course, at times 4chan would invade, but I think it was mostly eastern europeans present (as once again flags were the big thing to paint everywhere).
- kuusisto 10y ago
  Drawball
  - cjslep 10y ago
    This is exactly it! Thanks.
- iamatworknow 10y ago
  Came here to make this comment. I was on 4chan at the time and definitely remember a lot of "campaigns" to deface Drawball.
scrollaway 10y ago
Reddit's AF this year was excellent, probably my favourite AF experiment of all time. I usually really dislike AF on the internet - some (most) sites become completely unusable for a day and, last thing the internet needs, it gets even harder to tell real news from the fake bits. (Did you know Takei is running for 2018 congress? That was true! Actually it wasn't. But it was! Well, no, it wasn't.) But I'm really fond of how Reddit always handled it: A day for creativity and experimentation. The Place is a really, really beautiful experiment and the result of it surpassed expectations.
- ehsankia 10y ago
  I absolutely love AF on the internet. Yes, there will always be sites that produce low effort, boring and annoying content, but when isn't that true? On the other hand, you have plenty of companies and sites that produce genuinely funny and well thought out content. Reddit has consistently been the best for the past few years. Google, Blizzard, Razer and a few other companies always produce a couple good videos too. I definitely agree with you though that creativity and experimentation is far more interesting than cheap little tricks.
  - nojvek 10y ago
    Really enjoyed Ms pacman on google maps. I prefer that than fake news.
- nebabyte 10y ago
  > But I'm really fond of how Reddit always handled it: A day for creativity and experimentation Someone didn't sit through the TF2 one or iirc their other one (before? after?) it
Raphmedia 10y ago
I love those kind of "get together and improvise" experiments. The last time I had felt such a sense of wonder and community was the first few days of Pokemon Go when everyone was in the street trying to figure it out. There's an untapped concept behind all of those. Content that is ephemeral but brings a lot of people together...
- camtarn 10y ago
  I guess that's what a lot of Alternate Reality Games try and tap into - the shared joy of figuring out something interesting and strange, sometimes with ties to the real world. I remember reading about the I Love Bees ARG, with its GPS coordinates for payphones (which turned out to be a promo for Halo 2!) and wishing I'd been able to be a part of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees
- chillacy 10y ago
  A really great radiolab on the subject is their episode on Emergence: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91500-emergence/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/91500-emergence/ That's what /r/place was like in the first few hours, where people saw a pattern and just laid their pixel down to continue it, which is how you got things like a blue line (accelerating as time went on) and the blue corner. You as a contributor don't know what you're building, but as a group you build something. Later as communities started planning and running scripts, it became much less "improv"-y.
  - Raphmedia 10y ago
    "Emergence"! Thank you for the word. I was looking for it!
spiderfarmer 10y ago
It continues to inspire creativity even after it closed: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatmap_made_into_a_show_opening/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatm...
tonyztan 10y ago
This collaboration reminds me of Wikipedia, where users work together to create articles and remove vandalism.
wl 10y ago
I'm surprised that the article doesn't talk about how things were ruined towards the end with bots mindlessly overwriting squares to impose a pattern on the grid instead of collaborating.
doubleunplussed 10y ago
It was a seriously cool experiment. Factions rose and fell, alliances were forged, battles waged, "rules of war" developed. It was amazing. But I don't think there's much to be gained from pontificating about it as a model for preventing hate speech. For one, it was moderated. The slow speed of creating things just meant it was easier on moderators. Secondly, the main thing that made it mostly pleasant was that only very widespread ideas could flourish. Minority ideas, whether good or bad, could not (even the art from small communities was only allowed to exist via alliances with larger communities that could easily destroy their art). This means things were mostly unobjectionable, but it also limits creativity. Do you really want that to be your model of public conversation? Things can only be published if 1000 people all try to publish the same thing and work to maintain it? This would just be pushing filter bubbles to the extreme and driving resentment underground where nobody would notice it until it bubbled over. Then people would be like "whoa, where'd all the hate speech come from?", when it was there all along but not the dominant voice. And they would be making poor decisions regarding their own political strategy, because they mistakenly believed that they had won a battle that they had not. All a model like that would do would be to amplify the status quo, whether good or bad. Just because your political faction happens to be dominant in certain circles doesn't mean you should adopt policies that always benefit the dominant political faction. Especially when your faction is all about protecting minorities. A status-quo-favouring policy would be terrible for minorities that do not already carry favour with the larger population. When you think about whether a policy for shaping public conversation is a good idea long-term or not, consider whether it would be a good idea say, in Russia today. LGBT people in Russia are oppressed and do not hold favour with any larger political faction. "Majority gets to censor the minority" is a terrible policy in almost all cases, and people at present only don't realise this because they are in the historically improbable situation of the people with the power to censor also being the ones who favour minority voices. This is historically rare, and your policies should not rely on it being the case.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  > This would just be pushing filter bubbles to the extreme and driving resentment underground where nobody would notice it until it bubbled over. Then people would be like "whoa, where'd all the hate speech come from?", when it was there all along but not the dominant voice. And they would be making poor decisions regarding their own political strategy, because they mistakenly believed that they had won a battle that they had not. Doesn't this describe the recent presidential election?
Ajedi32 10y ago
