Reddit @lemmy.world

2y ago

/r/place going full-on French Revolution now

353 comments

The admins are blatantly censoring the drawing, putting checkerboard squares or circles of random color over that part. Here are some screenshots I took only seconds apart.
- No, I'm sure that's a "silent majority" of users who support everything that Reddit The Company does banding together to stamp out the minority of noisy rabble-rousers. /s
  
  Sure, the silent majority of spez's accounts
- I actually saw that happen in real time, did we confirm it was an admin action?
  All the pixels came in at the same time
  
  If you spend time watching /r/place you see that pictures mostly form in a natural, progressive way. This is the only place you see hundreds of pixels being changed uniformly all at once. Even bots would be making more gradual changes than this. It's clearly someone who has a brush tool for censoring.
  
  Random pixels? At this time of Reddit? In this part of r/place? Localized entirely on spez's head?
  
  It's the Admins, the new pixels don't have any usernames attached to them.
  
  Probably a bit then
  
  Who else? Seriously... Who else?
- That's how it has always been for all places. Admins have the power to erase anything that goes against Reddit's ToS. Depicting spez under the guillotine is against their ToS, but writing "fuck spez" isn't, which is why one gets deleted and the other remains.
  It makes sense IMO. It's just like admins having the power to erase swastikas, homophobic or transphobic content, blatant product advertisements and so on. Nothing wrong with it, IMO.
  
  They didnt depict him being decapitated, but his Snoo (i believe those are called Snoos) being decapitated. I think those are two entirely different things, especially given the french revolution theme around it.
  Admins are being pussies imo. (After making a very bad decision in returning /r/place) They are of course fully within their right to, and that's why reddit sucks.
  
  I don't know, I'm seeing a pretty large and blatant product advert on there for Boner Kebab right now.
  
  It’s just like admins having the power to erase swastikas
  Do you think they'll do this one day? Didn't Canada spend the entire time trying to un-swastika their flag last time, or am I misremembering?
  
  Surprised they’re not selling blatant product advertisements for it!
- That's some bullshit right there. Thanks for capturing it.
- Quebec still representing on Reddit is ironic and embarrassing.
- I didn't know you could up/downvote on imgur. I wonder where all the downvotes came from...
  
  lol yes there's a whole underground imgur social network full of users unaware that imgur was originally just an image hosting website for reddit. By default the images I uploaded were private but I decided to click the button to make them a public post just out of curiousity of what imgur's opinion on the matter might be. Turns out it's not interesting for them.
- Again, this is why the correct protest should have been to make everything Black or White.
- It was expected
- If this was being done over lemmy with lemmy.word admin name in it, would it be censored?
  
  Come on man, that's Ruud.
  
  That’s comparing apples and community centers; people would just leave and block this instance.

I refuse to help Reddit artificially juice their active users metrics by signing back in to contribute, but this is pretty funny
- Yeah, I find protesting Reddit by using Reddit to be incredibly stupid. Just leave and don't touch it at all, if their user metrics and site traffic are so low, then they're just gonna lose their advertisers, which is probably one of their main sources of income.
  
  Honorable mention to the people giving shooting star awards (you know, the EXPENSIVE one) to all of the comments on /r/place. Sure did show them there didn't you!
  
  This is the way
- You have to use the mobile app too. This is purely a stunt to get app adoption.

Don't participate. It's a literal trap. Fuck spez by using Lemmy, friends.
I love seeing this, but they hold all the cards... They will censor all of this.
- It's why I signed up. I've been looking for an alternative. This is great so far.
  
  We did on r/lemmy. It was removed
- or make a 'join lemmy' sign?
- I won’t lie to you Lemmings. Everyone who has stood their ground, everyone who has fought an admin has been banned.
  
  What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge mods?
  
  Are you saying that one day I can evade getting banned?
  No, I'm saying one day you won't have to.
  
  you cant fire me i quit
  
  Outstanding reference well played
- Thankfully they are making it super easy for me to resist placing pixels this year. Doesn't work on old.reddit, only works on new reddit or their official mobile app. No way in hell I'm downloading that piece of crap app and I don't feel like swapping back and forth between old and new site designs.
  
