[rmccoy6435]

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 need to defend this!".

The other thing this author tried to make this about was politics. I think the one thing this really showed was most people on reddit don't really care about politics, but the vocal minority on there makes it seem like it's the forefront of every issue. I don't think there is anything actually political on the final /r/place piece other than country flags. Maybe this was more about how disinterested the majority of redditors are with politics rather than how politics were being squashed out by other users?

[CarVac]

There was another fascinating aspect of politics that sprang up due to Place: inter-community politics.

My community (Madoka Magica) was continuously communicating with our neighbors on all sides, ranging from the gigantic PrequelMemes to our right, Canada to our south, Homestuck, the Greek and Turkish flags mentioned in the article (which really were warring for quite a time before the heart appeared), and even tiny little subreddits like the AEIROU who we had to relocate as part of negotiations for our expansion.

There was constant debate about where to expand, who to defend against, who was being a jerk and needed to be wiped out... it was like a game of Diplomacy more than anything else.

[Nexxxeh]

/r/wales and /faroeislands had a mutual defense pact, enabling both (small in terms of Reddit) communities to punch above their weight.

It was great fun, fighting off trolls and attempts by other subreddits to aquire further real estate for themselves.

/u/SCtester cleaned up the final image to fix up (ed: some of) the in-progress and rogue pixels and damage by the "void" group.

http://i.imgur.com/7E3bAnE.png

There are several errors in his fixup, "Hypercum" being an example. /r/Scotland got lucky at lock-time, they came closer to being Scatland.

[mikeash]

Reading through the conversation on this stuff, I'm wondering if this weird combination of amusement and befuddlement is how my parents felt when I was telling them about my online activities back in the early 90s.

[H4CK3RM4N]

Wait until you hear about how 4chan's My Little Pony and Politically Incorrect(read: Nazis) became friends after this year's April Fools prank.

[Nexxxeh]

Did you read about how /pol/ trolled Shia LaBeouf's "He Will Not Divide Us" project?

[ENTP]

As a Welsh guy, can i just say all Welsh people are stubborn as fuck and never surrender? Cymru am byth!

[bbctol]

The way that compromises emerged was actually kind of inspiring. Everyone knew that a harmonious picture would be more pleasing than a chaotic blob, and it would be easy for a failed negotiation to descend into chaos, so neighboring groups had a good incentive to work together and find ways of solving their problems. My favorite was when the cute dog subreddit /r/goodboye was starting to overlap with the Dutch flag; they mutually agreed to have the dogs wear clogs.

[castis]

I was helping maintain the /r/cubers place. We were neighbored with /r/bulgaria and ended up using the Bulgarian colors in the cube as well as helping maintaining their flag with them.

Was a really nice experience overall, I'm really impressed with how it all worked out.

[bsamuels]

> 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 :)

[CarVac]

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 underestimated our community's size, I think, because we grew to be fairly large and prominent.

[badloginagain]

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

[intended]

Eventually everything was scripted though, and you just needed to show up with a zombie account to contribute.

Saw lots of 1 year old accounts with no activity.

[baking]

I was involved in a successful joint effort to move an entire image up 3 pixels to resolve a border dispute.

[skizm]

I still cannot believe how large and clean that /r/PrequelMemes logo came out. It was a lot of text too, which made it all the more impressive.

[pkamb]

I don't understand why that was what a group of people put serious time and thought into creating.

[skizm]

I thought about that also. My conclusion: 1) Not political (or really controversial at all), 2) Meme is newish so not over done yet, 3) who doesn't like star wars? 4) Everyone on the sub knew right away what they wanted to post, so there was no lag time between designing a "logo" and rallying the troops.

I'm still impressed all things considered.

[dccoolgai]

Bless you. Don't ever go to reddit.com

[pkamb]

I get the fun of /r/place. I get the flags. I get the characters. I don't get the big block of text from Revenge of the Sith, and (mainly) how supporters of that beat out other communities.

[dccoolgai]

Unsurprising. It's not the kind of thing the readers of _hacker news_ would ever upvote...

[Nomentatus]

See Albert Camus' "Sissyphus", I guess.

[Normal_gaussian]

It was also cleaned up fairly early, I was just disappointed they didn't add full justification.

[TeMPOraL]

Missed out on that aspect, though I did my part as a freelancer, defending the art of /r/TheExpanse and /r/SpaceX, as well as significantly rebuilding the Star Trek badge nearby and fixing whatever else I found broken when I had pixels to spare.