Here's a timelapse of the entire event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY I found this whole thing to be incredibly fascinating. It's pretty amazing to see how everyone just sort of spontaneously banded together to create little works of art on the board which they could never have made on their own. Everytime I watch the timelapse I notice something new. It's also interesting to note that because the impact of any individual user on the board was pretty limited (you could only place one pixel every 5 minutes, and even then there was no guarantee the first pixel you placed wouldn't be overwritten by someone else before you were even allowed to place another), every significant piece of artwork on there had tens or even hundreds of people involved in creating and maintaining it. In addition to the various artworks on the board, there were also several major factions scattered throughout the board with their own goals. /r/TheBlueCorner dedicated themselves to filling the empty space in the bottom right corner of the board with blue pixels, while /r/theblackvoid formed to erase various artworks by replacing them with black tiles. If you pay attention you may also notice several other factions in the timelapse (the Rainbow Road, Draw Hearts, Erase the Place, and The Green Lattice were a few other notable ones). Other interesting events to note include [the German invasion of France](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ParHJmq2aCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ParHJmq2aCs) (and resulting peaceful resolution), [The Void's (unsuccessful) attack on the OSU logo](https://i.imgur.com/Tpmvrcc.gif https://i.imgur.com/Tpmvrcc.gif), and [several factions ganging up to attack the US flag](https://gfycat.com/InfamousShyEeve https://gfycat.com/InfamousShyEeve) while most of the US population was asleep. There's plenty of other stuff you might notice too if you look hard enough. (For example, can you find Waldo?) [Here's what the canvas looked like when the event finally ended](https://i.imgur.com/ajWiAYi.png https://i.imgur.com/ajWiAYi.png). Other interesting stuff to note include [this animated heatmap](https://i.imgur.com/a95XXDz.gifv https://i.imgur.com/a95XXDz.gifv) by /u/jampekka of activity on the canvas, and [this graphic](https://i.imgur.com/SEHaUSJ.png https://i.imgur.com/SEHaUSJ.png) by /u/alternateme highlighting all the white pixels which never got touched throughout the experiment.
SippinLean 10y ago
Cool experiment, very disappointing outcome. To me it was an experiment in dynamic, ever-changing art; giving way to creation and destruction. In the end, it was just scripted bots working to preserve art, mostly corporate logos and national flags. Why was there no captcha?!
- lovehashbrowns 10y ago
  The bots thing definitely leaves a bitter aftertaste to the whole experiment. I still loved it and enjoyed watching things unfold, though. As for the logos/flags thing.. I think that had more to do with how short the experiment was. Maybe if it went on for a little longer, people would have been slightly more creative. As it stands, even the more creative stuff was very meme-y. Megaman shooting dat boi, for example.
- ctdonath 10y ago
  Interesting philosophical contrast between this, your suggestion, and http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com - anarchy vs benevolent dictatorship vs capitalism.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    The benevolent dictatorship being represented by any pixel rendered image you find to be "benevolent" presumably. Compare the r/places output to MDH and http://media.cntraveler.com/photos/56d0aee058d9a8773c109eb2/master/w_775,c_limit/virgin-gorda-the-baths-cr-getty.jpg http://media.cntraveler.com/photos/56d0aee058d9a8773c109eb2/... and you'll probably establish a consensus for the "benevolent dictator" made art above the others?
- klenwell 10y ago
  If that's not a metaphor for the history of the internet, I don't know what is.
acalderaro 10y ago
My favorite subreddit (r/2007scape) went head-to-head against r/The_donald for the top left corner. Right now it's "connection lost - please wait, attempting to reestablish" but apparently the_Donald wanted to make it an American flag, and things got pretty heated. We won :)
- rmccoy6435 10y ago
  I didn't know about the competition against /r/t_d, but the sheer amount of threads on Sunday in /r/2007scape about defending and call to arms is what was beginning to aggravate me. I think there were 5 actual posts about the game or discussions on their front page, and 20 about /r/Place.
  - acalderaro 10y ago
    Yea they really wanted to win. Honestly it was pretty frustrating because I rely on them for 87% of my meme consumption, but I'm glad that we won a "place" on /r/place
callumprentice 10y ago
Reminds me of a more dynamic version of the Million Dollar Homepage from many years ago. http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
ctdonath 10y ago
Someone's gotta mention http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com : Early in the history of the Internet, some high school kid set up a web page with a 1000x1000 image and a limited color palette. He sold individual pixels, plus a link from that pixel to anywhere, for $1. Yup, he sold them all in fairly short order.
- xanderstrike 10y ago
  The sad thing is none of those logos and links have any meaning any more, almost all of them go to 404s, domain parked pages, or completely unrelated sites, and even when they were new they went to scummy ecommerce or porn sites. In 12 years, the imagery on /r/place will still hold meaning and the timelapses will still tell a pretty cool story.
  - petepete 10y ago
    Cartridge Save (top left) are still going strong. I used to work for their offshoot web division many years ago.
  - koyote 10y ago
    Lings Cars is still doing fine! http://www.lingscars.com/ http://www.lingscars.com/
  - ctdonath 10y ago
    It's like an old photograph of Times Square, where most businesses shown are long defunct and many were of dubious character. Nonetheless, it still holds meaning and tells a pretty cool story.
  - joenot443 10y ago
    Pretty wild to see a (relatively) huge company like 2checkout (https://www.2checkout.com/ https://www.2checkout.com/) on there.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
AsyncAwait 10y ago
It was neat how we at /r/archlinux were able to eventually come to an agreement with /r/sweden not to deface each other's logo, so that we had one less border to worry about :-) Thanks /r/sweden!
solotronics 10y ago
france tried to invade bitcoin but r/bitcoin fought them off after much struggle lol very interesting social experiment!
Namrog84 10y ago
Although I don't see it as much here on HN, but in real life and in other areas. I have seen some criticism that many felt it hard to believe that people could collaborate on this so well and they believe it was almost entirely bot driven or somehow belitte the effort. While I know towards the very end there were a growing number of bots and scripts that did start taking hold more. Anyone who was part of it, even more so if they were engaged in discord or other more active channels than just subreddits, easily saw the hundreds of people collaborating, community, alliances, discussing ideas, and more. All of this together helped make it what it was. I truly believe it was mostly done as a direct result of a lot of peoples' hard work and persistence. I participated in some large pieces; as well as helped promote/start a very small piece myself. All of it came together quite beautifully.
