By opening up r/place again, they've stolen the magic from it.
The first time it happened, it was amazing and novel.
The second time was an incredible surprise each time the board opened up again. I was involved with the r/Beach House community to put up an homage to our favorite band.
But now... It's become repetitive. It feels like just an attention grab, like a ploy to artificially increase traffic to the site. This time, it looks no different from every other time r/place has taken... place. It's flags everywhere, there's so much anger surrounding it, and it's just not fun.
r/place was special because of its spontaneity. But now it's soulless, like every other corporate-owned internet phenomenon is.
Everything from these big corps have no soul. Because we know it's just about exploiting users for money.
I want the old internet back so bad. Hopefully federation can fuel many new actually fun services that are not built to make money but to actually entertain and amuse people, or simply be useful.
I personally feel pleasure from doing good things in the world. But it seems to be a group of people who doesn't feel it's worth doing something for others unless there is money to be made from it.
I feel bad for every user that hasn't experienced an internet before all of this. Golden years to me, was 1996 ~ 2008. To others, far earlier.
The only thing we had to deal with then, was just popups. Now, it's like every fucking thing imaginable has to be turned into some subscription or retooled to be shareholder friendly. Because that's exactly what everything is gearing towards to appease - these fucking shareholders with stakes. Shareholders, who constitute a band of people who have absolutely no knowledge or fucks given as to what made things as good as they were in past internet. It's all about data farming for money to then market people to shit.
Google had to go and acquire YouTube, things seemed okay in the beginning. Now look at it, fucking bombardment of ads if you aren't using an adblocker. Amazon had to go and acquire Twitch and things seemed okay in the beginning. Now look at it, you're meaning to tell me I have to sit through 8 ads, while you minimize a stream of a channel I'm watching?! AND You're going to make YOUR OWN SUBSCRIPTION WHEN AMAZON PRIME ISN'T ENOUGH?! ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?!
Reddit was great until 2016, it broke itself over politics. Then it broke itself even further by 2020 and now we are where we are with it. Social Media, is running in place. It's about statistics anymore. Has Facebook ever been useful and functional? I'm having a hard time now remembering when the last time it even had real people helping you, because now it's just in some stupid half-ass wiki that doesn't even have all of the answers in it's own ecosystem.
Everyone is too politicized now, almost can't go a damn few comments anymore without someone coming up to you with an emotionally charged reply, that's hiding in the background, the basis of their political stance.
It's pathetic because it's nothing new, it's old code, they just have to run it again to try and distract the users. There's no changes, no creativity, no risk. They're just jangling keys in front of the baby to try and stop it crying
It's now a symbol of how deteriorated Reddit has become. I mean, yeah, you've summarized it perfectly. r/place is now the symbolism of everything wrong with Reddit. It's repetitious, as much as all of the karma farming posts on Reddit have been for years. All the other places had contained a culture snapshot of everything that Reddit brought together.
All that this version of Place has brought, is all of the anguish towards one person and their poor decision making.
I might could live with repetitive if it wasn't for the anger. I've got a 2'x2' print of 2022's canvas sitting next to my desk, and I still get lost in it every now and then. Just another trip exploring a new canvas could be fun.
But then I open the page and 15% of it is just "fuck spez" and everyone is angry. Rightfully so, but... I just don't feel it anymore.
Ehh, flags dominated since the very first r/place.
But yes it's pretty obvious each new edition is ever more astroturfed. The second one had lots of obvious organised bots designing perfect shapes and logos, and moderators' meddling was noticed as well.
It's the ol' Blizzard "Look, we're introducing a new character who might be gay! There's no lore that references it anywhere, we're just tellin' you they're gay or lesbian, aren't we great!" kind of maneuver. Ooh, look at the special thing we're doing, aren't we playful and fun?
For the record, I'm all for inclusiveness, I just use Blizzard as an example since they used to be just so transparent about that before the really dark times.