[emilecantin]

There was also an epic battle between r/canada and r/quebec that kind of mirrored actual political events that occurred in the 90s.

GIF: https://gfycat.com/WholeHalfBobcat

Description (in French): https://www.reddit.com/r/Quebec/comments/62xde0/le_jour_un_r...

[joeframbach]

It was so exciting to see Mami's gem pop up, the contract with Chatot, the blue space invader return, the pi help from Celtics, the Dullahan recoloring from anime_irl. What a fun 72 hours!

[MrMember]

It was pretty cool seeing unrelated communities come together. The Miami Dolphins subreddit had a small logo next to the Cubs subreddit logo and we had an agreement to help each other out.

[Yen]

> 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 the most, in favor of the group project.

Also, as an art project grows, it necessarily ran in to border conflicts with its neighbors. How these conflicts were handled - whether through overwhelming force, negotiation over borders, compromise, or other means, says a lot about how people deal with conflicts in general.

i.e., the fact that the board ended with so many intact artworks, with intact borders, is notable.

[porsupah]

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. ^_^

[H4CK3RM4N]

I still love how all the furry subs collapsed into the snoo and Yiff me daddy after starting with many different logos.

[rmccoy6435]

I started to think about this a bit while I was replying to pavel_lishin below. Maybe it was more of users caring more about other communities or images more so than they do about political causes.

I must agree the scale of some of the works on there and the coordination it took is very admirable. I loved checking in every few hours just to see what had changed and who was fighting for control. It was definitely fun for a while to follow, but after time it became like a cult with some really toxic side-effects that leaked into different subreddits and detracted from the actual content fit for that sub.

[eatitraw]

> 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".

[NoGravitas]

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.

[Grue3]

I don't see how hammer and sickle, a symbol used by multiple governments to oppress and murder millions of people, is in any way more appropriate than any far right symbol.

[vidarh]

As someone far left, I sort of agree. The hammer and sickle was conceived for the Soviet Union, and the Bolsheviks took power in a coup against the socialist provisional government that actually had popular support. It's a symbol of a movement that grabbed power in a coup and then went on to outlaw, persecute and kill socialists and communists with equal fervour as they killed reactionary supporters of the Czar (who had been deposed months before their coup).

At the same time it is in an odd position because it was also very early on, before it was widely known what was happening with the Soviet government, adopted by anti-authoritarian socialist and communist groups, some of whose members risked their life against Stalin, and it was later knowingly adopted by groups opposed to the Soviet regime, such as e.g. the Trotskyist 4th International, as well.

This makes it quite different to symbols that are singularly attached to totalitarian governments and movements, in that it also has nearly as long history of use by their opponents.

Personally I think it's unhelpful to use it, but I also understand those who use it as an attempt to "reclaim" socialist imagery that has been relentlessly abused.

[lacampbell]

I too am always baffled about how much more accepted communist imagery is than Nazi imagery. Mao and Stalins death counts far outstrip Hitlers. Also anyone advocating nazism in public would be rightly shouted down but you get heavily upvoted posts here advocating all sorts of nonsense proven to kill millions.

[vidarh]

I have never seen anyone here advocating "all sorts of nonsense proven to kill millions" without getting shouted down for it. I would love to see examples (well, not love, but you get the point).

I have seen people here advocating anti-authoritarian socialist ideologies of the types that would get you executed by regimes like those of Mao and Stalin.

[Grue3]

There are plenty of actual, unironic Stalinists and Maoists on Reddit.

[giggles_giggles]

Everybody read Elie Weisel's Night in school but almost nobody's heard of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, for one thing..

[hueving]

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

Or your preconceived notions of conservative people are wrong.

[metamet]

Have you seen any of the alt-right communities? The alt-right is not your traditional conservative.

It's not a preconceived notion that /r/the_donald is filled to the brim with hate speech and trolls. You simply have to go there and look for yourself.

[wutbrodo]

I think the term "alt-right" at this point is just a catch-all derogatory for shitty people who happen to be a certain type of nationalist rightist, in much the same way that "SJW" refers to shitty people who happen to be associated with the social justice movement.

Before the election, there was a narrower meaning, but as soon as the Clinton campaign mentioned it and the media picked it up, any hope of the term having any concrete meaning was lost forever. (This isn't helped by the fact that people love using it to attack arbitrary conservatives, in much the same way that SJW is sometimes used to attack anyone who expresses views supportive of social justice without behaving badly).

