It is happening! r/place goes out with a bang

rr7@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 1857 points –
166

3 minutes later

Lol

I was against giving them the engagement but this is goooood

The engagement is fleeting but the spoiling of the narrative is forever.

Never forget he accused the Apollo dev of blackmail and doubled-down on the claim even after evidence disproved it.

Pretty sure that’s a crime in most places.

They screwed over so many people. Losing the ability to search your own comment history with Camas / Push Shift screwed me out of archiving some of my older write-ups and valuable conversations.

Admins really took a nose-dive in the last year especially. They royally screwed my account over, blatantly wrongly banning my main account then using that false-ban as justification to permanently-ban me months later.

All the while they uphold objectively-racist comments despite several reports. Fucking weird.

I got temp banned for “report abuse” when I’ve only ever reported anything that clearly broke the sitewide rules. Just assumed it was some kinda mistake. When it happened a 2nd time I decided not to bother anymore. Now I consider my account read-only and if I want to post content I use Lemmy.

After giving the admins (and a bunch of mods) in the ModCoord sub a piece of my mind about the site and what it has turned into, I deleted my ~13 year old account. Nothing against the rules so definitely didn't justify a ban.

Logged in to my NSFW account a few days later to find that account, which I had literally never posted a single comment or post on, was permanently suspended from Reddit as a whole citing "Your accounts are now permanently suspended due to multiple, repeated violations of Reddit's content policy.". Had a look at my deleted account and it has been permanently suspended too, despite no longer existing lol. If I go to the user page of my deleted account it shows the "user is suspended" page, but searching for my username gives no results and if I go to a sub where I know I made a post, the post is there with [deleted] for the username.

So good that not only did they ban my lurking account after I deleted my main, but they also banned my deleted account somehow lol. Definitely didn't rustle an admins jimmies, did I? haha

Same thing happened to me. Admins must have gotten a message to do that or something. First time ever was during the protests.

🙄🙄🙄

Might be worth noting my temp bans were recent too. Also, both times the comments I reported were removed lol. Task failed successfully.

Yup, I've had this one as well. I probably have a 90% hit rate reporting calls for violence, yet apparently that's not precise enough for galaxy brain reddit admins.

You can request your entire data footprint and they have to comply. I got mine a few weeks ago just to inconvenience them.

All the while they uphold objectively-racist comments despite several reports. Fucking weird.

I mentally checked out of reddit when I got a comment deleted and a 3-day sitewide ban for saying:

"It is always OK to punch a Nazi."

It was a literal comment, not figurative, nothing was being compared, etc. Just a straight statement about actual past and present-day Nazis. Ban.

The 3rd-party app fiasco happened a couple of weeks later, and that was the second sign that I needed to GTFO.

My longest temp ban was literally for saying "well I guess the alternative is to kill anyone who disagrees with you."

Using sarcasm to argue against violence is too violent. 14 days, and they overturned the ban on appeal on day 12.

I have reservations on that statement for a few reasons (mainly because I think it makes the nazi problem worse in some respects) but I 100% don't think that deserves a ban and the general gist is fair. Any sort of bigot generally has not received a taste of their own medicine and lacks the empathy to learn form abstraction.

For my case I received a 3-day sitewide ban for saying, "Fun fact: the immune system synthesizes hydrogen peroxide at infection sites which signals a wider immune response," and cited 2 science articles. Cited for harassment... lol??

Later, r/news mods (shady fucks who I suspect are compromised with right-wing extremists) banned me without citing a comment or reason. Eventually I made an alt account months later and got perma-banned for ban-evasion (I didn't try to hide it), and get this, with them citing the previous bullshit suspension as a first-strike which I tried to appeal and they ignored.

Edit: Like the name, by the way. Love Lost Keys / Rosetta Stoned.

The worst thing IMO was making it impossible for blind people to moderate subreddits (like r/blind) and completely ignoring their pleas to make it possible without third-party apps.

