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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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:
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't doubt it, but the claim I responded to was that we get "heavily upvoted posts here advocating all sorts of nonsense proven to kill millions". Key word being here.
Some of the mismanagement however was intentional (for example in Ukraine) and/or enforced to a criminal extent (thinking of China here). People died of starvation because their harvest was taken away in its entirety.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> "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.
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.
>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.
Those numbers are not my opinion on anything in particular. It's a loose representation of how they were describing the groups. eropple said one in a few thousand were innocent, while Karunamon was describing a minority of the group as racist/terrorist.
There's a big difference between "almost all of this group is terrible, you are enabling them and should be painted with the same brush" and "a tiny fraction of this group is terrible, you are enabling them and should be painted with the same brush".
It's a fully general statement, not about particular groups.
Fair enough. I would definitely agree that there's a difference depending on what portion of the group has the behaviour in question. Thanks for clarifying.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can also be forced to become political - if someone tried to make it illegal to show off old hardware for instance. It's why the NRA is a political group, as are most LGBT groups.
> My meetup dedicated to showing off old hardware is not political.
Can you be absolutely sure? How do you decide who shows and tells today? Who is the meetup "leader", and how did they get that position? What do you do about that old software meetup that always meets across the hall from you at the same time and steals your donuts and coffee? Almost anything groups of people do entails politics, without necessarily even going to the obvious case of forcible taxes.
Besides we were talking about staking out pixels on a limited canvas, which is a zero sum game, involves other groups and the need to consolidate efforts, a decidedly political affair.
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!
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's worth nothing that the admins did actively ban users trying to make swastikas. /b/ tried and found that out the hard way. Reddit's content policy[1] was still applicable and was very much enforced.
When are we going to see this beautiful sign back in our culture as a positive symbol :( that and the Hitler mustache. I'm guessing we need a few hundred years before we can use these things without it being associated to Nazism.
To be fair, Michael Jordan spent a few years trying to rehabilitate the Hitler mustache in his Hanes ads. The problem is that Hitler's become so associated with it that it's now broadly known as the Hitler mustache (as opposed to the toothbrush mustache - thanks DanBC!), which makes it pretty hard to dissociate it with the man for most people.
a black person with a Hitler moustache is not remotely nearly as bad. they really don't look like Hitler, and it's very unlikely they are secretly hoping for the supremacy of the Aryan race
Lots of people notices the commercial and when he would sport it around Charlotte. ESPN even mentioned it, and IIRC he cut it because of the negative attention it was getting. I could be wrong about the last point.
With that said, when I saw it on an NBA game before the commercials aired I was like 'Hey! Look! Jordan has a Hitler stache, wth?' To which my friend responded 'he needs a new PR person'
>I'm guessing we need a few hundred years before we can use these things without it being associated to Nazism.
Imho this has more to do with a lack of knowledge among the general (western) populations which mostly only know the symbol from the Nazis. But not all swastika are same as there are quite a few differences in orientation and details between the Nazi Swastika and the actual Hindu/Buddhist symbols.
> But not all swastika are same as there are quite a few differences in orientation and details between the Nazi Swastika and the actual Hindu/Buddhist symbols.
The only difference I have seen between the nazi swastika and the Hindu one is that the nazi one is at an angle.
Swastikas are an ancient symbol of many religions and cultures across the world, and is usually a symbol of sacredness, good, luck, god, and other such meanings. In fact, the name itself comes from a sanskrit word. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika#Hinduism
You'll see it in much stonework on their temples and other buildings, especially as it does not have the associated stigma in Asia as it does in the West.
The swastika predated the Nazi party and Hitler by several millennia, and is still an important part of several religions and cultures. Wishing for the swastika to become un-stigmatized isn't really so controversial from that perspective.
My initial instinct was to down vote you, because (as we've discussed) Swastikas are synonymous with Nazism to many people, but on second reading it didn't seem like you were actually supporting Nazis so I decided I would ask. I also thought others might down vote you like I almost did.
I know I could have done a Google search and figured it out on my own, but if we're not allowed to ask questions which are already answered somewhere on the internet then I guess we wouldn't be asking very many questions.
Because it's a symbol that existed before they did. Why should they have the ability to wipe the symbol out of use just because they used it for bad things?
Variations of the swastika have been used in many cultures around the world, from the Far East to ancient Europe. The Nazis took it from the latter source, though it shows up in many Indian and East Asian religious contexts.
Yes! Let's prevent them from expressing themselves so they will never debate their ideas and never realize they might be wrong. Let's ostracize them until they have no choice but fester their frustration, hidden from the rest of world. Let's make those ideas illegal so that any of our parents, sibling and children, if they ever entertain them, will keep it their most sacred secret, protected from scrutiny.
All that, in the name of some people not wanting to be offended.
