Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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?
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.
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
There are several errors in his fixup, "Hypercum" being an example. /r/Scotland got lucky at lock-time, they came closer to being Scatland.
Was a really nice experience overall, I'm really impressed with how it all worked out.
Maybe that's why the EVE Online guys were able to hold their own so well against the larger and more popular games right next to their logo :)
The larger you are, the bigger the attack surface and the more your defenses are spread out.
Plus, you attract more attention when larger; the 1G logo northwest of Canada was originally a good deal bigger, but a rival streamer told his followers to wipe it out and it was completely dissolved within about ten minutes; very scary.
Personally I was against expansion but I underestimated our community's size, I think, because we grew to be fairly large and prominent.
Even in dedicated attacks, like the nuking of the American flag, the size of the community directly correlated to the amount of real-estate. The black blob showed how over-extension could collapse the whole structure.
The other thing I found interesting was how quickly the quality of discernible images/logos evolved. Monochromatic communities dominated to begin with, as users experimented with cooperation. Those same users were drawn to more detailed and interesting designs, relegating the collapse of monochromatic communities as background color for more interesting designs.
Honestly, this is a goldmine for anyone studying group dynamics or social sciences. There's a lot of dynamics going on in a very short amount of time. I'd love to see more detailed research going into the development of r/place
Saw lots of 1 year old accounts with no activity.
I'm still impressed all things considered.
GIF: https://gfycat.com/WholeHalfBobcat
Description (in French): https://www.reddit.com/r/Quebec/comments/62xde0/le_jour_un_r...
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.
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
I'm fine with this. ^_^
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.
There are various flags of different anarchist movements, very long trans* flag, LGBT flags here and there. IMO, all these count as "actually political".
At the same time it is in an odd position because it was also very early on, before it was widely known what was happening with the Soviet government, adopted by anti-authoritarian socialist and communist groups, some of whose members risked their life against Stalin, and it was later knowingly adopted by groups opposed to the Soviet regime, such as e.g. the Trotskyist 4th International, as well.
This makes it quite different to symbols that are singularly attached to totalitarian governments and movements, in that it also has nearly as long history of use by their opponents.
Personally I think it's unhelpful to use it, but I also understand those who use it as an attempt to "reclaim" socialist imagery that has been relentlessly abused.
I have seen people here advocating anti-authoritarian socialist ideologies of the types that would get you executed by regimes like those of Mao and Stalin.
Or your preconceived notions of conservative people are wrong.
It's not a preconceived notion that /r/the_donald is filled to the brim with hate speech and trolls. You simply have to go there and look for yourself.
Before the election, there was a narrower meaning, but as soon as the Clinton campaign mentioned it and the media picked it up, any hope of the term having any concrete meaning was lost forever. (This isn't helped by the fact that people love using it to attack arbitrary conservatives, in much the same way that SJW is sometimes used to attack anyone who expresses views supportive of social justice without behaving badly).
EDIT: I don't let myself get worked up about downvotes in political conversations, but this one has me pretty curious. My comment wasn't even remotely offensive to any part of the political spectrum.
Supposedly the Trump Supporters at The_Donald attempted to create a few Trump memes and Pepe frogs, but gave up and concentrated on keeping the US flag intact.
Other than that, the right couldn't get much traction at all.
It's an identity, not a political statement. It'd be like calling christian crosses "political"
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.
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.
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.
Drawing those imaginary lines to segment off Some Topics (because otherwise one might have to defend them) is nonsense. People draw these lines anywhere from religion to fandoms to allegiance to political parties--but none of them are meaningful. You are your impact on other people and every impact on everyone else is inescapably, inextricably, definitionally "political".