Yeah, I agree this is most certainly to increase traffic. On the one hand, I like that there are many places on the board where the anti-admin sentiment is very obvious, but it does play into their hands in terms of traffic numbers.
How far back do you think user engagement on r/place will stall reddit failing?
Do you think not using the canvas would cause more harm than their favorite event being covered in language shitting on the CEO and making the pretty canvas not marketable?
Personally, I strongly disagree if you do think so. Even if every Lemmy user drove 0 traffic to reddit, it would change very little of their day to day engagement.
It's important in the long term to move away from reddit and reduce engagement of the site, but the cost benefit ratio of fucking up the marketability of r/place strongly outweighs the effect users would have engaging the site.
Do you think not using the canvas would cause more harm than their favorite event being covered in language shitting on the CEO and making the pretty canvas not marketable?
Not just that. The whole /r/place event has been covered by (tech) news sites every year. This year, it's a much better story than ever before.
I don't expect anything. I don't know how ad execs think and I don't think I want to know. Who the fuck can say if they value traffic or clean language more? What I know is that SEPARATE ENTIRELY, to quote a great thinker of our time, is the best route in terms of personal mental health. Whether reddit fails or continues, I'm doing my best to not give a shit. That includes not interacting with the site, regardless of the reason.
Bad enough that I still find myself with a reddit post being the only place I can find an answer to a problem every once in a while. I don't need to go there voluntarily.
You guys act like an infinitesimally small blip of traffic coming from a relatively niche community will be enough to make reddit successful again. People on /r/place drawing "fuck spez" using 1d old accounts and adblockers are nothing. Ruining this year's /r/place in exchange for a blip of mostly useless traffic is a W imo.
This is true. But if this is this year's Place event, that's a sad turnout, regardless of what's being done there. Nothing like the original, not that anyone expected it would be. Dare to say this will be the last Place on Reddit.
I waited 5 years to participate in the second r/place since hearing about everything that happened in the first one was what brought me into Reddit. Now we're getting a new one already? I feel robbed.
I think it felt fine in 2022, the five year gap was long enough. But this year... it just feels hollow to me. Can't tell if that's from repetition or just me being burnt out on Reddit, or both.
Reddit does not need love, people enjoying it or whatever, they need traffic. Advertisers dont care if you are there just to express how awfull reddit is, they need views.
I would have love to see this shit staying blank.
I think even if users actually abstained, bots would get involved to make place look active. maybe. I don't know how far reddits willing to go to make it seem like they're a good platform
I don't know if the comparison applies here cause whats happening in reddit is a little bit more aggressive, but i have been in another more local based dying internet community (Taringa was pretty popular in latinamerica, 15 years ago or so)... we all knew the moment in which the site died. We expressed ourselves, made jokes about the owners, tried to fight back... nothing changed and people continued to use the site, mostly because we didnt have a replacement for it. At the end it took aprox. 10 years to settle down to the dead site that it is now. Its like a candle, slowly devouring itself to the end. I guess the same will happen with reddit.
I think a lot of reddit users havent even thought about looking for a replacement, they dont know about lemmy and they wouldnt switch either. I may be wrong.
That's been the overwhelming response each time I've seen it brought up. I want to help put little Lemmy symbols or something, but I haven't seen one forming when I've had a chance to check
"Hey, we're still cool. Remember this cool thing we did, look, we're doing it again, aren't we cool". Like that annoying kid in the class who had everybody laugh with one joke 2 years ago, and now he is repeating it time and again in order to get the same laughs.
Except in this case he's after any engagement so hateclicks are as good as loveclicks.
No, the discord’s still around. Just seems there was some trouble setting up in the initial phases i guess? Not participating this year so not keeping up at all.
No, the discord’s still around. Just seems there was some trouble setting up in the initial phases i guess? Not participating this year so not keeping up at all.
Place has always been a bit shit. The first time was interesting and novel because all the factions emerged with different ideologies that actually created personas and identities for themselves, but ever since then it's just been 50/50 nationalism or consumer products. There's so many more interesting things that could be painted and yet half of it will be flags of bourgeoise states.