I have experienced the exact same thing on several old accounts. One was just completely ghost banned out of the blue. No warning, no temp ban, no suspension notice. The account just ceased to exist one day. It was also my least anonymous work account so I was definitely well behaved on it. I legitimately have no fucking clue what happened.

My oldest account (14 years now) has gotten two temp suspensions completely idiotic reasons, both of which were overturned on appeal, but I assume that still counts as two strikes.

Never forget that Steve Huffman defends and protects Nazis and child abusers. Right wing terrorists radicalized entirely or partially on Reddit have killed dozens of people.

Yeah, now reddit can't really promote the final version of this one

That’s incredibly awesome. What a fantastic way to end it!

Honestly i’m sure this is the best thing that could happen for the reddit execs in terms of user engagement. Writing “fuck spez” on reddit is like shouting “save the planet” from a cruise ship.

I wrote about this elsewhere. Every post about Reddit or place has tons of comments like yours insisting that any engagement is good for Reddit. I disagree.

Reddit want dissenting users to leave! They have no interest in retaining it’s traditional userbase of cynical, lefty, tech-savvy users. They’re incredibly intolerant of advertising and difficult to monetise, and much of the reason why Reddit hasn’t made as much money as some of its competition.

They’d rather we all went elsewhere and left them with doomscrollng cryptobro memelords that don’t care if a post is a corporate shill or not, as long as it’s entertaining.

Sure, not engaging with their site reduced their numbers and thus value. But the number of users on Lemmy is a tiny fraction that I guarantee they’d be happy to lose if it made their userbase more tolerant of corporate bullshittery.

My goal isn’t to knock a fraction off their IPO valuation, it’s to bring other users and communities over to better platforms like this one. Or, perhaps, for Reddit to realise they done fucked up and roll back some of those user-hostile changes. That takes advocacy and reminding people of the failings of the platform’s admins.

This form of protest is valid and I support it.

Yep, whenever I see those type of comments I always think to myself that they're secretly pro-reddit and want to deter us from advertising Lemmy and other alternatives on Reddits BIGGEST attraction and putting the FUCK SPEZ where people WILL see it.

I don't think a foil hat is necessary

They just want people off of reddit. You don't agree with the site, so you stop using it. If enough people do that, they lose money. Sure, there's the argument you are advertising Lemmy to more users but anybody who has been paying attention for the last couple months already knows what Lemmy is.

Either they give a shit and have already switched over or they don't give and won't.

These posts pushing Lemmy are starting to remind me of shitcoin pump and dumps. My opinion is just disconnect from reddit and let Lemmy/kbin grow naturally. As long as it maintains consistent positive growth, it will be a beautiful thing in some years. There's no need to spam reddit.

You don't agree with the site, so you stop using it. If enough people do that, they lose money.

Maybe someone should tell them that's never gonna happen, then? Because a lot of them seem to think the amount of protestors are more than enough to influence reddit traffic. I'm all for boycotting reddit (i was probably here earlier than most rexxitors - this is my 4th account due to looking for a good home instance), but stopping people from protesting is just wrong. Protesting doesn't mean just boycotting.

let Lemmy/kbin grow naturally. As long as it maintains consistent positive growth, it will be a beautiful thing in some years.

As far as the Fediverse is concerned, I agree completely.

There's no need to spam reddit.

There may be no need, but there certainly is a reason in some people's minds.

I mean people can do whatever they want, I don't care. Me personally I had a 14 year old reddit account that I scrubbed clean by editing over the thousands of comments with a script right before the API change date.

And I haven't been back since. I don't agree with reddit, so I'm not going to use reddit.

If people want to go on reddit and protest, go for it why not. I just think it's a meaningless activity. It's owned by a company that couldn't care less about people protesting. The average redditor is also apathetic towards the cause. Reddit is not what it was 10 years ago.

Permission to use this in the future for similar comments. With credit, of course. You explained it better than i ever could.