It's this kind of maximalism that makes our politics so disgustingly toxic. It's entirely consistent for a hypothetical person to think that Hillary Clinton's hawkishness and role in the Middle East escapades of the last decade and a half are more damaging and evil than the Republican Party's association with racism in 2016's America. Your equally-ignorant doppelganger on the other side could say "it rings hollow that you say you didn't vote for Hillary _because_ of imperialism" and "see for example the useful idiots of the Democratic party who provide air cover for legitimizing the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents"[1]. Both of you can sit on your high horse, convinced that everyone else on the other side is guilty of the worst sins and too ignorant to know or evil to care. In the meanwhile, the level of political discourse drops ever lower and the level of political dysfunction climbs.
Being unable to separate people's intent from their n-degrees-of-separation theoretical impact isn't enlightened, it's childish. I know it's a lot of mental effort to consider the fact that those that disagree with you aren't evil, but hey, being an adult is hard.
[1] Note that none of the hypothetical political views in this comment are necessarily ones that I hold.
Do you support the Democratic party? If so, are you okay being defined by Nancy Pelosi using a Muslim person as a prop?
Even if one buys into your premise, your examples are quite notably biased and there is an obvious left wing analogue to each of your right wing boogeymen.
By the same standard, then, I can safely write off BlackLivesMatter as a group whose members are inherently racist, and in some cases engage in literal terrorism (definition: violence applied for political goals) with the sanction of the larger group?
Why or why not?
You are your impact on other people and every impact on everyone else is inescapably, inextricably, definitionally "political".
Except most of these definitions of yours, that are entirely yours as far as I can see, don't have anything to do with the actual definition of the word political. To wit:
relating to the government or the public affairs of a country.
Where's the connection to government and public affairs and Star Trek? You did make that connection, and I'm curious to see how you go about defending it, especially since you called out this division of political vs not as a rhetorical device used to avoid defending things.
On that same note, humans "draw lines to segment off topics" because that is literally the only way human reason about things. Your definition of politics implies that I can't watch a Goddamned fictional series about spaceships without a bunch of other ill-defined ideological baggage attached to it. I don't see the practical or metaphorical usefulness of this definition, and up to this point, you have not demonstrated it.
They were describing a situation of 99% bad people where you write off the 1%. You seem to be describing the inverse. That's not the same standard.
There's a big difference between "almost all of this group is terrible, you are enabling them and should be painted with the same brush" and "a tiny fraction of this group is terrible, you are enabling them and should be painted with the same brush".
It's a fully general statement, not about particular groups.
As for the LGBT flags, I don't view those as political but rather as communities within reddit that together make up a large userbase who were committed to protecting each other's art and flags.
What is this if not politics? Politics isn't a dirty word you know...
In the sense of /r/place and their arrangements: that is politics, or more so rather diplomacy. They have common grounds and worked together, that's all.
My meetup dedicated to showing off old hardware is not political. If I tried to force a tax on everyone through a referendum to support my group, then I've made it political.
Can you be absolutely sure? How do you decide who shows and tells today? Who is the meetup "leader", and how did they get that position? What do you do about that old software meetup that always meets across the hall from you at the same time and steals your donuts and coffee? Almost anything groups of people do entails politics, without necessarily even going to the obvious case of forcible taxes.
Besides we were talking about staking out pixels on a limited canvas, which is a zero sum game, involves other groups and the need to consolidate efforts, a decidedly political affair.
I am having trouble understanding why you think this. Care to explain why?
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?
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.
I'm not so sure this is actually true. Have you ever tried to organize a large number of people?
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.
To be fair, it is arguable that it deserved attention, as the final picture is now a part of internet history.
that's awesome! The whole thing became a territory war :)
Then there are people who live their whole lives in places more extreme than either of the moods I described.
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.
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.
To see how countries form and mutual cooperation strategies take hold.
I don't get this way of thinking. Human are a political beast. Everything we do or say is political.
With that said, when I saw it on an NBA game before the commercials aired I was like 'Hey! Look! Jordan has a Hitler stache, wth?' To which my friend responded 'he needs a new PR person'
Imho this has more to do with a lack of knowledge among the general (western) populations which mostly only know the symbol from the Nazis. But not all swastika are same as there are quite a few differences in orientation and details between the Nazi Swastika and the actual Hindu/Buddhist symbols.
