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How We Built r/Place (2017)

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Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#31

Post by zeven7 »

treesknees wrote: post #16
unsupp0rted wrote: post #11

I don't like /r/place - I spend time in several regional subreddits, and they've transferred their nationalistic identity wars to Reddit. They're constantly fighting to build and rebuild their flags. Now those regional subs are littered with one post after another of "come on, we need your help to defend our flag" nonsense. It's all pointless and divisive.

It was divisive everywhere. I saw so many posts from folks arguing why X or Y shouldn't be on the board, or shouldn't use up so much space, or how flags were too boring. I stopped playing after the first day because of all the anger around it.

I saw a lot of people having fun and didn't see people getting really angry. Though I'm sure there were people actually getting angry, that happens with every game. Maybe those people should relax more, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I was part of a community maintaining a small logo that got attacked a few times, and we repaired it - part of the fun. I agree with the people who think a canvas full of flags is kind of boring and wish people didn't jump so quickly into nationalistic identities as a way to express themselves, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#32

Post by kuraudo »

treesknees wrote: post #20

I didn't care for /r/place this time around. It felt like a lazy and uninspired move by Reddit to just copy the exact same idea from 5 years ago. As pointless as their other events were, like /r/the_button, at least they were unique. Not only that, it spoiled the treasured memory and experience of 2017. This year was so full of hate and fighting over flags, stream raids, bot scripts floating around, none of it felt g…

The exposing of the cheating didn't help.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#33

Post by MonkeyIsNull »

blamazon wrote: post #15
haskaalo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the first version of /r/place, there was some mechanism in place to reduce the use of bots such as a CAPTCHA and not allowing newly created accounts to place pixels. However, this year I feel like they gave up on all of that simply to gain more users.

Notably, Reddit is planning to IPO this year. [1] [1] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-announces-confidential...

oh no.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#34

Post by toper-centage »

blamazon wrote: post #15
haskaalo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the first version of /r/place, there was some mechanism in place to reduce the use of bots such as a CAPTCHA and not allowing newly created accounts to place pixels. However, this year I feel like they gave up on all of that simply to gain more users.

Notably, Reddit is planning to IPO this year. [1] [1] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-announces-confidential...

That explains why they allowed new accounts to participate. There were probably hundreds of thousands of new bot accounts created over the weekend.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#36

Post by bombcar »

The botting makes it more boring, in my opinion, it's just a user count system at that point.

It would be more interesting (in my opinion) if somehow you could get your OWN pixel by being the one who claims it, something like if you change a pixel, others can't change it for 5+x minutes where X increases each time you "defend" it or something.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#37

Post by pg_bot »

Liquid_Fire wrote: post #17
matsemann wrote: post #7

Last time, wasn't there someone here saying it was easy to do and they could do it in a weekend, and then actually delivered? Can't find it, but perhaps someone here remember more about it?

I'm sure it's not too difficult to build if you don't need to scale it up to a similar number of users (especially bots). How would you test that it's actually capable of that? Even the article mentions they ran into unexpected issues despite all the load testing.

Given the right tools, you should be able to handle double the max load that they are expecting given a beefy enough server. Their architecture is a bit too complex for my taste, but given that reddit is written in python it is not surprising that this was the direction that they took. You could use tsung (http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/1/01/about/) to test workloads at that level. This would be a pretty straightforward project to build with erlang/elixir's gen_server abstraction.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#38

Post by kannanvijayan »

blamazon wrote: post #14

Highlight of /r/place this year for me was Canada narrative. Initially that community struggled to decide on cannabis leaf or maple leaf, just like 5 years ago, leading to inevitable griefing campaigns taking advantage of the internal volatility to successfully turn it into "Bananas" with a yellow flag and a banana in place of the leaf for a short time. But then the Canadians prevailed in the last hour, with Canada s…

I did not participate in the reddit place event, but I did witness this drama play out as I was browsing the site.

The psychological response to this was also fittingly Canadian. Ultimately the chaotic symbol was dubbled the "merple lerf", and accepted in the good humour that it deserved to be.

Now allow me to take 20-50 minutes to dissect what this event means to the Canadian identity, and how the chaotic aspect of the symbol may reflect deeper schisms and currents that underscore the Canadian experience.

Tonight at 8:00pm on CBC Radio. 7:30pm in Newfoundland.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#39

Post by [deleted] »

bombcar wrote: post #36

The botting makes it more boring, in my opinion, it's just a user count system at that point. It would be more interesting (in my opinion) if somehow you could get your OWN pixel by being the one who claims it, something like if you change a pixel, others can't change it for 5+x minutes where X increases each time you "defend" it or something.

[deleted]

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#40

Post by yreg »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #28
yreg wrote: post #6

The original /r/Place was created (invented?) by /u/powerlanguage who recently rose to prominence again when he created Wordle.

He didn't invent pixel wars any more than he invented Mastermind.

I added the invent word to clarify that I don't mean "this guy created it, not the folks who wrote the article in the original post". How would you phrase it? :)
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