Yes, the horrible life of the persecuted right wing racists. We MUST let them spew any racist garbage they wish at all times on any platform, otherwise they will throw a hissy fit and vote for Trump again. It's very important we let ourselves be held hostage to that idea. We need to constantly consider the feelings of the persecuted few outspoken racist conservatives. Can you imagine their plight and how bad they have it? They only control every branch of the united states government. Well, they don't control the judicial branch... yet.
I agree about the backlash, just not the mean. Banishment and censorship is 1) a very harsh punishment for what is basically wrong think, 2) doesn't actually fix the problem, it just moves it to a darker place.
There was some NSFW stuff early on. There was a communist flag on the left side, under which was the statement "bash the fash." He-Man had a rainbow in his mouth like he was giving it a blowjob for the longest time, and all the nsfw stuff suddenly disappeared at the end. I highly suspect that moderators and bots took over by the end and made it come together, and I bet it was a PR move to amplify a sense of community.
Bots definitely did take over, and it's how communities left their images so preserved. A lot of subreddits had scripts they gave out to users to just run in the tab. I think this kind of ruined the joy of logging in after a few hours of being gone and seeing something completely different in an area.
Of the three, the swastika internationally is the most problematic symbol as far as international law goes. It is banned outright except for narrow historical exceptions in several Western countries (eg France and Germany). Other countries may not have banned the symbol per se, but they may have "hate speech" type laws, and a swastikas used for this purpose may also fall afoul of that.
The hammer and sickle is more comparable; it is indeed banned in a few (mostly post-Soviet) countries. But I've never heard of the hammer and sickle running into the same problems regarding hate speech laws, which was probably Reddit's focus here.
Though politics are involved, the LGBT flag represents identity and is not very comparable to major political movements with dodgy human rights records, or a symbol with a history of being behind "hate speech".
Yes, it should be clarified we are talking about the Nazi swastika.
Unfortunately in the West, the Nazi use of the swastika dominates the public perception of the symbol. (This is very unfortunate given the long historical tradition of the swastika in Asia and other cultures.)
As far as I'm aware, legally, context matters significantly in places where the symbol is banned; eg the Nazi swastika is outlawed in Germany because it represents a banned political ideology, whereas a Hindu swastika is not.
If that's the case, I have to say that for the political views of many people, an LGBT flag is as disrespectful or dangerous to society as a swastika can be to any individual or group. Being unable to see that just proves further that reddit admins are biased.
I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything; everybody has their own views and trying to change them over the internet is a waste of time. So this off-topic for me ends here.
I'm glad you brought it back to my original point so I didn't have to:
> are you actually comparing Nazi symbolism to the LGBT flag?
Again, you're comparing a symbol for a culture/organization that committed _genocide_, to the symbol of a group that was a victim of that genocide. Then you have the audacity to say they could be similarly offensive?
While some users might feel that way, I'm not sure how an image (which is a collection of pixels on a screen that has many different historical interpretations) would threaten, harass or bully someone. Or incite it.
Of course, these days ad networks are hyper-sensitive about this topic, so from an advertising perspective it does make sense.
I don't want to assume you lack a connection to swastikas used as they were during the Holocaust.
For me personally, my grandfather and his family were persecuted along with other family members and friends. My grandfather was even beaten by Hitler Youth, among experiencing other horrible events (Kristallnacht in particular). I wish it weren't the case but the symbol is strongly associated with the feelings from this era of time.
So yes, an image (which is a collection of pixels on a screen) does feel bullying to me. Maybe it's not active bullying where someone is specifically setting out to piss me off/scare me/whatever, but it's most certainly passive bullying because unfortunately there are people who still feel very strongly about it and its use in one of the most horrible eras of history.
While I do empathise with you (my family wasn't under fascist rule, they were under communist rule), I disagree with your way of approaching the issue.
In my mind, the best way of ridding ourselves of the mistakes of the past is to stop holding their symbolism as something that should be banned. It's the same with offensive words -- by keeping them as "things you should never say" you're effectively giving them power which goes against your wishes to eradicate the power they once had.
Do you think that Hitler (or Stalin, Tito, Mao, Pot) would prefer that you made fun of them and lightheartedly used the symbolism they held dear or that you feared them after the deaths of their regimes?
All of that being said, I completely understand why you would feel the way you do.
My grandparents lived in Europe during World War II and were also negatively affected by the Nazis.
While it's normal to find display of Nazi symbology distasteful, considering it bullying or taking personal offense is really not reasonable, unless it's done as an attempt to embarrass/mock you, personally.
Bullying is absolutely the wrong word for people who are going about their business without specific negative intent.
Like others, I hope that the swastika loses its strong association with Nazism. That's not going to happen if we continue to freak out and cry about our hurt feelings every time one is displayed.
