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Comment by CarVac | Hacker News Reader

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.

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/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

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

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.

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.

Did you read about how /pol/ trolled Shia LaBeouf's "He Will Not Divide Us" project?

As a Welsh guy, can i just say all Welsh people are stubborn as fuck and never surrender? Cymru am byth!

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.

> it was like a game of Diplomacy more than anything else.

Maybe that's why the EVE Online guys were able to hold their own so well against the larger and more popular games right next to their logo :)

They also held a much more modestly-sized area.

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

Eventually everything was scripted though, and you just needed to show up with a zombie account to contribute.

Saw lots of 1 year old accounts with no activity.

I was involved in a successful joint effort to move an entire image up 3 pixels to resolve a border dispute.

I still cannot believe how large and clean that /r/PrequelMemes logo came out. It was a lot of text too, which made it all the more impressive.

It was also cleaned up fairly early, I was just disappointed they didn't add full justification.

I don't understand why that was what a group of people put serious time and thought into creating.

Bless you. Don't ever go to reddit.com

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.

See Albert Camus' "Sissyphus", I guess.

Unsurprising. It's not the kind of thing the readers of _hacker news_ would ever upvote...

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'm still impressed all things considered.

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.

There was also an epic battle between r/canada and r/quebec that kind of mirrored actual political events that occurred in the 90s.

GIF: https://gfycat.com/WholeHalfBobcat

Description (in French): https://www.reddit.com/r/Quebec/comments/62xde0/le_jour_un_r...

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.

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