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Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

arstechnica.com

1–10 of 284 posts

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#3
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.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#4
post #2

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.

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.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#6
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?

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#7
post #2

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.

We'll s/gag/experiment/ above.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#8
post #7
post #2

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.

We'll s/gag/experiment/ above.

Cheers :)

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#9

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…

> 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?

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#10
post #5

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/

If it's anything it would be the moderators of r/Place. The admin's job is more of administration level (sitewide), and it's more of picking up where the mod privileges end.

There are subs where swastikas are allowed.

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