Why is it so important to accommodate trolls and nazis? If a stranger in my house at a party drew a swastika on my wall, I'm kicking him out. If someone on my website did the same, I would also remove him. It's not me getting offended, it's just curation of the community.
If someone doesn't want to follow the social norms of the community they're in, fine, but they'll pay the consequences. They can form their own community if they want.
I don't want to accommodate trolls and nazis, I don't really care about their agenda and would probably delete such a comment if it was posted in my blog.
The only thing I take offense to is the victimizing language of "bullying" being used here. Putting up free speech online, if it's not targeted to specific people, chronic, and abusive, is not "bullying". It's just in poor taste or offensive. If you own a space online and want to remove distasteful or offensive material, that's completely your right. But don't frame it as bullying, or any sort of persecution.
It's provocative - it taunts free society and those who suffered for its sake, for a cause that our society has nearly unanimously condemned. It's overtly disrespectful and intended to cause distress or annoyance. Some would define that as bullying and some wouldn't; either way, I wouldn't care to accommodate those people on my sites.
If someone wants to defend a controversial view, they need to learn how to effectively communicate it, rather than expect others to graciously welcome it. Let the idea's merits be its own defense. If it's only defense is, "well at least it's not technically illegal to say", then maybe it wasn't worth saying in the first place.
>If a stranger in my house at a party drew a swastika on my wall, I'm kicking him out. //
So you say "draw what you like on the walls" and then punish a follow of Vishnu because you associate the symbol differently to them. Don't invite strangers to draw stuff on your walls then?
>If someone doesn't want to follow the social norms of the community they're in //
Such as free speech. Don't give people freedom of speech and then chastise them for speaking freely. If they act immorally, or unethically, or illegally, sure ... but don't punish people for art alone.
Context is important. Communication is as much about interpretation as intent. If you draw a swastika in an environment where a swastika represents nazis, without taking the care to establish the context in which you would not be misrepresented, then sorry, I'm erasing it. 99.999% of the time an unadorned swastika is drawn anonymously in public in a Western environment, it's not the religious kind. So save it for a situation where the meaning is clear.
I didn't give anyone freedom of speech. If someone calls me racial slurs in my house, I'm kicking them out. Freedom of speech is for the courts, not for curating the communities I want to be in.
>99.999% of the time an unadorned swastika is drawn anonymously in public in a Western environment, it's not the religious kind.
Ok, so drawing it is an act of rebellion that tells us something about people, in a piece of public, open, collaborative art that's a good thing.
I want to hear opposing views to my own, if someone sincerely rallies behind a swastika/flag/emblem i want to see, learn why, not usher them away. Reddit has much more abhorrent content than a simple emblem.
You're of course right, you don't have to give free speech. But it helps to do so occasionally especially when the medium prevents any actual harm coming from it.
Nazis had their moment; we as a civilization already "rebutted" their arguments and decided their worldview is incompatible with ours. If they think they have a better case now, they better present it more eloquently than with provocative symbols.
If someone is wrong a 100 times, why listen to them the 101st time? Also, if their first 50 arguments involved massacring millions, why should we entertain _any_ future argument of theirs? In fact, perhaps entertaining the first 50 ones is what lead to such violence. If we give unlimited room to violent ideas, how can we be surprised when violence takes form?
Why give speech to those whose goal is to deny speech and life itself? I would argue that giving free speech to ideas that goes against the principles of a free society is not only a huge waste of time, but a big danger.
That's why I separated the kind of bullying it is.
Maybe I didn't explain my thought-process very well, but the idea is it may have not been directed specifically to bully, but by making statements, like "you're taking offense to pixels", there is an unintentional/passive form of bullying going on. It gives off the feeling of "well not everybody feels this way so it's just you and you shouldn't really be feeling this anymore or at all". Not everybody can just shut off feelings like that or desensitize themselves from a symbol. Plain and simple. It's just not that easy.
IMO bullying can also make someone feel uncomfortable; not necessarily in a threatening sense, but in a way where the person just doesn't feel right, like they don't fit in properly- the bullying makes them stand out and not in a 'good' way.
Somebody who does not even know you exist, puts up a drawing which they have no idea whether you will see or not, for their own purposes which you have no way of knowing, and you happen to come across it and feel bad. I think it's not fair to the word "bullying" to use it in this context.
There's a point where the word is no longer appropriate--I think "passive" bullying is an oxymoron. A bully is someone who targets someone else, and makes that person feel bad by repeatedly abusing them verbally and physically. This is a very bad thing, which is why the word is powerful, but it's very different from words like "offensive", which is more in line with what you mean. You are made uncomfortable by it, the poster likely has no intention whatsoever toward you.
The symbols, especially in this particular context, are put up as representations of the communities (and their ideals) that put them there.
What community does the swastika represent and what are their ideals?
The 'passive' bullying is done by displaying the symbol in a public space to 'bully' those who recognize it as a message that they are not welcome and not wanted in that space.