EDIT: I don't let myself get worked up about downvotes in political conversations, but this one has me pretty curious. My comment wasn't even remotely offensive to any part of the political spectrum.

[H4CK3RM4N]

The best description I've seen of the alt-right is /pol/ as an ideology.

[AimHere]

Not to mention a small anarchocapitalist (black/yellow) flag under the snakes near the top left.

Supposedly the Trump Supporters at The_Donald attempted to create a few Trump memes and Pepe frogs, but gave up and concentrated on keeping the US flag intact.

Other than that, the right couldn't get much traction at all.

[sqeaky]

Do you think they are angry about the US/Mexico heart?

[smitherfield]

That's Ireland.

[Navarr]

Anarchist movements I can see, but I don't think trans/LGBT flags count as "political."

It's an identity, not a political statement. It'd be like calling christian crosses "political"

[grive]

Identity is very tightly related to political views.

Moreover, LGBTQ pride is definitely political, even in Western democracies (see contentions about gay marriage).

LGBT activism is definitely marked on the left political spectrum in the USA. Christians values will inherently push toward traditionalism, so social conservatism.

It is the same in many European countries.

[eropple]

Christianity is a completely political phenomenon (as a cursory historical examination will demonstrate) and public advocacy of it is a political act.

Similarly, most things, including fandoms, are political in nature whether they want to be or not. By liking Star Trek, you're buying into a box of propositions, some related to the art and some related to the real-world universe around that art. By (as in the Reddit experiment) working to expand it, you're making a political claim.

People are political, people are never not political, and drawing an imaginary line to try to separate some political acts from others is pretty fruitless.

[Karunamon]

This defines the word "political" to be so broad as to render it essentially meaningless.

I can't like Star Trek without "buying into a box of propositions"? Really? First, you're going to have to tell me why I like Star Trek.

[eropple]

What I am saying is that politics is an externalization rather than an internalization--which is very far from meaningless. Your why doesn't matter (and it's one reason why the right wing's "but I didn't support the Republicans because of racism" is so hollow). Your what matters. And it matters to other people. It's inescapably political because you live in a polity and your decisions impact other people. See, for example, the useful idiots of GamerGate who provided air cover to people who sent death and rape threats to women who had the temerity to make video games. If they're the one in a figurative million, literally-few-thousand who actually cares about "ethics in games journalism", that doesn't matter in the slightest because of what they enable through their action and their inaction.

Drawing those imaginary lines to segment off Some Topics (because otherwise one might have to defend them) is nonsense. People draw these lines anywhere from religion to fandoms to allegiance to political parties--but none of them are meaningful. You are your impact on other people and every impact on everyone else is inescapably, inextricably, definitionally "political".

[wutbrodo]

> "but I didn't support the Republicans because of racism" is so hollow). Your what matters. And it matters to other people. It's inescapably political because you live in a polity and your decisions impact other people. See, for example, the useful idiots of GamerGate who provided air cover to people who sent death and rape threats to women who had the temerity to make video games. If they're the one in a figurative million, literally-few-thousand who actually cares about "ethics in games journalism", that doesn't matter in the slightest because of what they enable through their action and their inaction.

It's this kind of maximalism that makes our politics so disgustingly toxic. It's entirely consistent for a hypothetical person to think that Hillary Clinton's hawkishness and role in the Middle East escapades of the last decade and a half are more damaging and evil than the Republican Party's association with racism in 2016's America. Your equally-ignorant doppelganger on the other side could say "it rings hollow that you say you didn't vote for Hillary _because_ of imperialism" and "see for example the useful idiots of the Democratic party who provide air cover for legitimizing the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents"[1]. Both of you can sit on your high horse, convinced that everyone else on the other side is guilty of the worst sins and too ignorant to know or evil to care. In the meanwhile, the level of political discourse drops ever lower and the level of political dysfunction climbs.

Being unable to separate people's intent from their n-degrees-of-separation theoretical impact isn't enlightened, it's childish. I know it's a lot of mental effort to consider the fact that those that disagree with you aren't evil, but hey, being an adult is hard.

[1] Note that none of the hypothetical political views in this comment are necessarily ones that I hold.

[hueving]

Living in absolutes is like that is only afforded to people who agree with their group on absolutely every topic (a.k.a. mindless people).

