10 ms·

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 en

• 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.
      • Gaelan 9y ago
        The image I worked on only got a bot put together mid-day 3. Many factions refused to use bots at all.
  • rmccoy6435 10y ago
    That's actually a really interesting thought. I hadn't even considered that. I don't currently have the time to find all of the analytics about pixel placement, but I would assume there were tens of thousands of users who aligned with some 'faction' and had more than 20 pixel placements in the entire 72 hours (I would say that is a large enough number to identify people who actively participated), which is by no means a minority of individuals who frequent reddit. Most of the subreddits I visit all had some plans to organize something on there, so there was a very diverse crowd that organized around it. I draw my conclusion about politics based on the fact that it wouldn't have been very hard to get one of the larger political subreddits to get something on the board and maintain it for the weekend, yet that didn't happen. I have filtered all political subreddits via RES, and it's surprising how little politics is discussed on reddit once you remove the epicenters.
    • rhizome 10y ago
      it wouldn't have been very hard to get one of the larger political subreddits to get something on the board and maintain it for the weekend I'm not so sure this is actually true. Have you ever tried to organize a large number of people?
      • sqeaky 10y ago
        For something like this the level of organization is tiny. I added to tux, and all I need was the picture of tux. I barely needed that because I just refilled pixels people poked into him.
        • rhizome 9y ago
          Does it make sense that you'd really only need about 300 people, one for every second in 5min? After that, the group can pretty much add squares constantly, one per second. Maybe that wouldn't be fast enough, but it's a good head start on offense, and I'm obvs not accounting for defense.
        • greenhatman 9y ago
          /r/place made me realize that I care about Linux than my country.
• baby 10y ago
  > 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!" that's awesome! The whole thing became a territory war :)
  • thesagan 10y ago
    I, too, thought that was a big part of the fun! I liked the competition of it all. I'm a bit surprised to learn this wasn't a popular sentiment.
    • sqeaky 10y ago
      I go to reddit for two very different reasons. To unwind and just read interesting and unexpected stuff for a bit or to get into thoughtful and interesting debates. If I am in an unwinding mood I wouldn't want to deal with the /r/place debates. If I want to debate it would be awesome. Then there are people who live their whole lives in places more extreme than either of the moods I described.
      • rmccoy6435 10y ago
        When the stuff was confined to /r/place, I was definitely fine with it. Bus as I said to someone below about /r/2007scape, I go there for OSRS content, not /r/Place content, which is what that subreddit devolved into. There was even a fairly popular thread about getting a filter for /r/Place content. I'm not devaluing the idea of /r/Place content, I just wish it would have been contained elsewhere.
    • TheCapn 10y ago
      Depends on what you get out of Reddit. Are you there for the content aggregation or the communities? I imagine those wanting to enjoy content weren't all that happy with the tangent. We've known for years though that community websites become useless on April Fools anyway.
      • thesagan 10y ago
• brink 10y ago
  > 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!". To be fair, it is arguable that it deserved attention, as the final picture is now a part of internet history.
  • ggggtez 10y ago
    I don't think that argument is easy to defend, considering how big the internet is and that this is just a copy of existing ideas that have been done before.
    • flying_kangaroo 10y ago
      On the flip side, however, reddit is (as of today on Alexa) the 4th most visited site in the US. Given that user-base, I think a lot of internet users have noticed this.
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Context matters. This is Reddit, so that particular effort will become a part of remembered Internet history for the next decade or more.
• Palomides 10y ago
  an excellent demonstration of the power of tribal icons and memes, which were interesting to observe over the development of the picture. it started with simple place-specific things, like the rainbow, hearts, and color blobs, and then towards pixel art of specific pre-existing communities.
• Yen 10y ago
  > The other thing this author tried to make this about was politics. I think there is something to be said about politics, here, but it's not about specific countries, ideologies, or personalities - it's about the nature of how we do politics. In order for anything interesting of scale to get created, it required multiple users cooperating. In some cases, this means convincing them to abandon the project they want the most, in favor of the group project. Also, as an art project grows, it necessarily ran in to border conflicts with its neighbors. How these conflicts were handled - whether through overwhelming force, negotiation over borders, compromise, or other means, says a lot about how people deal with conflicts in general. i.e., the fact that the board ended with so many intact artworks, with intact borders, is notable.
  • rmccoy6435 10y ago
    I started to think about this a bit while I was replying to pavel_lishin below. Maybe it was more of users caring more about other communities or images more so than they do about political causes. I must agree the scale of some of the works on there and the coordination it took is very admirable. I loved checking in every few hours just to see what had changed and who was fighting for control. It was definitely fun for a while to follow, but after time it became like a cult with some really toxic side-effects that leaked into different subreddits and detracted from the actual content fit for that sub.
  • porsupah 10y ago
    Indeed - in /r/furry, we had a sort of accidental affiliation with /r/touhou, though from the looks of things, the size of the sub was sufficient for self-maintenance. That said, our Snoo did wind up sustaining some damage: http://i.imgur.com/oNyqdzz.png http://i.imgur.com/oNyqdzz.png Which the mods duly embraced; if you go there now, the sub has been appropriately renamed: http://i.imgur.com/uvTwe8o.png http://i.imgur.com/uvTwe8o.png I'm fine with this. ^_^
    • H4CK3RM4N 9y ago
      I still love how all the furry subs collapsed into the snoo and Yiff me daddy after starting with many different logos.