Quite a lot of people just like scrolling through nonsensical shorts and staged garbage squeezed between sponsored posts and fake game ads. I don't understand it but it's what most people like to do. Look at Facebook, it's still making money. Reddit's doing the same formula. Killing third party apps was just part of penning people in.

How much coordination did this take? You're only able to do a certain about of pixels right? Or did it freefall at the last minute?

i had this question a couple of days ago and today fell totally down the fuck spez rabbithole.

found myself on the main discord where the coordinators were talking to uruguay about doing the "u" after columbia (?) declined. guess hearing that, both uruguay and equador wanted in.

there was discussion of not stepping over the swiss flag in one of the letter because they were part of the coalition.

these folks are dedicated - many commented they hadn't really slept since it went live. kudos to all of them for the passion they showed today.

tbh it was impressive and one of the best executed operations i've seen in a long time. very fun to see up close.

working for a global multinational company i only wish we were this efficient internally ❤️

That's really interesting and very cool. Thanks for the insight

There was clearly a large bot net which started stencilling the outlines of the letters, but then it was magic, everybody understood the assignment. The letters filled out in a handful of minutes. Then, then the whiteout slowed - the apes (mostly) agreed the job was done. It took another half an hour or so for the white fog to finally take hold.

There was no bot net doing the outlines. The r/placeDE Discord prepared an overlay and distributed it to many other large communities and twitch streamers.

At the time or the whiteout the r/placeDE had 6500 active users in the voice chat coordinating to draw the outlines. A German streamer sent his 100k+ viewers to draw the letters. Other big communities also contributed.

Shure some bots might be involved, but there was a tampermonkey overlay which showed where to put the right pixel. Many with this overlay worked ahead and the rest followed. Also some streamers coordinated hundreds of thousands of users.

The gorgeous magic of the internets.

We all want to have an immortal legacy. Any good he's ever done is going to be overshadowed.

You can build 1000 bridges and fuck one clown. You won't be known as a bridge builder but a clown fucker.

Always heard it as goats. There's probably some sexy clowns out there.

I mean, if you view clowns as the opposite alignment of goths, in theory big tiddy clown gfs should be just as viable.

The Ace Attorney community would absolutely agree

Ok given the conversation has to do with sexy clowns and the ace community I have no idea what to expect.

I heard it was ostriches. Allegedly.

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It also successfully distracted the userbase and isolated their protests from the rest of the site.

People make fun of Place but I think they knew exactly what they were doing.

Certainly drove their use statistics up a lot, which helps more than the incendiary messaging hurts them (IMO).

Eh, I think this can work like sponsored messages on YouTube videos: probably not immediately a lot of clicks on the product but over time more and more people recognize it and know what it is. And I like to think that over time Spez will be recognized as the soulless fucker who is hated by the very community he is trying to sell. Reddit lost a lot of charm in the last couple of months, even more than was already lost before and his name is tied to the whole thing. I hope!

Name recognition is a big thing. From now on, anything Spez announces will be dampened slightly simply by the fact that he announced it. Of course, Spez could just run the company without much fuss and stay out of the spotlight but he's too egotistical for that.

Or the opposite. It is a form of bait that increases user engagement and drives up numbers for that IPO.

Especially with the massive number of bots, it helps get user and activity numbers up a lot

They also screwed themselves over by playing the r/place trump card so soon after the last iteration in 2022. Rather than doing it to create a cool event to experience once every few years, they did it to drive engagement on Reddit. That's made people lose interest and even if it's another 5 years before the next one, many of them won't come back. It's a self-acknowledgement that the peak reddit era is finished and wouldn't have happened without the prior backlash against their enshittification. It's the type of thing that sets up the conditions for a death spiral, because they've resorted to tricks to get people to use the site and eventually they'll run out of tricks.

Reddit admins right now

Image

Gaius was the best part of BSG

He was a very good part at least. The whole show was so good without a single bad character I don't think. It's hard to pick a favorite.

If only he had another typist or two, he could have out hacked them.

