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How We Built r/Place (2017)

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Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#41

Post by mirceal »

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…

the whole thing was hilarious. the memes that came out if it were also hilarious. at some point i saw a meme with a minion complaining that the Canadians are trying to take over his country’s flag.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#42

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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?

There are probably a lot of programs that could be built in a weekend. I imagine any competent full-stack developer could make a Twitter clone in an afternoon.

The challenge is making it scale. That developed-in-an-afternoon Twitter clone probably won't be able to handle an active user count in the 4 digits, let alone the 7+ digits Twitter has now.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#44

Post by yreg »

toper-centage wrote: post #34
blamazon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also hundreds of thousands human accounts as well to be fair. Whether they will stick around remains to be seen.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#45

Post by cuteboy19 »

kps wrote: post #24
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's all pointless and divisive. It's not pointless. Divisiveness drives engagement; engagement drives ad money.

I wonder if they count all the bots as active users

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#47

Post by cuteboy19 »

mirceal wrote: post #43

this sounds like a good system design question. how would you build r/place?

I would probably be the last person to suggest this, but why not put it on the blockchain? It would be a pointless display of conspicuous consumption, almost as bad as the monkey NFTs!

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#48

Post by jjoonathan »

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…

Yeah, r/place generated so many miniature dramas it was wild.

The US flag drama was also an interesting lesson in coordination. Obviously it drew a lot of attack / defense, beefs, etc, but a lot of the early support was uncoordinated and also hindered bringing the artwork to the next level. The hivemind was good at local fixes but bad at global fixes -- our equivalent of the merple leaf was that the flag would always tend towards 100 stars in a grid instead of 50 stars in staggered rows. Attempts to add artwork or remove & fix stars were rejected by the hivemind trying to defend the flag. I'm embarrassed to admit that I may have put 2 or 3 reverts against what, in hindsight, was an attempt to add Iwo Jima to the lower left.

In the end, what rallied the troops was a retreat. https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/tvhtgv/american_flag...

After seeing the US flag disappear, supporters flocked to the subreddit and the discord. This tipped the balance away from self-sabotaging hivemind and towards coordination. There was a dynamic of "minimum viable change," where the hivemind would stop fighting artwork only once it could recognize it, so the key was to organize enough people on discord to push out an identifiable chunk (say, the space shuttle) in a single wave. I'm sure this dynamic played out in hundreds of communities, but in the end good art and organization won:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericanFlaginPlace/comments/twg11p...

I'd love to hear the French story. They rotated through a few designs and look heavily contested on the heatmap: https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/twryzd/frequency_of_...

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#49

Post by mirceal »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #47
mirceal wrote: post #43

this sounds like a good system design question. how would you build r/place?

I would probably be the last person to suggest this, but why not put it on the blockchain? It would be a pointless display of conspicuous consumption, almost as bad as the monkey NFTs!

you can’t get the required tps for this. observability would also be bad between blocks and you would also have states where you could end up with different pixels based on the block that won.

so nope. wouldn’t work with blockchain

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#50

Post by theyeenzbeanz »

I participated and constantly had to fight against flags that keep severing and overriding our artwork and coordinators threatening to erase it entirely. We managed to make do, but the white only pixel at the end felt like a slap in the face after all the effort.
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