jwilk 10y ago
> 16-bit palette Did they mean 16 color palette?
- Robin_Message 10y ago
  They probably meant 16-bit palette, which typically allocates 5 bits to red, 6 to green, and 5 to blue. It was typical of computer games in the early noughties. It gives you a reasonable range of colours with only 2 bytes per pixel, which mattered then! EDIT: Oh, and green gets the extra bit because your eye can perhaps perceive more shades of green than other colours.
- jwilk 10y ago
  Answering to myself: They almost certainly did. There's only 16 colors in the final image: $ curl -s https://i.redd.it/wc436nf7fdpy.png | pngtopnm | ppmhist libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile r g b lum count ----- ----- ----- ----- ------- 34 34 34 34 258550 255 255 255 255 154487 229 0 0 68 123218 0 0 234 27 90720 229 217 0 196 63755 229 149 0 156 55643 2 190 1 112 40918 0 131 199 100 32930 0 211 221 149 29820 255 167 209 198 28576 228 228 228 228 27733 136 136 136 136 26035 130 0 128 54 20019 160 106 66 118 18023 148 224 68 183 16047 207 110 228 153 13526
ourcat 10y ago
Are there any open-source projects out there which can do this? The resulting 10 minute time-lapse video is an absolute thing of beauty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCAsY8kjE3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCAsY8kjE3w I once ran a site years ago where people could doodle these little squares. It didn't take long for 'wars' to break out, involving various insignia. And cartoon genitals. It got to about 500k before something went horribly wrong with a hard disk on the server. :(
jedanbik 10y ago
Not a fan of the 3D chart they used - lots of data gets hidden by towering spires, and the camera tilt adds its own bit of distortion. Did anyone create an old fashioned 2D heatmap?
- Qub3d 10y ago
  Yep [0]. They also made a cool TV show intro [1] out of it. [0]:https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/63240q/rplace_activity_animated_heatmap/ https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/63240q/rplace_activi... [1]:https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatmap_made_into_a_show_opening/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatm...
Danylon 10y ago
Reminds me of http://artcontext.net/act/06/glyphiti/docs/index.php http://artcontext.net/act/06/glyphiti/docs/index.php a black and white multiplayer canvas that has been running since 2001. They also animate the progress here: http://artcontext.net/act/01/glyphiti/anim/ http://artcontext.net/act/01/glyphiti/anim/
icc97 10y ago
I find this interesting in what it lacked: * No Google / Twitter / Facebook / Amazon * No news networks (except NPR) * Hardly any corporations except for Tesla, Space X, AMD, Lego and IKEA * No GTA, FIFA, large corporate games * Only 6 actual people (1/3 of which was the Dutch dutchy) * No films * No iconic logos - e.g. Olympics rings, Nike, McDonalds
- mycomian 10y ago
  Don't know what "dutchy" is supposed to mean but those are the king and queen.
  - icc97 10y ago
    Sorry - I meant duchy which is strictly for duke / duchess but was just my silly rhyming to refer to the Dutch royalty.
- C4K3 10y ago
  Lego and IKEA were only there because they represented the rivalry between Denmark and Sweden. But I do find it interesting how Tesla and Space X fans are so dedicated that they'd be willing to fight for them.
  - icc97 10y ago
    > so dedicated that they'd be willing to fight for them Now that's brand loyalty. I'm imagining the Great World Brand War of 2130 and the aftermath with McDonalds youth movement being convicted of the genocide of the Nike sneakers resellers
  - wtfishackernews 10y ago
    Reddit is known for it's Elon Musk fanboyism, and at least the Tesla subreddit where heavily botting.
- shalmanese 10y ago
  Don't forget Bunnings Warehouse!
arjie 10y ago
They should make a jigsaw puzzle of this. It would be entertaining.
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  Here's the Reddit thread about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/639mwv/i_just_had_the_best_idea_ever/ https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/639mwv/i_just_had_th...
  - arjie 10y ago
    Haha. Of course someone else has thought of this too. I think it would be fairly entertaining.
icc97 10y ago
Did anyone note the similarity to playing Go / Weiqi? Watching [0] the blue corner expanded masssively and then getting eaten from within somehow reminds me of all of the complexities of playing go when someone can place stones anywhere in your territory. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY
advertainment 10y ago
>Did Reddit’s April Fool’s gag solve the issue of online hate speech? I certainly hope that doesn't become a widely accepted solution; To me (I didn't participate but have read about the event) it seems like their solution was to A) marginalize each individual's impact/voice B) moderate heavily to remove offensive things This doesn't just remove "hate-speech", this removes anything unpopular.
hopfog 10y ago
The Button and Robin were awesome but this was on another level. I loved hanging out in the different factions' Discord servers and observe troops being rallied and defenses coordinated. It was an amazing 72 hours and I wonder how Reddit will top this next year. I was also really impressed with how little obscenity there was. I fully expected it to be overrun by trolls. In retrospect I agree with the article that the technical limitation for creating was a contributing factor. If you want to see what happens when no such limitation exists and trolls get the upperhand, check out the timelapse of my own multiplayer drawing site: https://youtu.be/qIJ3XFPRsSw https://youtu.be/qIJ3XFPRsSw
mmanfrin 10y ago
My favorite moment of the experiment was when a German flag began to overtake a French flag, and as fighting was taking place over the former-French flag, France went upwards and made a flag, and once that was complete the fighting over their former space started to morph in to an EU flag, and the intersection of France and Germany became the EU. I think also briefly Italy had the south side and Spain had the East, but those went back to France/Germany respectively.
lovemenot 10y ago
Wow, this is just fascinating. I don't really know Reddit, so this is the first time I heard of r/place. It reminds me of a couple of earlier experiments in emergent social organisation. Loren Carpenter's 1991 Pong, which is documented in Kevin Kelley's book Out of Control[1]. Also, DARPA's 2009 Network Challenge[2] (weather balloons) [1] http://kk.org/mt-files/books-mt/ooc-mf.pdf http://kk.org/mt-files/books-mt/ooc-mf.pdf (page 11) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Network_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Network_Challenge If Reddit releases the pixel placement timings and researchers can go back over the boards to investigate communication about r/place, I believe this should be a very rich trove of data for sociologists.
reednj 10y ago
I made a very similar site a few years ago, except you can't overwrite other peoples work: http://paint.reednj.com http://paint.reednj.com (Its not moderated, so probably NSFW)