Well the join lemmy ad made it until the end at least

From day 2 to the very end (0,0). No better advertisement possible. Don't even dare to try to change my mind.

I like how it started with a smaller Fuck Spez until some group clearly went "nah, we need to go bigger"

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Nice and all, but pretty pointless if you stay there after.

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-Dylan Thomas

And spez will always be a hurensohn no matter what.

SPRICH

ICH SPRECHE.

(Im all worried I didn't conjugate that right)

Man I just moved to Germany and the amount I hear "bitte?" because my conjugation and accent. Really proud of myself for managing a meeting setting up my account at the Stadtwerke all in German though.

I've figured out a trick with ein, eine, einen. It's a bit more expensive, but instead of "ein/e/n Bier," I say "zwei Bier." Works every time.

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Based! Hopefully everyone can abandon Reddit soon

Worked for me, quit Reddit and in the lemmyverse now. They did this to themselves.

I wonder what the federated version of r/place would look like. It should not be too hard to create a collaborative pixel board and accept input from anywhere in the fediverse. But we would need to come up with some cool fedi spin. A chessboard, maybe, where every server has a square?

In the future, when the fediverse is more mature, it would be cool to create something.

It should not be too hard to create a collaborative pixel board and accept input from anywhere in the fediverse.

That's a super optimistic viewpoint. Handling that kind of stuff is actually a pretty challenging technical problem. Reddit themselves wrote a nice technical blog post about the how they built r/place and the challenges associated with it. Dealing with synchronization issues across federated instances makes the problem quite a bit more difficult.

Huh, I didn’t know that the code base for r/place was open sourced.

Thanks for the interesting article.

There is no way the fediverse can reimplement r/place feature by feature. A federated Place would have to be different. It could be a month long project ora even permanent one, probably with a slower update rate.

I like the idea of people seeing different things depending on the server they use and who that server federates with or blocks (https://lemmy.world/comment/1749093).

But maybe the fediverse should look for its own thing rather than try to imitate.

The way the Lemmy version of r/place would look like would depend on which other servers your server is federated with. It's a very postmodern approach where there is no single view of the thing for everyone

Every time anything negative towards reddit has gone up on place, mass unattributed changes have happened. I expect the same will happen here.

All the images are so clean. Like if they were all created by well coordinated robots.

They are largely the result of scripts battling other scripts.

I don't think I saw one account that had more than a few karma putting points up on the super clean images. It really was just a bot fest.

Lmao! they thought we can't create art with just white pixels

Lol is this why Reddit has been flaky for the past hour?

Trying to view some posts and get random “community not found” errors or page loading errors.

Thank you to everyone that contributed to this beautiful piece of art🫡

Did r/place always increase the canvas size after a certain amount of time?

I don't remember if it always did every time from the beginning, but it did last time.

fuck them for shadowbanning me, but allowing most bots to roam free.

I can only imagine transitioning from the 2022 whiteout to the 2023 start, and then if r/place happens in 2024, transition from the 2023 whiteout to that.

This is very much a real thing. Hope spez grows a braincell tho, reddit was a fun thing to lurk in.

Waiting to see how they gonna spin it when (if) they make a post about how great r/place was this time around.

Hope spez fades from reddit like his name in this pic

Think about it for a minute, do you really believe it's true? It's just something people say

Man they really showed Spez who is boss by contributing to all the engagement KPIs they’re going to use to position the opening valuation of the IPO. Truly the most epic prank of all!

At least it ruins their ability to advertise with r/place like they wanted to. At this point, making as much of reddit as useless as possible is the last way to make them listen

I mean, all they have to do is take a screenshot / stop timelapses just before the giant fuck spez showed up and they’re golden

And crop out all the other scattered "fuck spez" messages?

Those are a problem sure, but far harder to see then the giant one

The huge one on the right formed literally seconds after the last canvas expansion. Unless they completely get rid of the last day the canvas is going to have a giant "fuck spez" that's probably the biggest text that has ever appeared on place.