How We Built r/Place (2017)
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Initially that community struggled to decide on cannabis leaf or maple leaf, just like 5 years ago, leading to inevitable griefing campaigns taking advantage of the internal volatility to successfully turn it into "Bananas" with a yellow flag and a banana in place of the leaf for a short time.
But then the Canadians prevailed in the last hour, with Canada spelled correctly and the maple leaf and even all their provincial flags were added.
At some point during the volatile Canadian flag period the Germans made a perfect maple leaf inside the German flag in about 3 minutes which was amusing.
You can see the Canadian leaf was one of the most volatile map areas on this pixel volatility heatmap:
https://mobile.twitter.com/Mehdi_Moussaid/status/15112531929...
The psychological response to this was also fittingly Canadian. Ultimately the chaotic symbol was dubbled the "merple lerf", and accepted in the good humour that it deserved to be.
Now allow me to take 20-50 minutes to dissect what this event means to the Canadian identity, and how the chaotic aspect of the symbol may reflect deeper schisms and currents that underscore the Canadian experience.
Tonight at 8:00pm on CBC Radio. 7:30pm in Newfoundland.
The US flag drama was also an interesting lesson in coordination. Obviously it drew a lot of attack / defense, beefs, etc, but a lot of the early support was uncoordinated and also hindered bringing the artwork to the next level. The hivemind was good at local fixes but bad at global fixes -- our equivalent of the merple leaf was that the flag would always tend towards 100 stars in a grid instead of 50 stars in staggered rows. Attempts to add artwork or remove & fix stars were rejected by the hivemind trying to defend the flag. I'm embarrassed to admit that I may have put 2 or 3 reverts against what, in hindsight, was an attempt to add Iwo Jima to the lower left.
In the end, what rallied the troops was a retreat. https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/tvhtgv/american_flag...
After seeing the US flag disappear, supporters flocked to the subreddit and the discord. This tipped the balance away from self-sabotaging hivemind and towards coordination. There was a dynamic of "minimum viable change," where the hivemind would stop fighting artwork only once it could recognize it, so the key was to organize enough people on discord to push out an identifiable chunk (say, the space shuttle) in a single wave. I'm sure this dynamic played out in hundreds of communities, but in the end good art and organization won:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericanFlaginPlace/comments/twg11p...
I'd love to hear the French story. They rotated through a few designs and look heavily contested on the heatmap: https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/twryzd/frequency_of_...
Not only that, it spoiled the treasured memory and experience of 2017. This year was so full of hate and fighting over flags, stream raids, bot scripts floating around, none of it felt genuine except maybe people keeping up with the Ukraine flag on day 1. In 2017 it closed with me thinking Reddittors came together to make some cool art, this year it closed with me wondering whether any humans were involved by the end.
They were doing it so much that it was clear they weren't just abusing their admin power but using a bot as well.
This isn't true at all. As I was following it, the original American flag was just being griefed.
This -completely- ruined the entire narrative. It's not organic content, it's not even user generated content. It's whatever the employees wanted it to be. Gross.
>The Admins are currently at war with r/drama's offsite forum, who have been brigading Reddit. Last week the Admins banned lots of them permanently. So yesterday those brigaders drew their cat mascot in r/place, and the Admins used their powers to erase it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/tv2lmx/comm...
Reddit even tweeted a screenshot of it: https://twitter.com/Reddit/status/1509990348378058755
Reference to "everyone" on their sub being banned by admins: https://old.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/tty3fn/_/
If you go to their official site, you can clearly see (as of this comment) that they're using this cat as their mascot, and it's posted all over the place.
So yes, it's "just a cat" except it's being used in a specific way.
And no, reddit didn't tweet an image of the cat. They responded to someone else's screenshot of /r/place.
> The API should be generally open and transparent so the reddit community can build on it (bots, extensions, data collection, external visualizations, etc) if they choose to do so.
They specifically made r/place (at least in 2017) to be easy to bot. Without botting I don't think individual users could coordinate well enough against spam to build some of the more complex art.
Your memory of 2017 seems to be more nostalgia than reality as much of the same occurred in regards to both good sentiment and bad during it - it was only looking back that everything seemed perfect. Many people hated rainbowroad, thebluecorner, flags, and similar groups just the same in 2017. Bots weren't the invention of the last 5 years either. If you look at the 2022 canvas and the only genuine interaction you see is the Ukrainian flag then you're simply ignoring the good parts to leave focus on the bad. If I had to focus on the biggest difference between 2017 and 2022 I'd actually say it was the amount of attention large streamers drove to it all. There were plenty of streamers in 2017 but in 2022 pretty much all major view count streamers were treating it as a multi-day content event between each other instead of really being tied to what was being coordinated from Reddit communities interacting.