I don’t understand why r/place is back, 2017 and 22 were very popular. I can only imagine they trying to drive traffic after the exodus. Anybody have insight?
Trying to put a bandaid on a gash, maybe. Also you can only use place on new Reddit or the official app. And you have to verify your email. So they could try to show off to investors that they have this many verified users, or this much increase in users even after the fiasco.
Just stop giving it attention. This is driving traffic and ultimately increases the number of interaction, which is good for reddit. I see people post screenshots of their phones, again driving numbers for the app that they just propped up by killing 3rd party apps.
i entered to see how it was, and it seems that there are only like 8 colors? so it is worse than the last time? like, the trans flag can't be done correctly, and probably the pixel art is going to look much worse. truly enshitification for literally no reason
Call me a conspiracy theorist but the amount and intensity of data they must get out of this is huge. They will know all the accounts that are anti-spez which they can monitor and algorithmically demote (soft censorship).
Reddit, like most captive-tech these days, is shifting to optimizing only for providing endless distraction to the 90% of mindless hoards which are easy to monetize.
I suspect Youtube will be next in line to squeeze the lemon, now that they are trying to block adblockers.
If they haven't figured out which accounts are anti-Spez from their plain text comments I doubt they'll get much extra insight out of pixels on the canvas.
You also give too much credit to what Spez & co. are doing (his little tantrums aside). Reddit has no value as a free platform, which is why they don't care if those values get destroyed. They want to sell the content, get their money and call it a day.
Then Reddit gets fed into a LLM and becomes a sandtrap for the clueless netizens who stumble across it. It will be a bot-filled cesspit within the year after the sale/IPO.
What I dung understand is why they're all trying to become tictok when advertisers are starting to pay less and less for endless-scrolling platforms.
Yeah, people will spend hours zombie-scrolling through 30-second content, but within 2 minutes they've forgotten what they've watched. That makes ads on the platforms worthless.
Youtube is on the way to doing it right. Use the shorts to get people to follow an account and then start watching longer videos.
Yeah I thought ads are worthless too, as everyone I know just blocks them. But that's when I realized the people like us who block ads ARE the 10% they now neglect! the other clueless 90% of masses are the ones they are after. There are so many more of them and they are so much easier to monetize
They gave up on us because we are too smart and they cant squeeze anything out of us.
IMO that's why we have to accept that its time to leave and build our own better internet lol
YouTube is getting a lot worse too, though. It's packed full of gimmicky content creators at this point who just make basically the same video over and over and over again. Sometimes their one point has some value worth considering, but even then much of the time they reduce themselves to a fake brand pandering to some small subsection of users.
Its by design. CEOs are replaceable, the corporation is not. Once all the shit changes are done they'll get rid of Huffman (who will get a fat golden parachute for his hard work) and new CEO will walk back maybe 2 of his changes. Suddenly reddit is loveable again and to say otherwise is asking for too much.
And for estranged reason, the previous CEO will be missed.
This happened to Gaia Online, where they lost their main admin for a good few years. Was remembered for basically just stumbling upon luck which got Gaia Online into it's hottest peak within 2007 through 2010. New CEO comes in, practically decimates the site and it's community with greedy practices. Old admin comes back, is practically worshiped, but really didn't bring the same magic as before. Because again, he just struck luck and we realized that he didn't really have a lot of good answers to bring the site back to shape.
AFAIK Spez is kinda special in that he is one of the creators of Reddit, being there since the very beginning (i think he made the first or second message), so i think unless the rest of the company kicks him out he isn't going anywhere.
Since reddit is like 90% bots these days. Do you think these events are catering to the bots since this event is 100% bots? Do you think the bots are gaining sentience?
Either way, just ignore reddit's attempt to draw people back or seem "cool"
I really want to keep updated on this, bit don't want to visit Reddit at all. Is there a way for me to do it other then relying on some one here posting it?
