Reddit

Mod reminder: We do have a rule against brigading. I know this is a special case - but please keep it respectful if you are planning to represent the Fediverse on r/place.

Let’s start with kbin.social.

There's no way they aren't aware of this. But also: what did they expect?

I don't necessarily agree, if one persons short term engagement results in five people's long term disengagements then it's a net gain and a good investment!

It doesn't hurt to use these opportunities to remind people of the reasons to abandon Reddit (and of course of all the various alternatives that exist).

Agreed fully with this comment.

I'm skeptical about that because if that was the case, why would they have needed to shake things up in the first place? They just make their profit and users continue using whatever front end they want. Instead they've burned bridges with people who were giving them free labour and have never been profitable.

Well technically if you shouted loud enough and long enough you could emit enough energy to melt down the wall if it was made of a meltable material like steel. Someone could probably do the maths.

They couldn't make a profit when the engagement was generally happening in good faith. I doubt they'll be able to convert this bad faith engagement into anything of value. It's just a web app where you can change pixels, do they even have ads on there, let alone ones that won't be blocked by all the users using ad blockers?

I mean, it is hard to tell what their goal was in even starting this. The results should have been very predictable. Maybe they were just trying anything they could think of out of desperation, or maybe the whole idea was to get a good idea of what people think of them and if there was a silent majority that didn't care about the third party app drama but would engage sufficiently to drown out the spez hate at least a bit.

But this should have been predictable because even the very first r/place ended up dominated by automation tools, which are used by people looking for a custom experience rather than an official one.

I think the whole "any engagement = profit potential" is the mindset that got Reddit into this mess in the first place. Though maybe more on the angle of "the admins realized they needed to show evidence of that or even realize it for a successful IPO".

Maybe. But if I was thinking about buying into their ipo I might be pretty skeptical of a social media site that's actively antagonizing their users while it can barely turn a profit when 90% of their labor force are unpaid volunteers.

Engagement can be fleeting and I'm not sure their archive content is as valuable to LLMs as they think it is.

Won't work, the Reddit admins just barge in there and start censoring it. Like the Spez effigy guillotine.

Reddit has twice in the past (2017 and 2022, I believe April 1 both times) made r/place - an open canvas where anyone with an account could place a single pixel in a color of their choice every 5 minutes. It's a fascinating social experiment, and was a lot of fun seeing images emerge, and communities spring up around coordinating efforts to make their mark. Doing it again at a somewhat random time only a year after last time is clearly an attempt to distract from the multiple reasons people are currently upset with Reddit, and it also clearly isn't working, judging by the general tenor of anti-spez (Reddit CEO's username) sentiment

Several years ago for April Fools Day, Reddit launched /r/place, which created a canvas where users could place individual pixels every few minutes. Communities would get together to carve out their own little corner of the canvas for a piece of art, and overall the whole thing was pretty well received.

Last year for April Fools Day, they did it again. Overall, once again pretty well received.

Now, since Reddit has pissed everyone off, they're doing it again again, likely in a desperate move to try and generate some positive community interactions. /r/place has always been pretty popular when they've done it before, so this is probably a 'push in case of emergency' attempt to placate users. Predictably, everyone's still mad so they've littered the whole canvas with 'fuck spez' posts.

Here’s a good article about it from The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/19/23800309/reddit-r-place-2023-protest

Newer article about how the crap has very much hit the fan with r/place: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23801716/reddits-r-place-protest-art