The only difference I have seen between the nazi swastika and the Hindu one is that the nazi one is at an angle.
You'll see it in much stonework on their temples and other buildings, especially as it does not have the associated stigma in Asia as it does in the West.
I know I could have done a Google search and figured it out on my own, but if we're not allowed to ask questions which are already answered somewhere on the internet then I guess we wouldn't be asking very many questions.
All that, in the name of some people not wanting to be offended.
Of course, there are many exceptions to this in history.
I'm curious since I don't ban swastikas on my site, although some of my users ask me to.
I'd say it falls under:
> Threatens, harasses, or bullies or encourages others to do so
Of course, these days ad networks are hyper-sensitive about this topic, so from an advertising perspective it does make sense.
For me personally, my grandfather and his family were persecuted along with other family members and friends. My grandfather was even beaten by Hitler Youth, among experiencing other horrible events (Kristallnacht in particular). I wish it weren't the case but the symbol is strongly associated with the feelings from this era of time.
So yes, an image (which is a collection of pixels on a screen) does feel bullying to me. Maybe it's not active bullying where someone is specifically setting out to piss me off/scare me/whatever, but it's most certainly passive bullying because unfortunately there are people who still feel very strongly about it and its use in one of the most horrible eras of history.
In my mind, the best way of ridding ourselves of the mistakes of the past is to stop holding their symbolism as something that should be banned. It's the same with offensive words -- by keeping them as "things you should never say" you're effectively giving them power which goes against your wishes to eradicate the power they once had.
Do you think that Hitler (or Stalin, Tito, Mao, Pot) would prefer that you made fun of them and lightheartedly used the symbolism they held dear or that you feared them after the deaths of their regimes?
All of that being said, I completely understand why you would feel the way you do.
While it's normal to find display of Nazi symbology distasteful, considering it bullying or taking personal offense is really not reasonable, unless it's done as an attempt to embarrass/mock you, personally.
Bullying is absolutely the wrong word for people who are going about their business without specific negative intent.
Like others, I hope that the swastika loses its strong association with Nazism. That's not going to happen if we continue to freak out and cry about our hurt feelings every time one is displayed.
If someone doesn't want to follow the social norms of the community they're in, fine, but they'll pay the consequences. They can form their own community if they want.
The only thing I take offense to is the victimizing language of "bullying" being used here. Putting up free speech online, if it's not targeted to specific people, chronic, and abusive, is not "bullying". It's just in poor taste or offensive. If you own a space online and want to remove distasteful or offensive material, that's completely your right. But don't frame it as bullying, or any sort of persecution.
If someone wants to defend a controversial view, they need to learn how to effectively communicate it, rather than expect others to graciously welcome it. Let the idea's merits be its own defense. If it's only defense is, "well at least it's not technically illegal to say", then maybe it wasn't worth saying in the first place.
So you say "draw what you like on the walls" and then punish a follow of Vishnu because you associate the symbol differently to them. Don't invite strangers to draw stuff on your walls then?
>If someone doesn't want to follow the social norms of the community they're in //
Such as free speech. Don't give people freedom of speech and then chastise them for speaking freely. If they act immorally, or unethically, or illegally, sure ... but don't punish people for art alone.
I didn't give anyone freedom of speech. If someone calls me racial slurs in my house, I'm kicking them out. Freedom of speech is for the courts, not for curating the communities I want to be in.
Ok, so drawing it is an act of rebellion that tells us something about people, in a piece of public, open, collaborative art that's a good thing.
I want to hear opposing views to my own, if someone sincerely rallies behind a swastika/flag/emblem i want to see, learn why, not usher them away. Reddit has much more abhorrent content than a simple emblem.
You're of course right, you don't have to give free speech. But it helps to do so occasionally especially when the medium prevents any actual harm coming from it.