I'm glad I finally found someone referencing this. It made me so sad to see. I really feel like this wave of anti LGBTQ+ sentiment is spreading and all from a fucking pointless culture war started by absolute morons.
Ironic, by engaging with the website they end up promoting it far more than any "fuck spez" could harm it, assuming that is their intended goal.
I don't like how all of this complex capitalistic greed that can be seen time and time again all got turned into hate for a single person.
I mean, I don't like the guy either, and I don't like the actions of reddit, but boiling it down to one single insult repeated over and over is childish. I'm quite happy that r/save3rdpartyapps has such a big spot, that's a much better avenue for the discussion of this topic
The announcement video shows several dates (starting with April 1), so it seems it just kept getting pushed back until they just said, "f it, we'll just do it now."
I don't think they care about what goes onto the canvas as much as they care about the increased traffic this brings. How many reddit refugees are going back just to vandalize /r/place? Even if that demographic is relatively small, this still drives up engagement from all demographics, and the greedy little pig boi needs those numbers for his IPO. I'm guessing he's going with "any publicity is good publicity".
I get a lot of pleasure, even laughing by myself hysterically, when I help "Deep Rock" become "Deer Cock", when I help make "Connecting" into "Cumnecting", and when with one little pixel I make "Factorio" into a slur...
I printed off a large 18x18 inch vinyl decal of last years /r/Place and put it on my fridge. I love looking at it every time I am cooking, because I see something new every time.
Can't wait to print this years off and stick it blow.
Pretty sure there is a self hosted version already. Seen a couple of Twitch streamers use it so I see no reason an instance couldn't run one with lemmy logins.
Yes, most of the top art is maintained with bots. I spent a ridiculous amount of time proving it last time. They log in 20-2,000 no comment no karma bots and tab through them to fill a single space with a single color. Connect a few of these in a network and boom. Whatever you like.
Given how Reddit admins have been cheating at r/place for years I think that was a given before it even opened. But they made their bed, let them lie in it. Also, constant paid eyes on every part of the canvas costs Reddit money and time, which is even better.
So if this means Reddit admins now have to work even harder because spez can't take the blowback when he goes out of his way to fuck up people's online communities, and repeatedly silenced Redditors have now seized upon this opportunity to paint countless iterations of fuck u/spez across his please-don't-leave-me canvas with his admins unable to keep up with the censoring, I can't see how that's a bad thing. Protesters leading the whole gang on a merry chase back and forth across the whole canvas until Reddit mercifully puts an end to its own public bollocking is a worthwhile endeavor, I think.
TL;DR: Censorship in this case is both expected and good. Also, the French guillotine and the German hurensohn are just delightful. -chef's kiss-
you can filter wors on apps like connect. I vote for filtering out the word reddit. People are still holding into it even when they are here on lemmy. such a shame. they played into the hands of reddit again. they gave them traffic which they could show to shareholders.
People in the Reddit top decided that they would run places again off-schedule. Best guess is someone thought that it would be good marketing for the coming IPO to show that Reddit is still functional with lively communities.
Any idiot could have seen what would actually happen coming a mile away. The only people who participated in r/place before are people who are now completely anti-reddit at the most and royally pissed at the admins at the least.
The bell weather was that Spez couldn't stay positive in that ama. Even with manipulation, they can't beat the overwhelming number of users. It's astounding they thought different here.
I'm only going there to help out fellow bronies (the MLP sub is going strong with their pixelart, but they did lock new posts until r/Place is over), and to see the protest art.
I used Boost until Reddit shut it down, and I must say, that has not been my experience.
Reddit is a shell of what it was before. /r/All and /r/Popular showed absolutely nothing. The most random subreddits would pop up, and have like 200 upvotes. The front page was so boring and blank.
When subs started coming back, they limited posts, so you'd get like 1 post per day instead of 50-100. Some subs turned into posting memes only, or pics of only one thing/person.
Reddit was absolutely harmed in this. I was already preparing to leave, but Reddit actually became really boring and useless that last month to the point where I rarely opened the app.