430 points by camtarn 10y ago

Hm. I agree the original title from the article was clickbait, but ... could it perhaps be titled something that emphasizes the cooperative nature? It's not really an April Fools' gag as much as a social experiment.

superkuh 10y ago
And only the most recent, large scale, implementation of the concept. I recall these pixel wars pages being popular in the early 2000s. Back then you made perl scripts to automate it. Now they (r/place teams) use python. Not much has changed. And I don't know if the author of the ars piece was just ignoring them or not, but there were plenty of dongs and other typical vandalism throughout.
dang 10y ago
We'll s/gag/experiment/ above.
- camtarn 10y ago
  Cheers :)
Ajedi32 10y ago
Earlier I tried posting a timelapse video of the experiment with the title "Timelapse - Reddit users each place 1 pixel / 5 minutes on a 1000x1000 grid", but it got deduped to a post with a much less descriptive title which, as a result, never really took off.
mhink 10y ago
Reddit's April Fools projects [1] have been social experiments for a few years now, and I really appreciate their willingness to actually build the kinds of interesting ideas which you can really only accomplish with such a large and engaged userbase. /r/thebutton was a lot of fun two years ago, and while I never really used /r/robin, I thought the concept was brilliant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#April_Fools_subreddits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#April_Fools_subreddits

gallerdude 10y ago

I can't think of many examples, but I do like these sort of projects - Twitch Plays Pokémon comes to mind. Interesting how an entire subculture can develop: inside jokes, wars, and more. It's amazing because it's a microculture, but it develops far faster than any "regular" culture would.

Ajedi32 10y ago
Other examples include the Bob Ross reruns and SeeBotsChat on Twitch.
- tcdent 10y ago
  Twitch installs Arch Linux was an interesting ride, too.
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  You're thinking of this w.r.t. Bob Ross? https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2015/11/02/how-dead-painter-bob-ross-is-bringing-positivity-to-the-internets-most-cynical-community/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2015/11/02/how-dea...
  - Ajedi32 10y ago
    Yep. Though it feels a bit strange to be reading a Forbes article about it. Seems more like the kind of thing you'd read about on Know Your Meme: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/bob-ross http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/bob-ross

beefhash 10y ago

It's worth nothing that the admins did actively ban users trying to make swastikas. /b/ tried and found that out the hard way. Reddit's content policy[1] was still applicable and was very much enforced. [1] https://www.reddit.com/help/contentpolicy/ https://www.reddit.com/help/contentpolicy/

