Got any explanation that doesn’t involve visiting reddit?
/r/Place is a temporary event that allows people to draw by placing one colored pixel per 5 minutes in a shared board. Using collaboration (and a lot of bots), subreddits can draw big things like flags, messages, etc. It was created by the same person who designed Wordle, and the first edition was very popular as people and the media wondered what would be the end result of an image created by a lot of random internet users interacting.
This time around, there were extra tools to help big subreddits claim portions of the board for themselves. Regardless, people (bots) kept finding ways of insulting spez in the board.
Very quickly, people noticed admins could override parts of the board with random noise instantly, and would do so to avoid the hate messages.
Towards the end of the event, which is usually where the final screenshot will be made, several subreddits collaborated to write a big “fuck spez” message, however, it was overriden and the event was terminated before it could be rewritten.
Some people are accusing the admins of ending it early to hide the message. The truth is that while they were indeed overwriting it, the event was scheduled to end regardless.
And that’s about as good of a summary as I’ll write, because honestly, I haven’t browsed Reddit in over a month and I couldn’t care less about the silly empty protests or the admin’s reactions.
Can’t wait for them to try and sell NFTs of the event or charge $0.99 per pixel.
Kadu’s summary is pretty good so I’ll only mention a few details/conjectures.
Odds are that Reddit did this 1) to drive engagement up (for the sake of metrics) and 2) to distract the userbase from the recent events. The second goal was a failure, but the first one was rather successful.
Bots were a big issue in both the 1st and 2nd editions of r/place. And Reddit’s answer for that, now, shows that they didn’t really give a fuck. “It’s hard to detect mkay.” Nationalists erasing drawings for the sake of their bloody flags were also an issue, but nobody addressed it.
The event was mocked by the userbase, that joked that the top pixel placer was “admins”, and the second top “bots”. The guillotine being erased pissed a lot of people. People also complained a lot about censorship in the subreddit itself; the admins removed some criticism at the start, but eventually gave up, and most threads have “fuck spez” as one of the top comments.
Overall the event itself is a shadow of what it was in the first edition. Just like Reddit is a shadow of what it used to be.
It was already planned to end. The canvas wide FUCK SPEZ! has nothing to do with it. It was actually coordinated because they know it’s ending. The white FUCK SPEZ! is only done during the white out, where to get the canvas deleted to blank (which also happened last year), users are only able to add greyscale tiles and eventually just white. There were plenty of other fuck Spez messages and art, and some were censored like the guillotine or when the name Steve Huffman was used directly, but this wasn’t one of them.
Wait, so the whiteout on last year’s canvas was due to limited color? I thought it was organically done. Now my non-appreciation with last year’s r/place canvas is less.
Haha, yea. I don’t think you can make people coordinate that much unless it’s bots.