If someone is wrong a 100 times, why listen to them the 101st time? Also, if their first 50 arguments involved massacring millions, why should we entertain _any_ future argument of theirs? In fact, perhaps entertaining the first 50 ones is what lead to such violence. If we give unlimited room to violent ideas, how can we be surprised when violence takes form?
Why give speech to those whose goal is to deny speech and life itself? I would argue that giving free speech to ideas that goes against the principles of a free society is not only a huge waste of time, but a big danger.
Maybe I didn't explain my thought-process very well, but the idea is it may have not been directed specifically to bully, but by making statements, like "you're taking offense to pixels", there is an unintentional/passive form of bullying going on. It gives off the feeling of "well not everybody feels this way so it's just you and you shouldn't really be feeling this anymore or at all". Not everybody can just shut off feelings like that or desensitize themselves from a symbol. Plain and simple. It's just not that easy.
IMO bullying can also make someone feel uncomfortable; not necessarily in a threatening sense, but in a way where the person just doesn't feel right, like they don't fit in properly- the bullying makes them stand out and not in a 'good' way.
There's a point where the word is no longer appropriate--I think "passive" bullying is an oxymoron. A bully is someone who targets someone else, and makes that person feel bad by repeatedly abusing them verbally and physically. This is a very bad thing, which is why the word is powerful, but it's very different from words like "offensive", which is more in line with what you mean. You are made uncomfortable by it, the poster likely has no intention whatsoever toward you.
What community does the swastika represent and what are their ideals?
The 'passive' bullying is done by displaying the symbol in a public space to 'bully' those who recognize it as a message that they are not welcome and not wanted in that space.
I just don't buy this part. How do you know this is the intention? I'm assuming that it's just a picture of a swastika, not a targeted message of hate. How can you be so sure that they are out to send you this message? Are we in the realm of thought crime?
The very idea of bullying to me is a protracted, targeted, abusive thing. It does the kids who go through true bullying every day injustice to say that one off, untargeted, pixel art is in any way, shape, or form, bullying. It can be highly offensive, disgusting, and discomforting, or it can be artistic, clever, funny, and thought provoking--you'll never know if you sensor the speech by calling it "bullying".
Bullying doesn't have to be targeted. A student who constantly walks around school halls indiscriminately slamming shut open lockers and pushing people out of their way would surely be labeled a bully.
It's abusive because of the context.
I fully agree that representations of hate presented in an artistic, clever, funny, or thought provoking way should not be stifled because their place in the conversation around preventing hate and evil is important.
But I think it's a long stretch to call the swastikas in /r/Place artistic, clever, funny, or thought provoking.
A sibling comment mentions: >Honestly, in this case it was probably mostly representing rebellious teenagers who love to offend the easily offended, not nazis or nazi symphatizers.
A very simple way to send the message that their "one off, untargeted, pixel art" of a symbol commonly described as "highly offensive, disgusting, and discomforting" is not "artistic, clever, funny, and thought provoking" is to have it removed.
From my experience "symbol X is offensive" doesn't actually help distinguish between malicious and non-malicious people because the thing that makes someone malicious is their actions and views, not the iconography they use to express said actions and views.
I completely agree with this.
I think most content creators make a conscious effort to make their intent known through the work.
For Example, movies like "Inglourious Basterds" or "Downfall" are clearly using Nazi iconography to build the aesthetic of their world without suggesting they support the ideals of the real-world Nazis.
Perhaps a more poignant current example is youtube personality JonTron. The basic gist as I understand it is: He occasionally makes off-color or insensitive jokes that could easily be considered offensive but are generally regarded as OK because the intent is understood to be a place of comedy. Now after defending some racist remarks, his past statements are seen in a new light that makes their original intent less clear.
I do think it's something important to discuss and we clearly can't have a discussion if what we want to talk about is a banned taboo. But I also think it's clearly wrong to treat any hate-speech/iconography as if somehow doesn't have all that extra cultural baggage.
