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Comment by writeslowly | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was interesting that one of their requirements was to provide an API that was easy to use for both bots and visualization tools. I remember reading some speculation when this was running that r/place was intentionally easy to interface with bots, while there were also complaints that the whole thing had been taken over by bots near the end.

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Without bots, I doubt that /r/place would have been very interesting. It's a nice thought that a million random strangers can be cohesive without automation, but for some reason I don't find that to be particularly realistic..

Oh it is very easy. You just need subreddits with lots of very loyal people who even do frequent meetups, and lots of those subreddits.

And soon you get exactly what /r/place was.

As a concrete example, as far as I can tell the entire Puella Magi Madoka Magica section, starting from Homura Did Nothing Wrong next to Darth Plagueis The Wise, was hand-crafted and hand-maintained. On their discord they were actively discouraging community members that wanted to use bots.

I remember taking part in a big drawing canvas exactly like this about twelve years ago between several Art/Photoshop communities, Worth1000.com, SomethingAwful, Fark.com etc. There wasn't bots at the time but it was still very socially interesting.

But reddit itself is a tool to bring cohesion out of a million random strangers.

As others have said subcommunities quickly formed or some subreddits themselves had a orga-thread to paint an iconic logo relevant to their niche.

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