  I mean you could (though it's not recommended, because fuck reddit) just type "https://new.reddit.com/(whatever)" in order to load new reddit for just that one tab. But don't do that and don't participate in r/place, because fuck reddit.
- I have been fucking spez for a week now
  
  Get yourself checked for STDs.
- I still am on reddit in order to keep posting "fuck spez" and to help people to switch

These people cannot control themselves. They're protesting a company by making them money.
- If you have an adblocker and/or other privacy browser plugins how do they make any money from you? If anything, you've wasted some bandwidth and server cycles, so you cost them money.
  I suppose an argument could be made that by adding to it you've created some tiny bit of content someone without adblockers might be enticed to see.
  
  They make them money because:
  they use reddit
  spez gets some nice usage stats to show off
  as a direct consequence, advertisers keep paying to put their ads
  also as a direct consequence, investors' confidence in reddit continues to recover; there's a real possibility that, when it IPOs, it will actually go for a decent price
  Now, if enough people go commit ad-block, and advertisers somehow become wise to that fact... then maybe it will hurt reddit's bottom line (at which point spez will start trying to emulate youtube's anti-ad stuff).
  But as it stands, especially if most of reddit's usage is through reddit's mobile app... I'm not really sure how you can block ads there.
  
  The theory is that their July traffic numbers are probably down so they're boosting them with /r/place traffic so that the drop due to 3rd party apps doesn't look as bad to investors. Reddit probably sees the increased server costs as an investment to boost their IPO valuation.
  
  by adding to it you've created some tiny bit of content
  It's sort of hard to visualize the split between collective and individual. If a prolific user decides to stop using reddit, reddit maybe becomes 0.001% worse. It doesn't sound like a lot on its own, but when millions do it.. it becomes significant.
  A little becomes a lot. If a significant chunk of reddit just decided to stop using the site, reddit would lose a lot of money.
  Remember when reddit traffic was down like 3% a couple weeks ago? Let's say traffic to reddit and the money reddit gets from advertisers are strongly correlated. So if traffic drops 50%, they get 50% less money from ads.
  It's probably not exactly the same, especially during a short time span like a week, but just for the sake of discussion.
  With an annual revenue of $350 million in 2021, they avered $29 million a month and $7 million a week. What's 3% of $7 million? About $210k
  $210k is not much for a company like reddit, but it's a significant amount of money. Now imagine we increase the traffic drop by a factor of 3 and increase the length of time down up to a month. We're talking $1.6 million.
  That hurts. And it could start a downwards spiral. Prolific users leave and there's less content so there's less reason for users to come back. Which causes less content and so on
  Unfortunately, I think the majority of redditors have probably moved on from the whole API affair. We still see "fuck spez" like for example in the /r/place but unless reddit creates another scandal in the near future they should be able to recover from this.
  We simply don't have the numbers to hurt reddit so I say go ahead and use /r/place without guilt if you want to
  
  If you are using an account in their service, they still have at least some data about you, which they can sell to third-parties under some conditions (unless they changed that part of their privacy policy). It's probably not a lot, but it adds up I guess.
  
  Apparently it's app only, which can't easily be adblocked
- The people you want to get off reddit are (shock) on reddit. While it makes reddit money in the short term, it spreads the word to people that aren't aware. Short term gain for hopefully long term loss.
  
  This is also why I don't mind the John Oliver stuff. It's interesting for now, but it will get boring. I just hope it doesn't get stupid like what happened on r/aww
- Does some individuals love circlejerking so much they'd GIVE AWAY money for it? Why yes they would.
- "It's not about the money. It's about sending a message."
  
  Sending a message costs money.

I turned it into my Lock Screen.
- Unfathomably based
- Looks pretty good actually
  
  Merci!

It's also being griefed using obvious bots. Every 30 seconds or so the entire blade gets blocked out by a perfect checkerboard pattern done all at once. Or a perfect square will get whited out. Either spez is directing it or some reddit fanboy is defending his honor with a bot army
- That's the moderators of place doing that.
  
  I consider r/place mods and spez to be the same group. I really just mean that it could be either an official action by reddit-affiliated person or could be bots run by someone who just dickrides spez, just trying to disclaim that obvious manipulation doesn't necessarily mean it's reddit's doing.
  
  I'm willing to bet the moderators of r/place aren't doing it/are glad it's taking this direction and/or the former mods of r/place were removed by cum-guzzling bootlicking admins who are now forcefully whitewashing reddit users' contributions.

and the admins nuked it.
- I'm never going back to that place
  
  same
- Of course they did. It was a death threats against an individual. The protestors needs to drop spez as a scapegoat and pick a target that is smarter.
  