dugditches 10y ago
Maybe it was even useful as bait, eliminating lots of accounts of those users from their userbase.
- stouset 10y ago
  If so, even better IMO.
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    Shame they didn't get rid of all the commies as well.
  - Coincoin 10y ago
    Yes! Let's prevent them from expressing themselves so they will never debate their ideas and never realize they might be wrong. Let's ostracize them until they have no choice but fester their frustration, hidden from the rest of world. Let's make those ideas illegal so that any of our parents, sibling and children, if they ever entertain them, will keep it their most sacred secret, protected from scrutiny. All that, in the name of some people not wanting to be offended.
    - therealdrag0 10y ago
      Sure worked well with Trump supporters right?
    - dwaltrip 10y ago
      Not being able to express your idea without intense backlash is a pretty strong signal you might be wrong. Of course, there are many exceptions to this in history.

rmccoy6435 10y ago

I think this was a pretty neat experiment. For the first 24 hours everything was chaos, then it settled down in the middle as communities formed, then at the end it was just annoying as every subreddit was trying to take over real-estate, and far too many people were taking it way too seriously. It got annoying going to certain subreddits that I subscribe to for content started getting flooded with "Man the decks, we need to defend this!". The other thing this author tried to make this about was politics. I think the one thing this really showed was most people on reddit don't really care about politics, but the vocal minority on there makes it seem like it's the forefront of every issue. I don't think there is anything actually political on the final /r/place piece other than country flags. Maybe this was more about how disinterested the majority of redditors are with politics rather than how politics were being squashed out by other users?

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> I think the one thing this really showed was most people on reddit don't really care about politics, but the vocal minority on there makes it seem like it's the forefront of every issue. Isn't it also possible for the reverse to be true? That a very vocal minority cared very much about r/place, and that vocal minority happened to not care enough about politics to show up on Place?
- the_watcher 10y ago
  It seems that given the restrictions on how often a single user could actually visibly change the image, coupled with the sheer volume of changes, no, the reverse is almost certainly not true.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    As I understand it, most organizers used bots to help coordinate the process. People who care about politics on Reddit are no less likely to be tech savvy.
    - 10y ago

good_sir_ant 10y ago

Ah, the ample parallels you could draw with this and freedom.

johnhenry 10y ago
Please expand?

cjslep 10y ago

This experiment reminds me of an old website where visitors only had so much paint (and it would slowly regenerate over time), and would paint portions of a common canvas. I can't remember the name of the site, but I think it was active in the mid 2000's. Of course, at times 4chan would invade, but I think it was mostly eastern europeans present (as once again flags were the big thing to paint everywhere).

kuusisto 10y ago
Drawball
- cjslep 10y ago
  This is exactly it! Thanks.
iamatworknow 10y ago
Came here to make this comment. I was on 4chan at the time and definitely remember a lot of "campaigns" to deface Drawball.

scrollaway 10y ago

Reddit's AF this year was excellent, probably my favourite AF experiment of all time. I usually really dislike AF on the internet - some (most) sites become completely unusable for a day and, last thing the internet needs, it gets even harder to tell real news from the fake bits. (Did you know Takei is running for 2018 congress? That was true! Actually it wasn't. But it was! Well, no, it wasn't.) But I'm really fond of how Reddit always handled it: A day for creativity and experimentation. The Place is a really, really beautiful experiment and the result of it surpassed expectations.

ehsankia 10y ago
I absolutely love AF on the internet. Yes, there will always be sites that produce low effort, boring and annoying content, but when isn't that true? On the other hand, you have plenty of companies and sites that produce genuinely funny and well thought out content. Reddit has consistently been the best for the past few years. Google, Blizzard, Razer and a few other companies always produce a couple good videos too. I definitely agree with you though that creativity and experimentation is far more interesting than cheap little tricks.
- nojvek 10y ago
  Really enjoyed Ms pacman on google maps. I prefer that than fake news.
nebabyte 10y ago
> But I'm really fond of how Reddit always handled it: A day for creativity and experimentation Someone didn't sit through the TF2 one or iirc their other one (before? after?) it

Raphmedia 10y ago

I love those kind of "get together and improvise" experiments. The last time I had felt such a sense of wonder and community was the first few days of Pokemon Go when everyone was in the street trying to figure it out. There's an untapped concept behind all of those. Content that is ephemeral but brings a lot of people together...

camtarn 10y ago
I guess that's what a lot of Alternate Reality Games try and tap into - the shared joy of figuring out something interesting and strange, sometimes with ties to the real world. I remember reading about the I Love Bees ARG, with its GPS coordinates for payphones (which turned out to be a promo for Halo 2!) and wishing I'd been able to be a part of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees
chillacy 10y ago
A really great radiolab on the subject is their episode on Emergence: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91500-emergence/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/91500-emergence/ That's what /r/place was like in the first few hours, where people saw a pattern and just laid their pixel down to continue it, which is how you got things like a blue line (accelerating as time went on) and the blue corner. You as a contributor don't know what you're building, but as a group you build something. Later as communities started planning and running scripts, it became much less "improv"-y.
- Raphmedia 10y ago
  "Emergence"! Thank you for the word. I was looking for it!