Do you support the Democratic party? If so, are you okay being defined by Nancy Pelosi using a Muslim person as a prop?

[mproy]

You are mostly speaking of the potential external impact of personal decisions. This is almost completely antithetical to politics. If I'm not proselytizing about Star Trek or even Christianity, there is nothing political about it.

Even if one buys into your premise, your examples are quite notably biased and there is an obvious left wing analogue to each of your right wing boogeymen.

[Karunamon]

>Your what matters. And it matters to other people. It's inescapably political because you live in a polity and your decisions impact other people.

By the same standard, then, I can safely write off BlackLivesMatter as a group whose members are inherently racist, and in some cases engage in literal terrorism (definition: violence applied for political goals) with the sanction of the larger group?

Why or why not?

You are your impact on other people and every impact on everyone else is inescapably, inextricably, definitionally "political".

Except most of these definitions of yours, that are entirely yours as far as I can see, don't have anything to do with the actual definition of the word political. To wit:

relating to the government or the public affairs of a country.

Where's the connection to government and public affairs and Star Trek? You did make that connection, and I'm curious to see how you go about defending it, especially since you called out this division of political vs not as a rhetorical device used to avoid defending things.

On that same note, humans "draw lines to segment off topics" because that is literally the only way human reason about things. Your definition of politics implies that I can't watch a Goddamned fictional series about spaceships without a bunch of other ill-defined ideological baggage attached to it. I don't see the practical or metaphorical usefulness of this definition, and up to this point, you have not demonstrated it.

[PhasmaFelis]

I agree that being queer shouldn't be political, but as long as millions of people's politics are centered on being anti-LGBT, simply being out of the closet is a political act whether we like it or not.

[rmccoy6435]

I think that's an interesting conversation to have. I didn't know there were anarchist flags on there, could you link me to some of them, I'm curious to see.

As for the LGBT flags, I don't view those as political but rather as communities within reddit that together make up a large userbase who were committed to protecting each other's art and flags.

[sooheon]

> 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...

[rmccoy6435]

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.

[sooheon]

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.

[hueving]

No, it only becomes political when it comes to forcing other groups to change or support your cause.

My meetup dedicated to showing off old hardware is not political. If I tried to force a tax on everyone through a referendum to support my group, then I've made it political.

[c0nducktr]

http://imgur.com/a/i9uS8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism#/media/Fil...

[rmccoy6435]

Huh. I obviously don't know much about Anarchist symbolism, as I had no idea what those represented after I was given the coordinates other than the Communist flag and the Black/Red Anarchist flag. I also never really looked at this portion of the board. Thanks for the insight!

[kmm]

At the left edge, somewhere above the middle, coordinates (0, 450) are a bunch of anarchist flags.

[pavel_lishin]

> I think the one thing this really showed was most people on reddit don't really care about politics, but the vocal minority on there makes it seem like it's the forefront of every issue.

Isn't it also possible for the reverse to be true? That a very vocal minority cared very much about r/place, and that vocal minority happened to not care enough about politics to show up on Place?

[rmccoy6435]

That's actually a really interesting thought. I hadn't even considered that.

I don't currently have the time to find all of the analytics about pixel placement, but I would assume there were tens of thousands of users who aligned with some 'faction' and had more than 20 pixel placements in the entire 72 hours (I would say that is a large enough number to identify people who actively participated), which is by no means a minority of individuals who frequent reddit. Most of the subreddits I visit all had some plans to organize something on there, so there was a very diverse crowd that organized around it.

I draw my conclusion about politics based on the fact that it wouldn't have been very hard to get one of the larger political subreddits to get something on the board and maintain it for the weekend, yet that didn't happen.

I have filtered all political subreddits via RES, and it's surprising how little politics is discussed on reddit once you remove the epicenters.

[softawre]

/r/the_donald tried to get their mascot on /r/place many times, only to be destroyed.

[rhizome]

it wouldn't have been very hard to get one of the larger political subreddits to get something on the board and maintain it for the weekend

I'm not so sure this is actually true. Have you ever tried to organize a large number of people?

[sqeaky]

For something like this the level of organization is tiny. I added to tux, and all I need was the picture of tux. I barely needed that because I just refilled pixels people poked into him.

[greenhatman]

/r/place made me realize that I care about Linux than my country.

[rhizome]

Does it make sense that you'd really only need about 300 people, one for every second in 5min? After that, the group can pretty much add squares constantly, one per second. Maybe that wouldn't be fast enough, but it's a good head start on offense, and I'm obvs not accounting for defense.