  I don't think that's a death threat at all. Guillotines are a metaphor for the working class forcibly taking power away from the ruling elite.
  
  given the many recent decisions by reddit, if there is people smarter than spez they are not vocal to it on the outside.
  But i seriously doubt that spez is listening, when people tell him what a bad idea is.
- I mean, fuck that place, but this particular instance of censorship seems acceptable and even good. Some schizo dude on the interweebs could think this is God speaking to him or something. Don't promote violence online.
  
  Idk. It's symbolic. It's art.
  We can't just live our lives in fear of what some crazy person is going to do because of it.
  This is what r/place was designed for: to capture the entirety of Reddit in one snapshot. And this is perfect defiance of what reddit is doing.
  Taking it down is why I won't go back to reddit ever.
  
  This is stupid. Crazies will be crazy. They'll take inspiration from anywhere. Kill john lennon.
  
  No. Stop. Don't.
  I hear you, but all these rich rat bastards need to be reminded that they only have what they have because the masses allow it. I hope I don't see it in my lifetime, but we are rapidly approaching a point where heads are going to roll.
  
  In the only two examples I'm somewhat familiar with (John Lennon and Ronald Reagan), when someone's mental illness led them to attack a public figure, the trigger wasn't anything nearly as obvious as an incitement to violence, or even criticism of the public figure. Unpredictable people are unpredictable; trying to foresee what might set them off is pointless.
  
  Do you think Marie antoinette shouldnt have been killed?

Lurker on Reddit, first comment on Lemmy. Let us hope this will become the better alternative 🙏
- It already is :-)
  
  always has been
- Welcome :) we should all expect some teething problems as lemmy is growing so rapidly. Looking good so far though
- Discussions are generally civil and engaging. Content is obviously going to be sparse for a bit but find the communities of your interest and start posting!
- is a good day for it
- Pro tip: !memes@sopuli.xyz is a meme community that is significantly less Communist
  
  Oh god not CoMmUnIsTs?!

I still remember how much fun the 2022 r/Place was. Now it feels kinda sad to watch the current one
- Especially since it happened right after they killed apps from the third party
  
  They did this to try and make people happy

I don't understand why they'd do another round of place at a time like this. Like wtf did they think would happen?
- If you read the r/place guidelines you must use the mobile app to participate. Hence everyone who is jumping in, even to mock spez, are stupidly doing exactly what reddit wants. Adopt their app. This is purely to get people to join their shit app
  
  It works fine in a desktop web browser. No app required.
  
  You can use new.Reddit.com.
- Probably to drive user interaction back up.
  
  Precisely.
  They don't care what the users make. They care that user interaction numbers are back up.
  Spez is the scapegoat. The ownership of Reddit knows what they're doing and spez is simply the idiot willing to (poorly) do what he's told.
  
  It's a tiny fraction, damn near a rounding error, of people involved compared to Reddit user base though.
- They do everything to up the engagement by any means necessary, so they can say that there were no big impact on traffic after blackouts. And it works. It doesn't matter that people go there out of hatred, they still end up as traffic

Redditors on their way to do everything except stop using reddit.
- I've gotten a few people to switch
- maybe it's not so bad, many of the reddit issues were caused by it's rotting culture of ragebait loving and bandwagoning, as much as the lemmyverse benefit from trafic, going back to news influenced hate trains and obviously ill white women screaming at a camera on all pages is far from desirable, imhu of course

Just leave, ffs. It's annoying that in the end of the day people still remain in droves. The only hope is that reddit drives itself into being unusable.
- I feel like saying "Just leave" to the protesters is akin to telling people protesting Trump as president: "Just leave for Canada. You working and living in USA is just making more tax money for Trump."
  
  Leaving Reddit or leaving a country or not comparable
  
  This is more like protesting Walmart while shopping there daily. Reddit directly benefits from the continued traffic.
  
  I think there is a difference between uprooting your entire life to move to a foreign country, and deleting an app
- The only hope for what? Is the end goal that Reddit dies or that lemmy gains in popularity?
  
  Sort of, really people want to have a non hostile relationship with websites, reddit is a comical example of corprate instincts being misaligned with that desire
  Spez will be seen as the animal that learned bad behavors and went savage
- It's because they don't know any better. The average redditor isn't exactly super smart, and half of them are even stupider than that!

Reddit is using it as a honeypot to attract the upset users, so that they can swing the banhammer.
- Oh no, if they ban me I'd lose all my precious reddit coins
  
  I don’t know if you saw, but they’re removing this functionality anyway. So all your coins will be absorbed or deleted or whatever after September 31st iirc
- Just waiting for my ban for placing a pixel there, tbh.
- Can't engage with the site if they block me from engaging with it.

