
Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment - camtarn
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/04/in-memoriam-reddits-72-hour-live-graffiti-wall-as-a-social-experiment/
======
rmccoy6435
I think this was a pretty neat experiment. For the first 24 hours everything
was chaos, then it settled down in the middle as communities formed, then at
the end it was just annoying as every subreddit was trying to take over real-
estate, and far too many people were taking it way too seriously. It got
annoying going to certain subreddits that I subscribe to for content started
getting flooded with "Man the decks, we need to defend this!".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[http://i.imgur.com/7E3bAnE.png](http://i.imgur.com/7E3bAnE.png)

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

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

~~~
H4CK3RM4N
Wait until you hear about how 4chan's My Little Pony and Politically
Incorrect(read: Nazis) became friends after this year's April Fools prank.

------
beefhash
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.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/help/contentpolicy/](https://www.reddit.com/help/contentpolicy/)

~~~
baby
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.

~~~
Buttons840
You need to explain yourself better. You seem to be opposed to Nazism, but in
favor of their symbol. Why?

~~~
baby
I upvoted you because it is sad that ignorance is downvoted :(

~~~
Buttons840
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.

------
scrollaway
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.

~~~
ehsankia
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.

~~~
nojvek
Really enjoyed Ms pacman on google maps.

I prefer that than fake news.

------
ctdonath
Someone's gotta mention
[http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com](http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com) :

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.

~~~
xanderstrike
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.

~~~
joenot443
Pretty wild to see a (relatively) huge company like 2checkout
([https://www.2checkout.com/](https://www.2checkout.com/)) on there.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It was an international news story and clearly still gets some attention (last
time I was reminded of it was within the last year).

------
doubleunplussed
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.

~~~
Nexxxeh
>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.

Actual: [https://i.imgur.com/GtkaGlJl.png](https://i.imgur.com/GtkaGlJl.png)

SCtester Cleanup:
[http://i.imgur.com/GQCTigC.png](http://i.imgur.com/GQCTigC.png)

Wales also had our dragon beneath the main UK flag along with NI, England and
Scotland. There was also a cool Wales places heart.

~~~
doubleunplussed
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.

~~~
Nexxxeh
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.

------
Raphmedia
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...

~~~
chillacy
A really great radiolab on the subject is their episode on Emergence:
[http://www.radiolab.org/story/91500-emergence/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91500-emergence/)

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.

~~~
Raphmedia
"Emergence"! Thank you for the word. I was looking for it!

------
gallerdude
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.

~~~
Ajedi32
Other examples include the Bob Ross reruns and SeeBotsChat on Twitch.

~~~
andrewflnr
You're thinking of this w.r.t. Bob Ross?
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2015/11/02/how-
dea...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2015/11/02/how-dead-painter-
bob-ross-is-bringing-positivity-to-the-internets-most-cynical-community/)

~~~
Ajedi32
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](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/bob-ross)

------
Namrog84
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.

------
cjslep
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).

~~~
kuusisto
Drawball

~~~
cjslep
This is exactly it! Thanks.

------
camtarn
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.

~~~
dang
We'll s/gag/experiment/ above.

~~~
camtarn
Cheers :)

------
mmanfrin
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.

------
SippinLean
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?!

~~~
ctdonath
Interesting philosophical contrast between this, your suggestion, and
[http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com](http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com)
\- anarchy vs benevolent dictatorship vs capitalism.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The benevolent dictatorship being represented by any pixel rendered image you
find to be "benevolent" presumably.

Compare the r/places output to MDH and
[http://media.cntraveler.com/photos/56d0aee058d9a8773c109eb2/...](http://media.cntraveler.com/photos/56d0aee058d9a8773c109eb2/master/w_775,c_limit/virgin-
gorda-the-baths-cr-getty.jpg) and you'll probably establish a consensus for
the "benevolent dictator" made art above the others?

------
icc97
I find this interesting in what it lacked:

* No Google / Twitter / Facebook / Amazon

* No news networks (except NPR)

* Hardly any corporations except for Tesla, Space X, AMD, Lego and IKEA

* No GTA, FIFA, large corporate games

* Only 6 actual people (1/3 of which was the Dutch dutchy)

* No films

* No iconic logos - e.g. Olympics rings, Nike, McDonalds

~~~
C4K3
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.

~~~
icc97
> 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

------
AsyncAwait
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 :-)

Thanks /r/sweden!