> The 'passive' bullying is done by displaying the symbol in a public space to 'bully' those who recognize it as a message that they are not welcome and not wanted in that space.
I just don't buy this part. How do you know this is the intention? I'm assuming that it's just a picture of a swastika, not a targeted message of hate. How can you be so sure that they are out to send you this message? Are we in the realm of thought crime?
The very idea of bullying to me is a protracted, targeted, abusive thing. It does the kids who go through true bullying every day injustice to say that one off, untargeted, pixel art is in any way, shape, or form, bullying. It can be highly offensive, disgusting, and discomforting, or it can be artistic, clever, funny, and thought provoking--you'll never know if you sensor the speech by calling it "bullying".
It is protracted because it happens almost everywhere on the internet (at least where people are pseudo-anonymous).
Bullying doesn't have to be targeted. A student who constantly walks around school halls indiscriminately slamming shut open lockers and pushing people out of their way would surely be labeled a bully.
It's abusive because of the context.
I fully agree that representations of hate presented in an artistic, clever, funny, or thought provoking way should not be stifled because their place in the conversation around preventing hate and evil is important.
But I think it's a long stretch to call the swastikas in /r/Place artistic, clever, funny, or thought provoking.
A sibling comment mentions: >Honestly, in this case it was probably mostly representing rebellious teenagers who love to offend the easily offended, not nazis or nazi symphatizers.
A very simple way to send the message that their "one off, untargeted, pixel art" of a symbol commonly described as "highly offensive, disgusting, and discomforting" is not "artistic, clever, funny, and thought provoking" is to have it removed.
Out of interest, what is your opinion about jokes related to Nazis? Are skits that have a swastika in them bad because they have a swastika in them? If someone says something that is clearly a white supremacist ideal, but doesn't use a swastika, does that make their message any less bad?
From my experience "symbol X is offensive" doesn't actually help distinguish between malicious and non-malicious people because the thing that makes someone malicious is their actions and views, not the iconography they use to express said actions and views.
>From my experience "symbol X is offensive" doesn't actually help distinguish between malicious and non-malicious people because the thing that makes someone malicious is their actions and views, not the iconography they use to express said actions and views.
I completely agree with this.
I think most content creators make a conscious effort to make their intent known through the work.
For Example, movies like "Inglourious Basterds" or "Downfall" are clearly using Nazi iconography to build the aesthetic of their world without suggesting they support the ideals of the real-world Nazis.
Perhaps a more poignant current example is youtube personality JonTron. The basic gist as I understand it is: He occasionally makes off-color or insensitive jokes that could easily be considered offensive but are generally regarded as OK because the intent is understood to be a place of comedy. Now after defending some racist remarks, his past statements are seen in a new light that makes their original intent less clear.
I do think it's something important to discuss and we clearly can't have a discussion if what we want to talk about is a banned taboo. But I also think it's clearly wrong to treat any hate-speech/iconography as if somehow doesn't have all that extra cultural baggage.
> Perhaps a more poignant current example is youtube personality JonTron. [...]
I think it's at the very least disingenuous to claim that his recent remarks are racist (the more we use that word, the more watered down it becomes). And it's also sad that people assume that your politics cannot change either.
My reading of the situation is that he was just doing a thought-experiment and asking why multiculturalism is only an issue in the western world. It's true that he appears to be more right-leaning than other people in the skeptic "community" but that view is not racist. It's just a question. When he went on to "debate" someone else, it's quite clear that he hasn't debated this topic before and it's quite clear that he probably hasn't heard any of the counter-arguments to his points before (because he hasn't argued them before). Would he change his mind if he had heard those counter arguments? Would he refine his opinions? Maybe, but calling him a racist doesn't help anyone. I would've assumed people learned that with all of the recent political events (Brexit, Trump, everything that's happening in Europe), they'd realise that calling everyone a misogynist/racist/Nazi doesn't actually help...
> But I also think it's clearly wrong to treat any hate-speech/iconography as if somehow doesn't have all that extra cultural baggage.
Right, but "cultural baggage" doesn't appear to me to be a justification for wanting such things banned or not allowed. I find some of 4chan's trolling distasteful and I probably wouldn't have done what they did, but I would never say they shouldn't be allowed to do what they do (not the least of all because I find some of their trolling quite funny).
The basic point I'm trying to make is that it really depends on intent and that intent can be difficult to accurately determine.
I agree that a zero-tolerance total ban is not right and not justified. Because intelligent respectful conversation is the only way to "unpack" that "cultural baggage".
The problem is, when that conversation isn't clearly respectful and intelligent it just isn't helping and only adds noise. It is to our benefit overall to filter out that noise.
> What community does the swastika represent and what are their ideals?
Honestly, in this case it was probably mostly representing rebellious teenagers who love to offend the easily offended, not nazis or nazi symphatizers.