Still engagement.

Reddit is doing Place to demonstrate continued engagement despite protests. People should stay logged out. But if they’re going in, people should hit them where it hurts:
“Reddit ads support Child Porn”
“Short Reddit Stock”
“Reddit Fakes Views”

c/places when?
- asking the real questions
- There are websites that do what place does but better. Maybe we should just partner with one and have our own.
  With obligatory blackjack and hookers.

Time lapse this year is going to be hilarious.
- By hilarious, I'm sure you meant "highly edited".
  
  I'm sure there are people grabbing constant captures so they can put out an unedited version.
- I'd be shocked if they followed through with it. Reviving r/place out of the blue is a naked grab at engagement numbers.

Anyone else remember when they had the last CEO institute a ton of egregious shit and then instead of running it back, they replaced her with spez and everyone then forgot about it?
- Ellen Pao, yup. F her and f spez

Based.
- And guillotine-pilled
- based
  Tubular.

For someone that does not have a reddit account and joined lemmy from hearing about the api crap on mastodon and linux podcasts. Reddit sounds like a dumpster fire worse that twitter.
- If I'm being honest, it's no where near as bad as Twitter. But still a dumpster fire
  
  Maybe more like a kitchen garbage can fire?
- The only reason twitter is worse is because elon got there first. You can just reorder the timeline. They're both heading the same way

Am I the only one who thinks place is lame? It’s just another Reddit circle jerk and everyone is falling for it hook line and sinker. Shit like this reminds me why the human population is mentally deficient and why politicians have such an easy time controlling us.
- I finally kinda see it, but hate the tone it was said with "heres a game to keep you distracted"
  
  cough cough Draw a pic of Mouhamad (with face) cough cough
  
  There's a very old saying that I think was attributed to a Roman leader which went something like "Games and bread", humans have been easy to swat for a very long time.
- You are the one posting here, dude.

r/RedditCensorship should have a field day about this getting censored. 🤡

Honestly, I don't blame reddit for censoring this. This is cringey, and also just wrong. It SHOULD just be the Snoo under the blade, with spez pulling the cord.
- Nah. It should be spez. It’s a metaphor for what’s coming and it’s going to be the billionaires of the world that are going to experience it.
  
  It’s a metaphor for what’s coming
  optimistically. I dunno if we actually have it in us.
- Twitter even censored news about french protest too.

Can someone ELI5 this r/place thing? Despite my 10+ years on Reddit I have managed to not understand wtf is happening right now with this.
- r/place is a site wide event where any user can place a pixel on the big canvas every 5 minutes or so. Communities will often coordinate efforts so their users can make art to represent their community. It looks like a lot of people have come together to make this Spez guillotine, which is fun.
  
  Oh wow, I don’t know what I was expecting the answer to be, but that wasn’t it. That’s kind of neat, and also i am not surprised they are censoring things given the current state of Reddit. Bummer though. Why in the world would they bring it back at this point. What did they think would happen. This has been a wild ride.
  
  They also made "Fuck Spez" over much of the rest of the canvas. I saw a picture on Mastodon. I'll see if I can find it.
  Found it: https://mastodon.social/@joshmillard/110748362644888776
- Basically you get one turn to place one pixel. By working together people and communities can make pictures and memes.
  The Void is a bunch that just use black to consume everything.
  After a little bit you can take another turn. So on and so forth.
  In the past there were almost literal tile wars as communities fought for specific coordinates to color for whatever flag, void, meme or inside joke of the year.

Chef kiss, perfect.

and its oficial the reddit moderation menace to ban the entore r/placefr if the y continue. freedom my ass.
- Rudy Giuliani, that you?

Who the fuck ~~that~~ thought "hey, we just made millions extremely mad, let's give them r/place now so they can tell us what they really feel"? 😂
- They want the engagement numbers. They're hoping those angry people log back in.
  
  But that's just a temporary number, though.

looks like everyone is having a good time on Reddit again

Vive la révolution! ✊

Obligatory reminder that 99% of executions during the French Revolution were of commoners, not the nobility.
- Yeah but the borgousise ones were the ones that made it onto all the MySpace pages.

Ze Germans are also taking over large part of the canvas.

This pleases me.

I've removed my modded Sync from my home screen and replaced it with Voyager for Lemmy until Sync for Lemmy is ready. This r/place BS is pathetic.
- There are also mods and admins by passing the timers and abusing to place more pixels again

LMAO how do I even access to it? I read that you need the official app? Fuck that.
- Open the website and change the browser to "desktop view"
  
  Thanks.