spiderfarmer 10y ago

It continues to inspire creativity even after it closed: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatmap_made_into_a_show_opening/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatm...

tonyztan 10y ago

This collaboration reminds me of Wikipedia, where users work together to create articles and remove vandalism.

wl 10y ago

I'm surprised that the article doesn't talk about how things were ruined towards the end with bots mindlessly overwriting squares to impose a pattern on the grid instead of collaborating.

doubleunplussed 10y ago

It was a seriously cool experiment. Factions rose and fell, alliances were forged, battles waged, "rules of war" developed. It was amazing. But I don't think there's much to be gained from pontificating about it as a model for preventing hate speech. For one, it was moderated. The slow speed of creating things just meant it was easier on moderators. Secondly, the main thing that made it mostly pleasant was that only very widespread ideas could flourish. Minority ideas, whether good or bad, could not (even the art from small communities was only allowed to exist via alliances with larger communities that could easily destroy their art). This means things were mostly unobjectionable, but it also limits creativity. Do you really want that to be your model of public conversation? Things can only be published if 1000 people all try to publish the same thing and work to maintain it? This would just be pushing filter bubbles to the extreme and driving resentment underground where nobody would notice it until it bubbled over. Then people would be like "whoa, where'd all the hate speech come from?", when it was there all along but not the dominant voice. And they would be making poor decisions regarding their own political strategy, because they mistakenly believed that they had won a battle that they had not. All a model like that would do would be to amplify the status quo, whether good or bad. Just because your political faction happens to be dominant in certain circles doesn't mean you should adopt policies that always benefit the dominant political faction. Especially when your faction is all about protecting minorities. A status-quo-favouring policy would be terrible for minorities that do not already carry favour with the larger population. When you think about whether a policy for shaping public conversation is a good idea long-term or not, consider whether it would be a good idea say, in Russia today. LGBT people in Russia are oppressed and do not hold favour with any larger political faction. "Majority gets to censor the minority" is a terrible policy in almost all cases, and people at present only don't realise this because they are in the historically improbable situation of the people with the power to censor also being the ones who favour minority voices. This is historically rare, and your policies should not rely on it being the case.

sqeaky 10y ago
> This would just be pushing filter bubbles to the extreme and driving resentment underground where nobody would notice it until it bubbled over. Then people would be like "whoa, where'd all the hate speech come from?", when it was there all along but not the dominant voice. And they would be making poor decisions regarding their own political strategy, because they mistakenly believed that they had won a battle that they had not. Doesn't this describe the recent presidential election?

Ajedi32 10y ago

Here's a timelapse of the entire event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY I found this whole thing to be incredibly fascinating. It's pretty amazing to see how everyone just sort of spontaneously banded together to create little works of art on the board which they could never have made on their own. Everytime I watch the timelapse I notice something new. It's also interesting to note that because the impact of any individual user on the board was pretty limited (you could only place one pixel every 5 minutes, and even then there was no guarantee the first pixel you placed wouldn't be overwritten by someone else before you were even allowed to place another), every significant piece of artwork on there had tens or even hundreds of people involved in creating and maintaining it. In addition to the various artworks on the board, there were also several major factions scattered throughout the board with their own goals. /r/TheBlueCorner dedicated themselves to filling the empty space in the bottom right corner of the board with blue pixels, while /r/theblackvoid formed to erase various artworks by replacing them with black tiles. If you pay attention you may also notice several other factions in the timelapse (the Rainbow Road, Draw Hearts, Erase the Place, and The Green Lattice were a few other notable ones). Other interesting events to note include [the German invasion of France](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ParHJmq2aCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ParHJmq2aCs) (and resulting peaceful resolution), [The Void's (unsuccessful) attack on the OSU logo](https://i.imgur.com/Tpmvrcc.gif https://i.imgur.com/Tpmvrcc.gif), and [several factions ganging up to attack the US flag](https://gfycat.com/InfamousShyEeve https://gfycat.com/InfamousShyEeve) while most of the US population was asleep. There's plenty of other stuff you might notice too if you look hard enough. (For example, can you find Waldo?) [Here's what the canvas looked like when the event finally ended](https://i.imgur.com/ajWiAYi.png https://i.imgur.com/ajWiAYi.png). Other interesting stuff to note include [this animated heatmap](https://i.imgur.com/a95XXDz.gifv https://i.imgur.com/a95XXDz.gifv) by /u/jampekka of activity on the canvas, and [this graphic](https://i.imgur.com/SEHaUSJ.png https://i.imgur.com/SEHaUSJ.png) by /u/alternateme highlighting all the white pixels which never got touched throughout the experiment.