------
acalderaro
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.

We won :)

~~~
rmccoy6435
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.

~~~
acalderaro
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

------
Danylon
Reminds me of
[http://artcontext.net/act/06/glyphiti/docs/index.php](http://artcontext.net/act/06/glyphiti/docs/index.php)
a black and white multiplayer canvas that has been running since 2001.

They also animate the progress here:
[http://artcontext.net/act/01/glyphiti/anim/](http://artcontext.net/act/01/glyphiti/anim/)

------
icc97
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.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY)

------
advertainment
>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.

------
spiderfarmer
It continues to inspire creativity even after it closed:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatm...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatmap_made_into_a_show_opening/)

------
hopfog
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:

[https://youtu.be/qIJ3XFPRsSw](https://youtu.be/qIJ3XFPRsSw)

------
jwilk
> _16-bit palette_

Did they mean 16 color palette?

~~~
jwilk
Answering to myself:

They almost certainly did. There's only 16 colors in the final image:

    
    
      $ curl -s https://i.redd.it/wc436nf7fdpy.png | pngtopnm | ppmhist
      libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile
         r     g     b         lum     count  
       ----- ----- -----      -----   ------- 
          34    34    34         34    258550 
         255   255   255        255    154487 
         229     0     0         68    123218 
           0     0   234         27     90720 
         229   217     0        196     63755 
         229   149     0        156     55643 
           2   190     1        112     40918 
           0   131   199        100     32930 
           0   211   221        149     29820 
         255   167   209        198     28576 
         228   228   228        228     27733 
         136   136   136        136     26035 
         130     0   128         54     20019 
         160   106    66        118     18023 
         148   224    68        183     16047 
         207   110   228        153     13526

------
callumprentice
Reminds me of a more dynamic version of the Million Dollar Homepage from many
years ago.
[http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/](http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/)

------
wl
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.

------
tonyztan
This collaboration reminds me of Wikipedia, where users work together to
create articles and remove vandalism.

------
Ajedi32
Here's a timelapse of the entire event:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY)

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](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](https://i.imgur.com/Tpmvrcc.gif)),
and [several factions ganging up to attack the US
flag]([https://gfycat.com/InfamousShyEeve](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](https://i.imgur.com/ajWiAYi.png)).
Other interesting stuff to note include [this animated
heatmap]([https://i.imgur.com/a95XXDz.gifv](https://i.imgur.com/a95XXDz.gifv))
by /u/jampekka of activity on the canvas, and [this
graphic]([https://i.imgur.com/SEHaUSJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/SEHaUSJ.png))
by /u/alternateme highlighting all the white pixels which never got touched
throughout the experiment.

------
lovemenot
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)

[1] [http://kk.org/mt-files/books-mt/ooc-mf.pdf](http://kk.org/mt-files/books-
mt/ooc-mf.pdf) (page 11)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Network_Challenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Network_Challenge)

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.

------
ourcat
Are there any open-source projects out there which can do this?

The resulting 10 minute time-lapse video is an absolute thing of beauty.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCAsY8kjE3w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCAsY8kjE3w)

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. :(

------
reednj
I made a very similar site a few years ago, except you can't overwrite other
peoples work: [http://paint.reednj.com](http://paint.reednj.com)

(Its not moderated, so probably NSFW)

------
arjie
They should make a jigsaw puzzle of this. It would be entertaining.

~~~
Ajedi32
Here's the Reddit thread about that:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/639mwv/i_just_had_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/639mwv/i_just_had_the_best_idea_ever/)

~~~
arjie
Haha. Of course someone else has thought of this too. I think it would be
fairly entertaining.

------
jedanbik
Not a fan of the 3D chart they used - lots of data gets hidden by towering
spires, and the camera tilt adds its own bit of distortion.

Did anyone create an old fashioned 2D heatmap?

~~~
Qub3d
Yep [0]. They also made a cool TV show intro [1] out of it.

[0]:[https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/63240q/rplace_activi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/63240q/rplace_activity_animated_heatmap/)

[1]:[https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatm...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63amnd/rplace_heatmap_made_into_a_show_opening/)

------
solotronics
france tried to invade bitcoin but r/bitcoin fought them off after much
struggle lol

very interesting social experiment!

------
good_sir_ant
Ah, the ample parallels you could draw with this and freedom.

~~~
johnhenry
Please expand?