Bloody hell. They're not holding back their anger, are they?
- I think it's part of the "landed gentry" theme Spez started.

That's amazing

WEN MURICA REVOLUTION?
- When they piss us off enough.
  
  Lol. I honestly don’t know what it will actually take. We had 20 2nd graders get murdered at school, execution style. Watched out politicians do absolutely nothing and nobody gave 2 shits. Americans are too fat, lazy, and stupid to hit the streets and demand change. Exactly like they want us to be.

Two words. Get out!
Reddit will not last.
- LOL. You made me chuckle.

Can someone please explain to me wtf r/place is? I'm so confused.
- It's a subreddit/event that they do every year (or I think it's only once a year?) where every user can place a single, colored pixel on a large digital canvas.
  Your pixel can be over-written by another user, and each user can only place one pixel every 5 minutes or so (and there's a lot of bot-use, which is lame)
  So different subreddits will band together to try and orchestrate a picture and protect it from being over-written by other users (or bots... if possible)
  So alliances between subreddits are formed, fall apart, some backstabbing and deception... all until the event is over and the final canvas is locked-in.
  It was actually a pretty cool event. You could maybe join a discord, a pattern and placement would be followed, and you'd just drop a pixel where it needed to be when you could, to help the overall picture. Or go rogue and try and etch a tiny little corner somewhere yourself
  I had fun with it last year, but c'est la vie. I ain't going back there for anything. Would be cool if the different instances could somehow do something of the same nature across the fediverse one day. It was the comradery and light-hearted fun that really made it
- On reddit you go to /r/place and can place a pixel on a certain place on this huge canvas of like... idk 5000 * 5000 pixels wide? Its a huge canvas of pixels. So you and your friend or another subreddit can try team up and conquer part of the canvas, lets say the bottom right corner. And then you can all work together and create a little flag or another picture/image like this one. I am not sure on the limit of how many pixels each user can post per minute, or the exact number of pixels, but its roughly something like 5000-10000 pixels wide and high
  EDIT: This image you see would be a tiny portion of the entire canvas. You can tell because the resolution of 'Spez' for example is pretty bad, which means its only a few pixels wide. If it was taking up the entire canvas it would be perfect resolution and you wouldnt see janky edges
  This is an example of the entire canvas at some point over the past few days. Its probably actually something like 50000x50000 pixels
  
  So it's like crowd sourced graffiti or something? I still don't get it but whatever makes you happy I guess.

Someone is mad.

Oh, I miss place 😕
- Same, used to love it last time. But this time I won't participate.

It's a cultural thing.

https://youtu.be/acT_PSAZ7BQ
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/acT_PSAZ7BQ
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- This is surprisingly sick funk for the end of my day.
  
  Communists write good music. Boots Riley rocks.

Wow that's a bit wow ok that's ahaha yeah that's quite something

The site will go down in a year at max.

Censorship are everywhere, especially big tech platforms

@Ertebolle Voici la grande peur!

This is excessive. I know they're angry. I know they have a reason to be. I know they don't mean this literally. But this is not okay. Maybe it's less not-okay than what u/spez did, but it doesn't justify doing this.
Please, let us not follow the same path this far.
- Personally, I think all the heads of social media networks could use some reflection time in one of these just for a start.

I'm not big on spez but this particular one is a little bit in poor taste to me.
- ...really?
  
  Yeah. I see I'm being downvoted but meh. I'm cool with the fuck spez stuff and I used to be on Reddit way too much so I'm feeling the loss too, but in the end it's a website and the guillotine is just too much for me given what we're upset about. It's cool if other people feel differently about it but that's how I feel.
- I gave you a meaningless upvote because I don't think you're wrong and you've got a completely reasonable take
  Just saying for me, yeah I guess if I think too into it, it does rub me the wrong way but I see a couple degrees of separation between the art and the person. It was the snoo head with just the word spez with a big red card behind it
  I feel like if it was written on the forehead for example that would have definitely make me question their decision a lot more
  (And in regards to the other comments of yours in this thread, I get how that could put you at unease.. there's some interesting things developing in America)
- I’m also not big on Spez but I do agree with you.
  
  You got some downvotes too so I'm chiming in to say that you're also not wrong, and I don't feel either one of you said anything unreasonable (so far...)
  A little leeway should be given if for nothing else anyone or anything getting their head chopped off in place would be questionable

353 comments