I think it's at the very least disingenuous to claim that his recent remarks are racist (the more we use that word, the more watered down it becomes). And it's also sad that people assume that your politics cannot change either.
My reading of the situation is that he was just doing a thought-experiment and asking why multiculturalism is only an issue in the western world. It's true that he appears to be more right-leaning than other people in the skeptic "community" but that view is not racist. It's just a question. When he went on to "debate" someone else, it's quite clear that he hasn't debated this topic before and it's quite clear that he probably hasn't heard any of the counter-arguments to his points before (because he hasn't argued them before). Would he change his mind if he had heard those counter arguments? Would he refine his opinions? Maybe, but calling him a racist doesn't help anyone. I would've assumed people learned that with all of the recent political events (Brexit, Trump, everything that's happening in Europe), they'd realise that calling everyone a misogynist/racist/Nazi doesn't actually help...
> But I also think it's clearly wrong to treat any hate-speech/iconography as if somehow doesn't have all that extra cultural baggage.
Right, but "cultural baggage" doesn't appear to me to be a justification for wanting such things banned or not allowed. I find some of 4chan's trolling distasteful and I probably wouldn't have done what they did, but I would never say they shouldn't be allowed to do what they do (not the least of all because I find some of their trolling quite funny).
I agree that a zero-tolerance total ban is not right and not justified. Because intelligent respectful conversation is the only way to "unpack" that "cultural baggage".
The problem is, when that conversation isn't clearly respectful and intelligent it just isn't helping and only adds noise. It is to our benefit overall to filter out that noise.
Honestly, in this case it was probably mostly representing rebellious teenagers who love to offend the easily offended, not nazis or nazi symphatizers.
The just saw exactly what you described. Edgy trolls posting nazi stuff.
You might say that, but for some reason a lot of people appear to believe that pepe and milk are symbols of white supremacy and that YouTubers making edgy jokes are suddenly literal Nazis. Actual mainstream publications are publishing this crap.
Obviously the degree is different, so perhaps a Chinese flag for Tibetans, or a Turkish Flag for Armenians [estimates suggest 1.5Million murdered 100years ago], or ...
USA, where I assume the controlling decisions for Reddit are made, is known for "freedom of speech" which makes this sort of control of speech stand out more starkly.
How do you differentiate the supposed support for one set of actions with the apparent support for another equally vile set of actions in such cases. Clearly you can go personal in the analysis, but what about when your personal analysis conflicts with millions of others?
If somebody spreads something illegal on your comments/forums/whatever, and you fail to delete it, the German state will hold you, as the operator of said site, responsible and not the person who actually posted that stuff.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a
[1] http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2007/06/11/meinprofde...
We have to accept that the things we do online can have real-world repercussions, even if they're just pixels on a screen.
I saw some posts early on on the subreddit where a lot of people collectively resolved to erase swastikas on sight, so I just kinda assumed that was the reason why symbols like that never stayed up for long.
I've heard it hypothesised, but I haven't seen any evidence. Swastikas did appear and disappear again, but what makes you think this was admin action?
There are subs where swastikas are allowed.
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.
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.
I prefer that than fake news.
Someone didn't sit through the TF2 one or iirc their other one (before? after?) it
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.
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.
I'd disagree. /r/wales and /r/faroeislands have less than 7k subscribers between us. We had no bots, just a few people in a Discord channel.
Actual: https://i.imgur.com/GtkaGlJl.png
SCtester Cleanup: http://i.imgur.com/GQCTigC.png
Wales also had our dragon beneath the main UK flag along with NI, England and Scotland. There was also a cool Wales places heart.
Other, larger groups that did not have alliances with others failed to gain traction - Trump fans failed to draw Trump even though there are more of them than welsh people. Their numbers were large, but they did not have the favour of the majority.
The OSU people, though nobody had an opinion on them beforehand, did a poor job of diplomacy, and as a result really struggled to stay on the canvas.