SippinLean 10y ago

Cool experiment, very disappointing outcome. To me it was an experiment in dynamic, ever-changing art; giving way to creation and destruction. In the end, it was just scripted bots working to preserve art, mostly corporate logos and national flags. Why was there no captcha?!

lovehashbrowns 10y ago
The bots thing definitely leaves a bitter aftertaste to the whole experiment. I still loved it and enjoyed watching things unfold, though. As for the logos/flags thing.. I think that had more to do with how short the experiment was. Maybe if it went on for a little longer, people would have been slightly more creative. As it stands, even the more creative stuff was very meme-y. Megaman shooting dat boi, for example.
ctdonath 10y ago
Interesting philosophical contrast between this, your suggestion, and http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com - anarchy vs benevolent dictatorship vs capitalism.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  The benevolent dictatorship being represented by any pixel rendered image you find to be "benevolent" presumably. Compare the r/places output to MDH and http://media.cntraveler.com/photos/56d0aee058d9a8773c109eb2/master/w_775,c_limit/virgin-gorda-the-baths-cr-getty.jpg http://media.cntraveler.com/photos/56d0aee058d9a8773c109eb2/... and you'll probably establish a consensus for the "benevolent dictator" made art above the others?
klenwell 10y ago
If that's not a metaphor for the history of the internet, I don't know what is.

acalderaro 10y ago

My favorite subreddit (r/2007scape) went head-to-head against r/The_donald for the top left corner. Right now it's "connection lost - please wait, attempting to reestablish" but apparently the_Donald wanted to make it an American flag, and things got pretty heated. We won :)

rmccoy6435 10y ago
I didn't know about the competition against /r/t_d, but the sheer amount of threads on Sunday in /r/2007scape about defending and call to arms is what was beginning to aggravate me. I think there were 5 actual posts about the game or discussions on their front page, and 20 about /r/Place.
- acalderaro 10y ago
  Yea they really wanted to win. Honestly it was pretty frustrating because I rely on them for 87% of my meme consumption, but I'm glad that we won a "place" on /r/place

callumprentice 10y ago

Reminds me of a more dynamic version of the Million Dollar Homepage from many years ago. http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

ctdonath 10y ago

Someone's gotta mention http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com : Early in the history of the Internet, some high school kid set up a web page with a 1000x1000 image and a limited color palette. He sold individual pixels, plus a link from that pixel to anywhere, for $1. Yup, he sold them all in fairly short order.

xanderstrike 10y ago
The sad thing is none of those logos and links have any meaning any more, almost all of them go to 404s, domain parked pages, or completely unrelated sites, and even when they were new they went to scummy ecommerce or porn sites. In 12 years, the imagery on /r/place will still hold meaning and the timelapses will still tell a pretty cool story.
- petepete 10y ago
  Cartridge Save (top left) are still going strong. I used to work for their offshoot web division many years ago.
- koyote 10y ago
  Lings Cars is still doing fine! http://www.lingscars.com/ http://www.lingscars.com/
- ctdonath 10y ago
  It's like an old photograph of Times Square, where most businesses shown are long defunct and many were of dubious character. Nonetheless, it still holds meaning and tells a pretty cool story.
- joenot443 10y ago
  Pretty wild to see a (relatively) huge company like 2checkout (https://www.2checkout.com/ https://www.2checkout.com/) on there.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago

AsyncAwait 10y ago

It was neat how we at /r/archlinux were able to eventually come to an agreement with /r/sweden not to deface each other's logo, so that we had one less border to worry about :-) Thanks /r/sweden!

solotronics 10y ago

france tried to invade bitcoin but r/bitcoin fought them off after much struggle lol very interesting social experiment!

Namrog84 10y ago

Although I don't see it as much here on HN, but in real life and in other areas. I have seen some criticism that many felt it hard to believe that people could collaborate on this so well and they believe it was almost entirely bot driven or somehow belitte the effort. While I know towards the very end there were a growing number of bots and scripts that did start taking hold more. Anyone who was part of it, even more so if they were engaged in discord or other more active channels than just subreddits, easily saw the hundreds of people collaborating, community, alliances, discussing ideas, and more. All of this together helped make it what it was. I truly believe it was mostly done as a direct result of a lot of peoples' hard work and persistence. I participated in some large pieces; as well as helped promote/start a very small piece myself. All of it came together quite beautifully.

jwilk 10y ago

> 16-bit palette Did they mean 16 color palette?

Robin_Message 10y ago
They probably meant 16-bit palette, which typically allocates 5 bits to red, 6 to green, and 5 to blue. It was typical of computer games in the early noughties. It gives you a reasonable range of colours with only 2 bytes per pixel, which mattered then! EDIT: Oh, and green gets the extra bit because your eye can perhaps perceive more shades of green than other colours.
jwilk 10y ago
Answering to myself: They almost certainly did. There's only 16 colors in the final image: $ curl -s https://i.redd.it/wc436nf7fdpy.png | pngtopnm | ppmhist libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile r g b lum count ----- ----- ----- ----- ------- 34 34 34 34 258550 255 255 255 255 154487 229 0 0 68 123218 0 0 234 27 90720 229 217 0 196 63755 229 149 0 156 55643 2 190 1 112 40918 0 131 199 100 32930 0 211 221 149 29820 255 167 209 198 28576 228 228 228 228 27733 136 136 136 136 26035 130 0 128 54 20019 160 106 66 118 18023 148 224 68 183 16047 207 110 228 153 13526

ourcat 10y ago

Are there any open-source projects out there which can do this? The resulting 10 minute time-lapse video is an absolute thing of beauty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCAsY8kjE3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCAsY8kjE3w I once ran a site years ago where people could doodle these little squares. It didn't take long for 'wars' to break out, involving various insignia. And cartoon genitals. It got to about 500k before something went horribly wrong with a hard disk on the server. :(

jedanbik 10y ago

Not a fan of the 3D chart they used - lots of data gets hidden by towering spires, and the camera tilt adds its own bit of distortion. Did anyone create an old fashioned 2D heatmap?