It's not the equivalent of being a nazi and I don't think anyone's perception was "We have to ban these literally goose stepping nazi's from our reddit website"
The just saw exactly what you described. Edgy trolls posting nazi stuff.
> I don't think anyone's perception was "We have to ban these literally goose stepping nazi's from our reddit website"
You might say that, but for some reason a lot of people appear to believe that pepe and milk are symbols of white supremacy and that YouTubers making edgy jokes are suddenly literal Nazis. Actual mainstream publications are publishing this crap.
The same argument could be made against almost any national flag. It represents a force who committed acts against my ancestors that I find deplorable. [Fake example:] Like, USA revolutionaries murdered my ancestors. Or, USA soldiers tortured my family members during the Gulf War.
Obviously the degree is different, so perhaps a Chinese flag for Tibetans, or a Turkish Flag for Armenians [estimates suggest 1.5Million murdered 100years ago], or ...
USA, where I assume the controlling decisions for Reddit are made, is known for "freedom of speech" which makes this sort of control of speech stand out more starkly.
How do you differentiate the supposed support for one set of actions with the apparent support for another equally vile set of actions in such cases. Clearly you can go personal in the analysis, but what about when your personal analysis conflicts with millions of others?
Might have more to do with criminal liability due to certain countries straight up banning the symbol, like Germany [0]. In addition to that, the German law does hold operators of websites liable for any law-breaking comments/posts/whatever made by users of the site [1].
If somebody spreads something illegal on your comments/forums/whatever, and you fail to delete it, the German state will hold you, as the operator of said site, responsible and not the person who actually posted that stuff.
Re-worded: While some users might feel that way, I'm not sure how a slogan (which is a collection of pixels on a screen that has many different historical interpretations) would threaten, harass, or bully someone.
We have to accept that the things we do online can have real-world repercussions, even if they're just pixels on a screen.
Interesting. Where there actually any real instances of the admins needing to step in like that?
I saw some posts early on on the subreddit where a lot of people collectively resolved to erase swastikas on sight, so I just kinda assumed that was the reason why symbols like that never stayed up for long.
I wonder how they decided who was a willing participant. If I was a troll, I would try to create one with as many 'innocent' pixels as possible and get people banned for placing pixels they didn't know would become a swastika.
If it's anything it would be the moderators of r/Place. The admin's job is more of administration level (sitewide), and it's more of picking up where the mod privileges end.
Right, but theres a difference between a suspension/sidewide ban and a ban in a sub. One can be done by the admins while the other is done by the mods on a subreddit level.
Reddit is provided by the owners to people in Germany, say. You can't ship goods/services to Germany bearing swastikas, AIUI, under their law. If Reddit sell to Germany (eg Reddit Gold) then they likely broke the law. /IANAL
The only sub that returns a 421 ("Unavailable For Legal Reasons") here in Germany is r/watchpeopledie, as can be seen in Reddit's latest transparency report.
Reddit's AF this year was excellent, probably my favourite AF experiment of all time.
I usually really dislike AF on the internet - some (most) sites become completely unusable for a day and, last thing the internet needs, it gets even harder to tell real news from the fake bits. (Did you know Takei is running for 2018 congress? That was true! Actually it wasn't. But it was! Well, no, it wasn't.)
But I'm really fond of how Reddit always handled it: A day for creativity and experimentation. The Place is a really, really beautiful experiment and the result of it surpassed expectations.
I absolutely love AF on the internet. Yes, there will always be sites that produce low effort, boring and annoying content, but when isn't that true? On the other hand, you have plenty of companies and sites that produce genuinely funny and well thought out content.
Reddit has consistently been the best for the past few years. Google, Blizzard, Razer and a few other companies always produce a couple good videos too. I definitely agree with you though that creativity and experimentation is far more interesting than cheap little tricks.
Early in the history of the Internet, some high school kid set up a web page with a 1000x1000 image and a limited color palette. He sold individual pixels, plus a link from that pixel to anywhere, for $1. Yup, he sold them all in fairly short order.
The sad thing is none of those logos and links have any meaning any more, almost all of them go to 404s, domain parked pages, or completely unrelated sites, and even when they were new they went to scummy ecommerce or porn sites. In 12 years, the imagery on /r/place will still hold meaning and the timelapses will still tell a pretty cool story.
It's like an old photograph of Times Square, where most businesses shown are long defunct and many were of dubious character. Nonetheless, it still holds meaning and tells a pretty cool story.
The reddit experiment is way more interesting. Everything on million dollar homepage is trashy ads for very shady websites. /r/Place is populated by fan communities and jokes and memes. I set it as my desktop background and still keep finding interesting things in it.
It was a seriously cool experiment. Factions rose and fell, alliances were forged, battles waged, "rules of war" developed. It was amazing.
