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How We Built r/Place (2017)

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Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#91

Post by yannoux »

jjoonathan wrote: post #48
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…

The big French flag (bottom left) was mostly drawned and defended by the French streamers. There were more than 400k viewers last night on Kameto Twitch channel to defend the area (probably 600-700k for all French streamers) and they were regularly attacked by Spanish + US streamers who were trying to destroy the flag.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#92

Post by Macha »

jrockway wrote: post #90
Macha wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely rampant. I think most communities that were still on the canvas day 2 and on either had a huge inbuilt following or resorted to bots. I think Osu, the superstonk people and France probably were botting, but unless those bots were incredibly poorly written, I don't think were the cause of the sudden erasure - the bot code I saw shared most widely was definitely looking up which colour to pick based on the r…

That's interesting. I didn't look into the API in detail. I took one edit request and did "copy as curl" and played with that a bit (it's just GraphQL, and I enjoyed how some fields are "snake_case" and others are "CamelCase"). I was kind of surprised that I could reuse the various authorization headers between requests, I assumed they would really want to validate that you were actually using a browser and not repla…

Oh, I don't know how many of the bots were actually using the API, versus just userscripts running in TamperMonkey/ViolentMonkey. The ones I saw were userscripts, so they were browser based.

They did try _some_ prevention, there was a guy running 20 accounts who had his timers escalate up to like 18000 minutes, and also if you placed too many black pixels in sequence you'd get errors for a while before you could place again. But it definitely didn't kick in until way too late.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#93

Post by zamadatix »

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…

It was tweaked quite a bit. Canvas expansion over time, palette expansion over time, wait time modified to a flat 5 minutes, and a completely different ending come to mind. Of course this time there were also ~5x as many tiles placed per hour as well. If all that counts for is a lazy uninspired move to copy the exact same thing then sign me up for more lazy uninspired events.

Your memory of 2017 seems to be more nostalgia than reality as much of the same occurred in regards to both good sentiment and bad during it - it was only looking back that everything seemed perfect. Many people hated rainbowroad, thebluecorner, flags, and similar groups just the same in 2017. Bots weren't the invention of the last 5 years either. If you look at the 2022 canvas and the only genuine interaction you see is the Ukrainian flag then you're simply ignoring the good parts to leave focus on the bad. If I had to focus on the biggest difference between 2017 and 2022 I'd actually say it was the amount of attention large streamers drove to it all. There were plenty of streamers in 2017 but in 2022 pretty much all major view count streamers were treating it as a multi-day content event between each other instead of really being tied to what was being coordinated from Reddit communities interacting.

I hope they do another one in another 5 years. My favorite part of this year was seeing placestart manage to get the XP start menu in after the final expansion. It was my favorite part of the first one and it was good to see it get some tweaks as well.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#94

Post by zenexer »

snarkerson wrote: post #78
colordrops wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why was an admin overwriting squares?

Some images were not permitted. Like the American flag linked above. They rebuilt it but the original was wiped out by an admin user.

There were portions of the canvas wiped out by admins, but the American flag wasn’t among them. That was a coordinated griefing effort.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#95

Post by fattless »

My favorite little spot was the r/foxhole little spot

For those who are unfamiliar, foxhole is a grand scale mmo war game where two sides fight over a giant map over the course of a few weeks. There’s extensive player led logistics lines, massive front lines, and every battle, base, and item are all made by players. It’s a good time

The foxhole community built a little replica of the game map, and over the course of place fought over it much like the actual game. If you check the Timelapse you can see both sides trying to push into the other territories.

And it found itself caught in a bunch of big events, raids, voids, ect. But the community rebuilt and resumed fighting incredibly quick, which seems pretty in character lol.

Leave it to the foxhole players to fight over even faker land

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#96

Post by Tijdreiziger »

istorical wrote: post #69
ASalazarMX wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good chunk of that anger was because of trolls. People extending someone else's flag over other's artwork, random streamers calling their followers for vandalism, and general griefing. Since regular users are limited to one pixel every five minutes, it can be exasperating to see their effort erased in a few seconds.

You might be missing the point of those who disagree with your take, which is to call those who want to do different things on /r/Place than you 'trolls' or 'griefers' is itself just you projecting your own value judgment onto them, or acting as if you are the judge of what is right and wrong. From the perspective of someone who likes /r/theblackvoid, the pixel artists coloring over the void are just trolls and grief…

I do think the failure of Reddit to deploy even the most basic of anti-bot measures made the endeavour less authentic. If it had been all humans, sure; duke it out and may the stronger community win. As it stands, though, the communities with the largest number of bots occupied the largest amount of space (hence the massive German, Belgian and Dutch flags).

Of course, this might have been intentional; there's a theory that this was Reddit's attempt to pump up user numbers for their IPO.

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#97

Post by Marsey »

treesknees wrote: post #87
silisili wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those unaware, https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/tv3hin/a_reddit_mod_... This -completely- ruined the entire narrative. It's not organic content, it's not even user generated content. It's whatever the employees wanted it to be. Gross.

Apparently the cat being overwritten here has been in use as a mascot by a group of folks who were banned from Reddit. So I'm not sure it's as simple as stating that admins wanted to control the board, there could have been some abuse going on that we don't know about. >The Admins are currently at war with r/drama's offsite forum, who have been brigading Reddit. Last week the Admins banned lots of them permanently. S…

Full details are here, and it's just an orange cat: https://twitter.com/MarseyCat/status/1510733817937547272

Reddit even tweeted a screenshot of it: https://twitter.com/Reddit/status/1509990348378058755

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#98

Post by softcactus »

fattless wrote: post #95

My favorite little spot was the r/foxhole little spot For those who are unfamiliar, foxhole is a grand scale mmo war game where two sides fight over a giant map over the course of a few weeks. There’s extensive player led logistics lines, massive front lines, and every battle, base, and item are all made by players. It’s a good time The foxhole community built a little replica of the game map, and over the course of…

Everyone was calling it "Shard 3" which gave me a good laugh

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#99

Post by willis936 »

There is plenty of talk of bots, but no one mentioning that reddit employees were caught painting whatever they feel like. Admins defended it as "a tool to keep users safe". r/place being special is an illusion. It's worse than nothing because it actually tricks people into thinking the image is somehow representative of users voting on pixels. It's all just awful.

https://reddit.com/r/place/comments/tv3hin/a_reddit_mod_is_c...

https://reddit.com/r/place/comments/tv2lb6/mod_caught_cheati...

Re: How We Built r/Place (2017)

#100

Post by gnubison »

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.

If you look at r/place and see a bunch of flags … look closer? Sure, there are flags. There is also a ridiculous amount of pixel art created and protected by tireless fans of the games that have left their mark all over the canvas.
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