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Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

arstechnica.com

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Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#151

Post by sooheon »

rmccoy6435 wrote: post #124
sooheon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

To clarify: I do not view orientation or sexual identity as politics. 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.

Well, having (or lacking) a sexual orientation or identity is not politics, it just is. But expressing it, identifying with others who share it, forming groups and alliances and a shared sense of community is precisely what politics is. I think we pretty much agree.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#152

Post by hueving »

mhermher wrote: post #141
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…

On the politics point, I really think it was for a different reason. 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.

That's another way of saying people hate political crap.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#153

Post by badloginagain »

CarVac wrote: post #86
bsamuels wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was like a game of Diplomacy more than anything else. 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 :)

They also held a much more modestly-sized area. 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…

What's interesting is how quickly the game theory of r/place was learned, and how most sizes represented the size of the community.

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

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#154

Post by kjdndisneinj »

najati83 wrote: post #116
kjdndisneinj wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but are you actually comparing Nazi symbolism to the LGBT flag? This has to be sarcastic, no?

A swastika, an LGBT flag and a hammer and a sickle are all political symbols. I found it funny admins only banned one of them.

They didn't ban political symbols, they ban bullying and acting disrespectfully. The swastika fits that, the LGBT flag doesn't.

This might not be the case, but it feels like you're acting naive to further an agenda.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#155

Post by ctdonath »

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.

It's like an old photograph of Times Square, where most businesses shown are long defunct and many were of dubious character. Nonetheless, it still holds meaning and tells a pretty cool story.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#156

Post by hueving »

NoGravitas wrote: post #133
eatitraw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 anyth…

>ugly trolling and hate speech is that the alt-right

Or your preconceived notions of conservative people are wrong.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#157

Post by Houshalter »

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 reddit experiment is way more interesting. Everything on million dollar homepage is trashy ads for very shady websites. /r/Place is populated by fan communities and jokes and memes. I set it as my desktop background and still keep finding interesting things in it.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#158

Post by icc97 »

I find this interesting in what it lacked:

* 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

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#159

Post by sooheon »

cokeandsympathy wrote: post #132
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 zoni…

You can kill 2 birds with one stone by placing what you want to see over what you want to sensor. But yeah, if you want to sensor many different places, there is an opportunity cost there.

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.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#160

Post by najati83 »

kjdndisneinj wrote: post #154
najati83 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A swastika, an LGBT flag and a hammer and a sickle are all political symbols. I found it funny admins only banned one of them.

They didn't ban political symbols, they ban bullying and acting disrespectfully. The swastika fits that, the LGBT flag doesn't. This might not be the case, but it feels like you're acting naive to further an agenda.

If that's the case, I have to say that for the political views of many people, an LGBT flag is as disrespectful or dangerous to society as a swastika can be to any individual or group. Being unable to see that just proves further that reddit admins are biased.

I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything; everybody has their own views and trying to change them over the internet is a waste of time. So this off-topic for me ends here.

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