I hope they do another one in another 5 years. My favorite part of this year was seeing placestart manage to get the XP start menu in after the final expansion. It was my favorite part of the first one and it was good to see it get some tweaks as well.
Now those regional subs are littered with one post after another of "come on, we need your help to defend our flag" nonsense.
It's all pointless and divisive.
Agreed on the flags though, they're just so boring. At least a lot of the flags ended up with artwork on them this time though. Some of the big streamers were pretty irritating too, they just seemed like they wanted to ruin peoples fun. I don't mind chaos but it's more interesting if it's a swarm like the void and not just some guy screaming into a mic to attack a random spot.
I was really impressed by the level of detail as more shades were introduced.
From the perspective of someone who likes /r/theblackvoid, the pixel artists coloring over the void are just trolls and griefers.
So the parent would refer to anyone 'complaining' about other users as unnecessarily angry. Whether it's a flag person mad that some other flag or art or void or whatever is drawing over their flag, or whether it's a void person mad at the flag person, or whether its a pixel artist mad at the flag person, it's all just people projecting their own preference as if its some moral imperative.
Who are you to say that streamers shouldn't use their followers to leave a mark? Or that chaos and randomly placing pixels isn't a valid goal? You may personally find it really stupid and annoying. I personally find baseball really stupid and annoying. But I wouldn't refer to people who enjoy baseball as trolls.
Dr. Seuss' butter battle is the perfect illustration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book
I'd go as far as to qualify people who practiced r/TheBlackVoid in the canvas as antisocial, since filling a single-color void requires very little cooperation between themselves.
I'm not saying someone shouldn't be disappointed their art was overwritten. But again this gets back to my comment about the whole thing being divisive. You've demonstrated my entire point by saying /r/TheBlackVoid as using /r/place incorrectly.
Of course, this might have been intentional; there's a theory that this was Reddit's attempt to pump up user numbers for their IPO.
Seems unfair to blame this on a game. It's more a sign of the times we live in.
It's not pointless. Divisiveness drives engagement; engagement drives ad money.
Now they have a chat feature apparently (I'm always on RIF now) but I'm betting that's just awful.
Wordle would have been perfect -- every reddit account getting the little green and black squares display.
Having said that, I also hope that the next time it does happen - Reddit developers will implement at least some protection against this kind of brigading. I wouldn't be surprised it was also the reason they decided to wipe out the whole thing in the end.
However, this year I feel like they gave up on all of that simply to gain more users.
[1] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-announces-confidential...
The whole thing jumped the shark, big time.
I initially imagined that communities that cared to bot would have some sort of coordination server, and users would add compute power to that from their local machines. The local thing that each user ran would get a pixel to change from the coordination server, then use their auth credentials and IP address to make the edit. Reading some comments below, though, it seems like there was no IP rate limiting and no requirement to use an active account. So instead of needing a coordination server, I'm guessing that interested users just made a lot of accounts and cycled through them locally to make the desired edits. Does anyone know for sure? (The main reason I didn't bot this was because I assumed having a pool of residential IPs and high-karma accounts would be mandatory. I guess I was wrong, though!)
Some other comments below imply that this was an intentional decision to boost user numbers before an investment round / IPO. I hope the investors that are looking to get in on that get access to the database to determine whether or not the numbers are legitimate. I'm surprised investors are OK with spam accounts being counted as legitimate users. They aren't going to buy anything that's advertised or invite their friends ;)
I think Osu, the superstonk people and France probably were botting, but unless those bots were incredibly poorly written, I don't think were the cause of the sudden erasure - the bot code I saw shared most widely was definitely looking up which colour to pick based on the rendered colour code, and one discord I was in that was using it was definitely alerted to the white starting because the bots started erroring out for being unable to find the desired colour. I think it's more likely hostile bots were the cause of the swift erasure. If they're just picking a random or first colour to try wipe it out, they'd still function and contribute to swift deletion
I guess my underlying assumption that was completely wrong was that they wanted to avoid bots this time around. It doesn't seem like they did, and I don't understand why. On one side of the spectrum if you add some defenses then the people that break them are good people to offer a job to. On the other side of the spectrum, it's a lot more fun for humans when they aren't competing with machines. Having no bot mitigation just means the computer savvy users get to stomp on the actually creative communities. It makes me a little sad.
