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Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

arstechnica.com

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Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#131

Post by make3 »

the_watcher wrote: post #56
baby wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When are we going to see this beautiful sign back in our culture as a positive symbol :( that and the Hitler mustache. I'm guessing we need a few hundred years before we can use these things without it being associated to Nazism.

To be fair, Michael Jordan spent a few years trying to rehabilitate the Hitler mustache in his Hanes ads. The problem is that Hitler's become so associated with it that it's now broadly known as the Hitler mustache (as opposed to the toothbrush mustache - thanks DanBC!), which makes it pretty hard to dissociate it with the man for most people.

a black person with a Hitler moustache is not remotely nearly as bad. they really don't look like Hitler, and it's very unlikely they are secretly hoping for the supremacy of the Aryan race

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#132

Post by cokeandsympathy »

doubleunplussed wrote: post #39

It was a seriously cool experiment. Factions rose and fell, alliances were forged, battles waged, "rules of war" developed. It was amazing. 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…

A difference though is that the time limit between pixel placing introduced opportunity cost and provided a means of testing strength of preference.

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.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#133

Post by NoGravitas »

eatitraw wrote: post #49
rmccoy6435 wrote: post #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…

> 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".

Yeah, look on the Far Left (/r/TheFarLeftSide/). Reddit's radical leftist contingent spent a tremendous amount of time protecting the hammer and sickle, Comrade Party Parrot, and BLM from brigading by the far right. In fact, I'd argue that one of the reasons there wasn't more ugly trolling and hate speech is that the alt-right were mainly wasting their time trying to deface the FarLeftSide rather than producing anything of their own.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#134

Post by mhink »

camtarn wrote: 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.

Reddit's April Fools projects [1] have been social experiments for a few years now, and I really appreciate their willingness to actually build the kinds of interesting ideas which you can really only accomplish with such a large and engaged userbase. /r/thebutton was a lot of fun two years ago, and while I never really used /r/robin, I thought the concept was brilliant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#April_Fools_subreddits

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#135

Post by petepete »

xanderstrike wrote: post #119
ctdonath wrote: post #104

Someone's gotta mention http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com : 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.

The sad thing is none of those logos and links have any meaning any more, almost all of them go to 404s, domain parked pages, or completely unrelated sites, and even when they were new they went to scummy ecommerce or porn sites. In 12 years, the imagery on /r/place will still hold meaning and the timelapses will still tell a pretty cool story.

Cartridge Save (top left) are still going strong. I used to work for their offshoot web division many years ago.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#136

Post by porsupah »

Yen wrote: post #45
rmccoy6435 wrote: post #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…

> 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 th…

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

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. ^_^

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#137

Post by NoGravitas »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #42
someguy101010 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised at the lack of swastikas, curse words, and nsfw content on the canvas, but that may say more about me than anything else.

There was some NSFW stuff early on. There was a communist flag on the left side, under which was the statement "bash the fash." He-Man had a rainbow in his mouth like he was giving it a blowjob for the longest time, and all the nsfw stuff suddenly disappeared at the end. I highly suspect that moderators and bots took over by the end and made it come together, and I bet it was a PR move to amplify a sense of community…

Not sure how a communist flag (stayed on till the end, by the way) or "bash the fash" is NSFW. Unless your workplace is fascist, of course.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#138

Post by Nexxxeh »

doubleunplussed wrote: post #111
Nexxxeh wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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) 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 Wal…

Sure but the heart was there at the pleasure of the heart people, and the dragon beneath the UK flag at the pleasure of the UK people. If either of them wasn't cool with wales, they could have gotten rid of them (I'm not sure about the other one but I suspect there were conversations and agreements with surrounding art not to expand into each others' territories). Other, larger groups that did not have alliances with…

All the stuff in the image was by us, and we fought and won for the space.

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.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#139

Post by spike021 »

sooheon wrote: post #118
spike021 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to assume you lack a connection to swastikas used as they were during the Holocaust. 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…

That is not bullying, it is you taking offense to pixels. Which you are perfectly free to do, but nobody is bullying you by putting their art online.

That's why I separated the kind of bullying it is.

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.

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