It was about who was in the good books of the larger factions more than anything else. If rainbowroad or the germans liked you, you were golden. If OSU liked you, well, that wasn't worth much.
Wales is fundamentally part of the UK, and I would assume the Welsh we were represented within the /r/unitedkingdom place team. We certainly are in the subreddit. That was more /r/unitedkingdom but /r/wales did some defence of it.
As for the heart in placehearts, that was r/placehearts and their allies more than us. (The Wales/Faroe Islands heart in the image was all us.)
I would speculate T_D failed in large part because they attacked areas that were defended by bots, they (correctly) prioritized the flag, and trolling others.
I'm sure it didn't help that they've antagonized the entire Reddit community with their shitty lack of reddiquette in general since their inception.
I'd go further and suggest a lot of their members were lost to the Void, which I'd cynically suggest overlaps significantly.
People were forced to make trade-offs between creating the things they wanted to see and censoring the things they didn't want to see, and could not do both simultaneously. This is unlike political systems in which people can vote on a referendum on gay marriage and zoning laws on the same ballot (or US congressmen voting on multiple laws in one session).
Of course there are still elements of this in politics when it comes to enacting complex legislation (can't do healthcare and tax reform at the same time) but that that has more to do with the time and political capital trade-offs it takes to build coalitions which can then act unilaterally, while in reddit the cost is downstream, as coalitions must divide their power if they want to pursue simultaneous goals.
Also, the time limit measured takes into account strength of preference since the ability of an individual to affect the outcome of the canvas depends on how much time they're willing to devote to their effort. Consider the example of LGBT laws. Those who are LGBT tend to have much stronger preferences regarding such laws compared to the general population who may be for or against them (though some on the religious right probably feel very strongly as well). In politics, this can lead to persecution, as a majority of people that don't care strongly but vote no can hold back those who care strongly and vote yes. On the reddit platform, since people with greater conviction are likely to devote more time than those who do not care strongly, it makes it more likely for them to get their message out.
As for your second point, I'd argue that any variance b/w individuals wasn't that much. Much more effective than staying online for an hour and getting a few more pixels in, is propagandizing to a subreddit of 10,000 people and getting each of them to drop one pixel. Those who got their voices heard were not those staying up 24 hrs placing dots, it was those who wrote calls to arms on subreddits and mobilized others.
Doesn't this describe the recent presidential election?
There's an untapped concept behind all of those. Content that is ephemeral but brings a lot of people together...
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.
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.
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).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#April_Fools_subreddits
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.
I think also briefly Italy had the south side and Spain had the East, but those went back to France/Germany respectively.
Compare the r/places output to MDH and http://media.cntraveler.com/photos/56d0aee058d9a8773c109eb2/... and you'll probably establish a consensus for the "benevolent dictator" made art above the others?
* 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
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
Thanks /r/sweden!
We won :)
They also animate the progress here: http://artcontext.net/act/01/glyphiti/anim/
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.
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.
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:
Did they mean 16 color palette?
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 13526It 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.
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) (and resulting peaceful resolution), [The Void's (unsuccessful) attack on the OSU logo](https://i.imgur.com/Tpmvrcc.gif), and [several factions ganging up to attack the US flag](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). Other interesting stuff to note include [this animated heatmap](https://i.imgur.com/a95XXDz.gifv) by /u/jampekka of activity on the canvas, and [this graphic](https://i.imgur.com/SEHaUSJ.png) by /u/alternateme highlighting all the white pixels which never got touched throughout the experiment.
[1] http://kk.org/mt-files/books-mt/ooc-mf.pdf (page 11)
[2] 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.
The resulting 10 minute time-lapse video is an absolute thing of beauty. 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. :(
(Its not moderated, so probably NSFW)
Did anyone create an old fashioned 2D heatmap?
[0]:https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/63240q/rplace_activi...
[1]:https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatm...
very interesting social experiment!