[rmccoy6435]

Organizing groups of people for something as menial as this isn't a hard task. Many subreddits had a pixel template they posted for the content they wanted that made it to those communities front page, and users generated it. Upkeep after that wasn't much of an issue unless they were being raided.

[the_watcher]

It seems that given the restrictions on how often a single user could actually visibly change the image, coupled with the sheer volume of changes, no, the reverse is almost certainly not true.

[pavel_lishin]

As I understand it, most organizers used bots to help coordinate the process. People who care about politics on Reddit are no less likely to be tech savvy.

[Gaelan]

The image I worked on only got a bot put together mid-day 3. Many factions refused to use bots at all.

[mhermher]

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.

[hueving]

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

[brink]

> It got annoying going to certain subreddits that I subscribe to for content started getting flooded with "Man the decks, we need to defend this!".

To be fair, it is arguable that it deserved attention, as the final picture is now a part of internet history.

[ggggtez]

I don't think that argument is easy to defend, considering how big the internet is and that this is just a copy of existing ideas that have been done before.

[TeMPOraL]

Context matters. This is Reddit, so that particular effort will become a part of remembered Internet history for the next decade or more.

[flying_kangaroo]

On the flip side, however, reddit is (as of today on Alexa) the 4th most visited site in the US. Given that user-base, I think a lot of internet users have noticed this.

[baby]

> It got annoying going to certain subreddits that I subscribe to for content started getting flooded with "Man the decks, we need to defend this!"

that's awesome! The whole thing became a territory war :)

[thesagan]

I, too, thought that was a big part of the fun! I liked the competition of it all. I'm a bit surprised to learn this wasn't a popular sentiment.

[sqeaky]

I go to reddit for two very different reasons. To unwind and just read interesting and unexpected stuff for a bit or to get into thoughtful and interesting debates. If I am in an unwinding mood I wouldn't want to deal with the /r/place debates. If I want to debate it would be awesome.

Then there are people who live their whole lives in places more extreme than either of the moods I described.

[rmccoy6435]

When the stuff was confined to /r/place, I was definitely fine with it. Bus as I said to someone below about /r/2007scape, I go there for OSRS content, not /r/Place content, which is what that subreddit devolved into. There was even a fairly popular thread about getting a filter for /r/Place content. I'm not devaluing the idea of /r/Place content, I just wish it would have been contained elsewhere.

[TheCapn]

Depends on what you get out of Reddit. Are you there for the content aggregation or the communities? I imagine those wanting to enjoy content weren't all that happy with the tangent. We've known for years though that community websites become useless on April Fools anyway.

[thesagan]

For me, it's a bit of both, depending on the community. That's why I like Reddit; the culture is different sub to sub.

[artursapek]

People made attempts to put political messages on the canvas, but with the polarized nature of our two-party political system the two sides basically canceled each other's efforts out. This didn't happen to less controversial imagery, which survived through to the end because half of the user base didn't object to it.

[aryamaan]

And another thing I found quite interesting is that people were able to coordinate with each other to make it something planned.

I was feeling it would turn out to be some chaos because it's so easy to screw it up. ELI5, how people didn't screw it.

[2bitencryption]

> ELI5, how people didn't screw it.

In the beginning there is chaos -- then, through persistence and random chance, SOMEONE's idea gets completed without it getting screwed up. Now there's a clear image that has come out of the chaos.

Whenever someone screws up the image by adding in a "bad" pixel, they need to wait 5-10 minutes to add another. In that time, everyone who can see the image knows that it got screwed up, and they realize the biggest impact they can make is fixing it. "I did it. I fixed the image!" vs "I dropped a random pixel in a sea of blue, accomplishing nothing."

So eventually, out of chaos comes creation, and then when that creation is threatened, the biggest impact an individual can make with their limited resources of pixels is to fix and defend the creations.

[EGreg]

I am interested in this as a microcosm of any shared space or community.

To see how countries form and mutual cooperation strategies take hold.

[Palomides]

an excellent demonstration of the power of tribal icons and memes, which were interesting to observe over the development of the picture. it started with simple place-specific things, like the rainbow, hearts, and color blobs, and then towards pixel art of specific pre-existing communities.

[zouhair]

> The other thing this author tried to make this about was politics.

I don't get this way of thinking. Human are a political beast. Everything we do or say is political.