• eatitraw 10y ago
  > I don't think there is anything actually political on the final /r/place piece other than country flags. There are various flags of different anarchist movements, very long trans* flag, LGBT flags here and there. IMO, all these count as "actually political".
  • Navarr 10y ago
    Anarchist movements I can see, but I don't think trans/LGBT flags count as "political." It's an identity, not a political statement. It'd be like calling christian crosses "political"
    • grive 10y ago
      Identity is very tightly related to political views. Moreover, LGBTQ pride is definitely political, even in Western democracies (see contentions about gay marriage). LGBT activism is definitely marked on the left political spectrum in the USA. Christians values will inherently push toward traditionalism, so social conservatism. It is the same in many European countries.
    • eropple 10y ago
      Christianity is a completely political phenomenon (as a cursory historical examination will demonstrate) and public advocacy of it is a political act. Similarly, most things, including fandoms, are political in nature whether they want to be or not. By liking Star Trek, you're buying into a box of propositions, some related to the art and some related to the real-world universe around that art. By (as in the Reddit experiment) working to expand it, you're making a political claim. People are political, people are never not political, and drawing an imaginary line to try to separate some political acts from others is pretty fruitless.
      • Karunamon 10y ago
        This defines the word "political" to be so broad as to render it essentially meaningless. I can't like Star Trek without "buying into a box of propositions"? Really? First, you're going to have to tell me why I like Star Trek.
• CarVac 10y ago
  There was another fascinating aspect of politics that sprang up due to Place: inter-community politics. My community (Madoka Magica) was continuously communicating with our neighbors on all sides, ranging from the gigantic PrequelMemes to our right, Canada to our south, Homestuck, the Greek and Turkish flags mentioned in the article (which really were warring for quite a time before the heart appeared), and even tiny little subreddits like the AEIROU who we had to relocate as part of negotiations for our expansion. There was constant debate about where to expand, who to defend against, who was being a jerk and needed to be wiped out... it was like a game of Diplomacy more than anything else.
  • baking 10y ago
    I was involved in a successful joint effort to move an entire image up 3 pixels to resolve a border dispute.
  • Nexxxeh 10y ago
    /r/wales and /faroeislands had a mutual defense pact, enabling both (small in terms of Reddit) communities to punch above their weight. It was great fun, fighting off trolls and attempts by other subreddits to aquire further real estate for themselves. /u/SCtester cleaned up the final image to fix up (ed: some of) the in-progress and rogue pixels and damage by the "void" group. http://i.imgur.com/7E3bAnE.png http://i.imgur.com/7E3bAnE.png There are several errors in his fixup, "Hypercum" being an example. /r/Scotland got lucky at lock-time, they came closer to being Scatland.
    • mikeash 10y ago
      Reading through the conversation on this stuff, I'm wondering if this weird combination of amusement and befuddlement is how my parents felt when I was telling them about my online activities back in the early 90s.
      • H4CK3RM4N 9y ago
        Wait until you hear about how 4chan's My Little Pony and Politically Incorrect(read: Nazis) became friends after this year's April Fools prank.
• EGreg 10y ago
  I am interested in this as a microcosm of any shared space or community. To see how countries form and mutual cooperation strategies take hold.
• aryamaan 10y ago
  And another thing I found quite interesting is that people were able to coordinate with each other to make it something planned. I was feeling it would turn out to be some chaos because it's so easy to screw it up. ELI5, how people didn't screw it.
  • 2bitencryption 10y ago
    > ELI5, how people didn't screw it. In the beginning there is chaos -- then, through persistence and random chance, SOMEONE's idea gets completed without it getting screwed up. Now there's a clear image that has come out of the chaos. Whenever someone screws up the image by adding in a "bad" pixel, they need to wait 5-10 minutes to add another. In that time, everyone who can see the image knows that it got screwed up, and they realize the biggest impact they can make is fixing it. "I did it. I fixed the image!" vs "I dropped a random pixel in a sea of blue, accomplishing nothing." So eventually, out of chaos comes creation, and then when that creation is threatened, the biggest impact an individual can make with their limited resources of pixels is to fix and defend the creations.
• mhermher 10y ago
  On the politics point, I really think it was for a different reason. Probability of putting up an image on r/place was a function (inversely related to) of how much antagonism it would draw. I think that it why there were so few political messages. There were too many people AGAINST a given image, and not necessarily not enough FOR it. Sabotaging was way easier than constructing.
  • hueving 10y ago
    That's another way of saying people hate political crap.
• artursapek 10y ago
  People made attempts to put political messages on the canvas, but with the polarized nature of our two-party political system the two sides basically canceled each other's efforts out. This didn't happen to less controversial imagery, which survived through to the end because half of the user base didn't object to it.
• zouhair 9y ago
  > The other thing this author tried to make this about was politics. I don't get this way of thinking. Human are a political beast. Everything we do or say is political.