But I don't think there's much to be gained from pontificating about it as a model for preventing hate speech.
For one, it was moderated. The slow speed of creating things just meant it was easier on moderators.
Secondly, the main thing that made it mostly pleasant was that only very widespread ideas could flourish. Minority ideas, whether good or bad, could not (even the art from small communities was only allowed to exist via alliances with larger communities that could easily destroy their art). This means things were mostly unobjectionable, but it also limits creativity. Do you really want that to be your model of public conversation? Things can only be published if 1000 people all try to publish the same thing and work to maintain it?
This would just be pushing filter bubbles to the extreme and driving resentment underground where nobody would notice it until it bubbled over. Then people would be like "whoa, where'd all the hate speech come from?", when it was there all along but not the dominant voice. And they would be making poor decisions regarding their own political strategy, because they mistakenly believed that they had won a battle that they had not.
All a model like that would do would be to amplify the status quo, whether good or bad. Just because your political faction happens to be dominant in certain circles doesn't mean you should adopt policies that always benefit the dominant political faction. Especially when your faction is all about protecting minorities. A status-quo-favouring policy would be terrible for minorities that do not already carry favour with the larger population.
When you think about whether a policy for shaping public conversation is a good idea long-term or not, consider whether it would be a good idea say, in Russia today. LGBT people in Russia are oppressed and do not hold favour with any larger political faction. "Majority gets to censor the minority" is a terrible policy in almost all cases, and people at present only don't realise this because they are in the historically improbable situation of the people with the power to censor also being the ones who favour minority voices. This is historically rare, and your policies should not rely on it being the case.
>Minority ideas, whether good or bad, could not (even the art from small communities was only allowed to exist via alliances with larger communities that could easily destroy their art)
I'd disagree. /r/wales and /r/faroeislands have less than 7k subscribers between us. We had no bots, just a few people in a Discord channel.
Sure but the heart was there at the pleasure of the heart people, and the dragon beneath the UK flag at the pleasure of the UK people. If either of them wasn't cool with wales, they could have gotten rid of them (I'm not sure about the other one but I suspect there were conversations and agreements with surrounding art not to expand into each others' territories).
Other, larger groups that did not have alliances with others failed to gain traction - Trump fans failed to draw Trump even though there are more of them than welsh people. Their numbers were large, but they did not have the favour of the majority.
The OSU people, though nobody had an opinion on them beforehand, did a poor job of diplomacy, and as a result really struggled to stay on the canvas.
It was about who was in the good books of the larger factions more than anything else. If rainbowroad or the germans liked you, you were golden. If OSU liked you, well, that wasn't worth much.
All the stuff in the image was by us, and we fought and won for the space.
Wales is fundamentally part of the UK, and I would assume the Welsh we were represented within the /r/unitedkingdom place team. We certainly are in the subreddit. That was more /r/unitedkingdom but /r/wales did some defence of it.
As for the heart in placehearts, that was r/placehearts and their allies more than us. (The Wales/Faroe Islands heart in the image was all us.)
I would speculate T_D failed in large part because they attacked areas that were defended by bots, they (correctly) prioritized the flag, and trolling others.
I'm sure it didn't help that they've antagonized the entire Reddit community with their shitty lack of reddiquette in general since their inception.
I'd go further and suggest a lot of their members were lost to the Void, which I'd cynically suggest overlaps significantly.
A difference though is that the time limit between pixel placing introduced opportunity cost and provided a means of testing strength of preference.
People were forced to make trade-offs between creating the things they wanted to see and censoring the things they didn't want to see, and could not do both simultaneously. This is unlike political systems in which people can vote on a referendum on gay marriage and zoning laws on the same ballot (or US congressmen voting on multiple laws in one session).
Of course there are still elements of this in politics when it comes to enacting complex legislation (can't do healthcare and tax reform at the same time) but that that has more to do with the time and political capital trade-offs it takes to build coalitions which can then act unilaterally, while in reddit the cost is downstream, as coalitions must divide their power if they want to pursue simultaneous goals.
Also, the time limit measured takes into account strength of preference since the ability of an individual to affect the outcome of the canvas depends on how much time they're willing to devote to their effort. Consider the example of LGBT laws. Those who are LGBT tend to have much stronger preferences regarding such laws compared to the general population who may be for or against them (though some on the religious right probably feel very strongly as well). In politics, this can lead to persecution, as a majority of people that don't care strongly but vote no can hold back those who care strongly and vote yes. On the reddit platform, since people with greater conviction are likely to devote more time than those who do not care strongly, it makes it more likely for them to get their message out.
You can kill 2 birds with one stone by placing what you want to see over what you want to sensor. But yeah, if you want to sensor many different places, there is an opportunity cost there.