Qub3d 10y ago
Yep [0]. They also made a cool TV show intro [1] out of it. [0]:https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/63240q/rplace_activity_animated_heatmap/ https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/63240q/rplace_activi... [1]:https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatmap_made_into_a_show_opening/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatm...

Danylon 10y ago

Reminds me of http://artcontext.net/act/06/glyphiti/docs/index.php http://artcontext.net/act/06/glyphiti/docs/index.php a black and white multiplayer canvas that has been running since 2001. They also animate the progress here: http://artcontext.net/act/01/glyphiti/anim/ http://artcontext.net/act/01/glyphiti/anim/

icc97 10y ago

I find this interesting in what it lacked: * No Google / Twitter / Facebook / Amazon * No news networks (except NPR) * Hardly any corporations except for Tesla, Space X, AMD, Lego and IKEA * No GTA, FIFA, large corporate games * Only 6 actual people (1/3 of which was the Dutch dutchy) * No films * No iconic logos - e.g. Olympics rings, Nike, McDonalds

mycomian 10y ago
Don't know what "dutchy" is supposed to mean but those are the king and queen.
- icc97 10y ago
  Sorry - I meant duchy which is strictly for duke / duchess but was just my silly rhyming to refer to the Dutch royalty.
C4K3 10y ago
Lego and IKEA were only there because they represented the rivalry between Denmark and Sweden. But I do find it interesting how Tesla and Space X fans are so dedicated that they'd be willing to fight for them.
- icc97 10y ago
  > so dedicated that they'd be willing to fight for them Now that's brand loyalty. I'm imagining the Great World Brand War of 2130 and the aftermath with McDonalds youth movement being convicted of the genocide of the Nike sneakers resellers
- wtfishackernews 10y ago
  Reddit is known for it's Elon Musk fanboyism, and at least the Tesla subreddit where heavily botting.
shalmanese 10y ago
Don't forget Bunnings Warehouse!

arjie 10y ago

They should make a jigsaw puzzle of this. It would be entertaining.

Ajedi32 10y ago
Here's the Reddit thread about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/639mwv/i_just_had_the_best_idea_ever/ https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/639mwv/i_just_had_th...
- arjie 10y ago
  Haha. Of course someone else has thought of this too. I think it would be fairly entertaining.

icc97 10y ago

Did anyone note the similarity to playing Go / Weiqi? Watching [0] the blue corner expanded masssively and then getting eaten from within somehow reminds me of all of the complexities of playing go when someone can place stones anywhere in your territory. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY

advertainment 10y ago

>Did Reddit’s April Fool’s gag solve the issue of online hate speech? I certainly hope that doesn't become a widely accepted solution; To me (I didn't participate but have read about the event) it seems like their solution was to A) marginalize each individual's impact/voice B) moderate heavily to remove offensive things This doesn't just remove "hate-speech", this removes anything unpopular.

hopfog 10y ago

The Button and Robin were awesome but this was on another level. I loved hanging out in the different factions' Discord servers and observe troops being rallied and defenses coordinated. It was an amazing 72 hours and I wonder how Reddit will top this next year. I was also really impressed with how little obscenity there was. I fully expected it to be overrun by trolls. In retrospect I agree with the article that the technical limitation for creating was a contributing factor. If you want to see what happens when no such limitation exists and trolls get the upperhand, check out the timelapse of my own multiplayer drawing site: https://youtu.be/qIJ3XFPRsSw https://youtu.be/qIJ3XFPRsSw

mmanfrin 10y ago

My favorite moment of the experiment was when a German flag began to overtake a French flag, and as fighting was taking place over the former-French flag, France went upwards and made a flag, and once that was complete the fighting over their former space started to morph in to an EU flag, and the intersection of France and Germany became the EU. I think also briefly Italy had the south side and Spain had the East, but those went back to France/Germany respectively.

lovemenot 10y ago

Wow, this is just fascinating. I don't really know Reddit, so this is the first time I heard of r/place. It reminds me of a couple of earlier experiments in emergent social organisation. Loren Carpenter's 1991 Pong, which is documented in Kevin Kelley's book Out of Control[1]. Also, DARPA's 2009 Network Challenge[2] (weather balloons) [1] http://kk.org/mt-files/books-mt/ooc-mf.pdf http://kk.org/mt-files/books-mt/ooc-mf.pdf (page 11) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Network_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Network_Challenge If Reddit releases the pixel placement timings and researchers can go back over the boards to investigate communication about r/place, I believe this should be a very rich trove of data for sociologists.

reednj 10y ago

I made a very similar site a few years ago, except you can't overwrite other peoples work: http://paint.reednj.com http://paint.reednj.com (Its not moderated, so probably NSFW)