As for your second point, I'd argue that any variance b/w individuals wasn't that much. Much more effective than staying online for an hour and getting a few more pixels in, is propagandizing to a subreddit of 10,000 people and getting each of them to drop one pixel. Those who got their voices heard were not those staying up 24 hrs placing dots, it was those who wrote calls to arms on subreddits and mobilized others.
> This would just be pushing filter bubbles to the extreme and driving resentment underground where nobody would notice it until it bubbled over. Then people would be like "whoa, where'd all the hate speech come from?", when it was there all along but not the dominant voice. And they would be making poor decisions regarding their own political strategy, because they mistakenly believed that they had won a battle that they had not.
Doesn't this describe the recent presidential election?
I love those kind of "get together and improvise" experiments. The last time I had felt such a sense of wonder and community was the first few days of Pokemon Go when everyone was in the street trying to figure it out.
There's an untapped concept behind all of those. Content that is ephemeral but brings a lot of people together...
I guess that's what a lot of Alternate Reality Games try and tap into - the shared joy of figuring out something interesting and strange, sometimes with ties to the real world. I remember reading about the I Love Bees ARG, with its GPS coordinates for payphones (which turned out to be a promo for Halo 2!) and wishing I'd been able to be a part of it:
That's what /r/place was like in the first few hours, where people saw a pattern and just laid their pixel down to continue it, which is how you got things like a blue line (accelerating as time went on) and the blue corner. You as a contributor don't know what you're building, but as a group you build something.
Later as communities started planning and running scripts, it became much less "improv"-y.
I can't think of many examples, but I do like these sort of projects - Twitch Plays Pokémon comes to mind. Interesting how an entire subculture can develop: inside jokes, wars, and more. It's amazing because it's a microculture, but it develops far faster than any "regular" culture would.
Yep. Though it feels a bit strange to be reading a Forbes article about it. Seems more like the kind of thing you'd read about on Know Your Meme: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/bob-ross
Although I don't see it as much here on HN, but in real life and in other areas. I have seen some criticism that many felt it hard to believe that people could collaborate on this so well and they believe it was almost entirely bot driven or somehow belitte the effort. While I know towards the very end there were a growing number of bots and scripts that did start taking hold more.
Anyone who was part of it, even more so if they were engaged in discord or other more active channels than just subreddits, easily saw the hundreds of people collaborating, community, alliances, discussing ideas, and more. All of this together helped make it what it was.
I truly believe it was mostly done as a direct result of a lot of peoples' hard work and persistence. I participated in some large pieces; as well as helped promote/start a very small piece myself. All of it came together quite beautifully.
This experiment reminds me of an old website where visitors only had so much paint (and it would slowly regenerate over time), and would paint portions of a common canvas. I can't remember the name of the site, but I think it was active in the mid 2000's.
Of course, at times 4chan would invade, but I think it was mostly eastern europeans present (as once again flags were the big thing to paint everywhere).
Hm. I agree the original title from the article was clickbait, but ... could it perhaps be titled something that emphasizes the cooperative nature? It's not really an April Fools' gag as much as a social experiment.
Reddit's April Fools projects [1] have been social experiments for a few years now, and I really appreciate their willingness to actually build the kinds of interesting ideas which you can really only accomplish with such a large and engaged userbase. /r/thebutton was a lot of fun two years ago, and while I never really used /r/robin, I thought the concept was brilliant.
And only the most recent, large scale, implementation of the concept. I recall these pixel wars pages being popular in the early 2000s. Back then you made perl scripts to automate it. Now they (r/place teams) use python. Not much has changed.
And I don't know if the author of the ars piece was just ignoring them or not, but there were plenty of dongs and other typical vandalism throughout.
Earlier I tried posting a timelapse video of the experiment with the title "Timelapse - Reddit users each place 1 pixel / 5 minutes on a 1000x1000 grid", but it got deduped to a post with a much less descriptive title which, as a result, never really took off.
My favorite moment of the experiment was when a German flag began to overtake a French flag, and as fighting was taking place over the former-French flag, France went upwards and made a flag, and once that was complete the fighting over their former space started to morph in to an EU flag, and the intersection of France and Germany became the EU.
I think also briefly Italy had the south side and Spain had the East, but those went back to France/Germany respectively.
Cool experiment, very disappointing outcome. To me it was an experiment in dynamic, ever-changing art; giving way to creation and destruction. In the end, it was just scripted bots working to preserve art, mostly corporate logos and national flags. Why was there no captcha?!
Interesting philosophical contrast between this, your suggestion, and http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com - anarchy vs benevolent dictatorship vs capitalism.
The bots thing definitely leaves a bitter aftertaste to the whole experiment. I still loved it and enjoyed watching things unfold, though. As for the logos/flags thing.. I think that had more to do with how short the experiment was. Maybe if it went on for a little longer, people would have been slightly more creative. As it stands, even the more creative stuff was very meme-y. Megaman shooting dat boi, for example.
Lego and IKEA were only there because they represented the rivalry between Denmark and Sweden. But I do find it interesting how Tesla and Space X fans are so dedicated that they'd be willing to fight for them.
> so dedicated that they'd be willing to fight for them
Now that's brand loyalty.
I'm imagining the Great World Brand War of 2130 and the aftermath with McDonalds youth movement being convicted of the genocide of the Nike sneakers resellers
It was neat how we at /r/archlinux were able to eventually come to an agreement with /r/sweden not to deface each other's logo, so that we had one less border to worry about :-)
My favorite subreddit (r/2007scape) went head-to-head against r/The_donald for the top left corner. Right now it's "connection lost - please wait, attempting to reestablish" but apparently the_Donald wanted to make it an American flag, and things got pretty heated.
I didn't know about the competition against /r/t_d, but the sheer amount of threads on Sunday in /r/2007scape about defending and call to arms is what was beginning to aggravate me. I think there were 5 actual posts about the game or discussions on their front page, and 20 about /r/Place.
Yea they really wanted to win. Honestly it was pretty frustrating because I rely on them for 87% of my meme consumption, but I'm glad that we won a "place" on /r/place
Did anyone note the similarity to playing Go / Weiqi?
Watching [0] the blue corner expanded masssively and then getting eaten from within somehow reminds me of all of the complexities of playing go when someone can place stones anywhere in your territory.
>Did Reddit’s April Fool’s gag solve the issue of online hate speech?
I certainly hope that doesn't become a widely accepted solution; To me (I didn't participate but have read about the event) it seems like their solution was to
A) marginalize each individual's impact/voice
B) moderate heavily to remove offensive things
This doesn't just remove "hate-speech", this removes anything unpopular.
The Button and Robin were awesome but this was on another level. I loved hanging out in the different factions' Discord servers and observe troops being rallied and defenses coordinated. It was an amazing 72 hours and I wonder how Reddit will top this next year.
I was also really impressed with how little obscenity there was. I fully expected it to be overrun by trolls. In retrospect I agree with the article that the technical limitation for creating was a contributing factor. If you want to see what happens when no such limitation exists and trolls get the upperhand, check out the timelapse of my own multiplayer drawing site:
I'm surprised that the article doesn't talk about how things were ruined towards the end with bots mindlessly overwriting squares to impose a pattern on the grid instead of collaborating.
I found this whole thing to be incredibly fascinating. It's pretty amazing to see how everyone just sort of spontaneously banded together to create little works of art on the board which they could never have made on their own. Everytime I watch the timelapse I notice something new.
It's also interesting to note that because the impact of any individual user on the board was pretty limited (you could only place one pixel every 5 minutes, and even then there was no guarantee the first pixel you placed wouldn't be overwritten by someone else before you were even allowed to place another), every significant piece of artwork on there had tens or even hundreds of people involved in creating and maintaining it.
In addition to the various artworks on the board, there were also several major factions scattered throughout the board with their own goals. /r/TheBlueCorner dedicated themselves to filling the empty space in the bottom right corner of the board with blue pixels, while /r/theblackvoid formed to erase various artworks by replacing them with black tiles. If you pay attention you may also notice several other factions in the timelapse (the Rainbow Road, Draw Hearts, Erase the Place, and The Green Lattice were a few other notable ones).
Other interesting events to note include [the German invasion of France](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ParHJmq2aCs) (and resulting peaceful resolution), [The Void's (unsuccessful) attack on the OSU logo](https://i.imgur.com/Tpmvrcc.gif), and [several factions ganging up to attack the US flag](https://gfycat.com/InfamousShyEeve) while most of the US population was asleep. There's plenty of other stuff you might notice too if you look hard enough. (For example, can you find Waldo?)
[Here's what the canvas looked like when the event finally ended](https://i.imgur.com/ajWiAYi.png). Other interesting stuff to note include [this animated heatmap](https://i.imgur.com/a95XXDz.gifv) by /u/jampekka of activity on the canvas, and [this graphic](https://i.imgur.com/SEHaUSJ.png) by /u/alternateme highlighting all the white pixels which never got touched throughout the experiment.
Wow, this is just fascinating. I don't really know Reddit, so this is the first time I heard of r/place. It reminds me of a couple of earlier experiments in emergent social organisation. Loren Carpenter's 1991 Pong, which is documented in Kevin Kelley's book Out of Control[1]. Also, DARPA's 2009 Network Challenge[2] (weather balloons)
If Reddit releases the pixel placement timings and researchers can go back over the boards to investigate communication about r/place, I believe this should be a very rich trove of data for sociologists.
I once ran a site years ago where people could doodle these little squares. It didn't take long for 'wars' to break out, involving various insignia. And cartoon genitals.
It got to about 500k before something went horribly wrong with a hard disk on the server. :(
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?