They did try _some_ prevention, there was a guy running 20 accounts who had his timers escalate up to like 18000 minutes, and also if you placed too many black pixels in sequence you'd get errors for a while before you could place again. But it definitely didn't kick in until way too late.
It supports much larger images though!
You can find it on Android called "Pixmap".
How I built it:
Server: Client side websocket load balancing against NodeJS servers. Client connection location stored in DB. Separate service to route events between the client facing servers. Separate service which pulls change events from the DB and applies to images and also keeps track of the most popular areas of rooms, so the client can auto zoom you to those areas when you join.
Changing pixels involves two things. 1. Broadcasting the immediate event, and 2. Processing the image. When someone joins a room, they just fetch the image. The image processor is in Node too.
Client architecture: App is in pure Java. There are two rendering engines that we switch between based on zoom level. When you zoom out far, we mostly use the GPU, and individual pixel changes update a bitmap which is then pushed to the GPU. When you zoom in, it mostly uses the CPU and just a canvas as it feels more responsive this way. Also allows us to do things like add annotations to show who is drawing. Getting the transition seemless is tricky.
There's also a whole matchmaking system, which was a fun thing to build.
Anyway my ankle healed and I switched to other projects... :)
It's fun reading over the different arguments. Flag haters, bot haters, territorial arguments, etc. This is the best kind of art! It's also kinda funny watching people complain about bots when the first iteration had just as much botting. I wouldn't be surprised if the exact same scripts were used now that existed then. I think the only big difference this time around was streamers using overlays to 50K+ viewers.
For those who are unfamiliar, foxhole is a grand scale mmo war game where two sides fight over a giant map over the course of a few weeks. There’s extensive player led logistics lines, massive front lines, and every battle, base, and item are all made by players. It’s a good time
The foxhole community built a little replica of the game map, and over the course of place fought over it much like the actual game. If you check the Timelapse you can see both sides trying to push into the other territories.
And it found itself caught in a bunch of big events, raids, voids, ect. But the community rebuilt and resumed fighting incredibly quick, which seems pretty in character lol.
Leave it to the foxhole players to fight over even faker land
the harder part is scaling the number of requests and active websockets
The challenge is making it scale. That developed-in-an-afternoon Twitter clone probably won't be able to handle an active user count in the 4 digits, let alone the 7+ digits Twitter has now.
It would be more interesting (in my opinion) if somehow you could get your OWN pixel by being the one who claims it, something like if you change a pixel, others can't change it for 5+x minutes where X increases each time you "defend" it or something.
If the ownership is shorter than the cooldown, then the botting game just becomes clicking every pixel until you own one, then finding someone (really a bot on a different account) to take over for you.
I'm not invested at all in Place, but to me it seems like the whole point of the event is that things are not permanent. The inevitable time-lapses is the ACTUAL artwork, not the final state of the canvas.
That's probably the reason why they made it fade away back to white in the end. For many participants through, they were motivated to spend the entire weekend on this just to ensure that their creation ended up in the final snapshot and that would feel like a slap in the face.
Once the Sand Mandala is complete, it's ceremoniously swept into a bin and returned to nature. The idea, as I understand it, is to demonstrate how even actions that are impermanent have meaning, symbolic of our transitory lives on this planet. Or, stated another way, "maybe the real Mandala was the friends we made at the sand table."
Then I pointed at a Sand Mandala that was visibly hanging on the wall and asked what's that. They explained that that Mandala was present during a visitation by the Dalai Lama to their temple so they glued the sand in place and hung it up.
I was like, wait, doesn't that invalidate the premise of the Mandala? To which they just kind of shrugged and smirked and said "not really. That one is special, but it too will be destroyed someday."
how would you build r/place?
so nope. wouldn’t work with blockchain
Where can we find posts like these — e.g. architectural and technological analysis and decisions in real word contexts?
https://reddit.com/r/place/comments/tv3hin/a_reddit_mod_is_c...
https://reddit.com/r/place/comments/tv2lb6/mod_caught_cheati...
Having carefully placed a pixel childishly contributing to the humour of a banner depicting a favourite football club, I noted it was replaced by a very serious user within seconds named 'ProBiotic587' or something similar.
I was not alone in my contributions, as others were rewriting the very serious banner in a manner similar to scratching out parts of a 'Please mind your head sign' to 'Fleas in your head'. Seeing that sign on the train as a 10 year old was a reminder both that were I a few years younger there may indeed be fleas in my head and headlice shampoo was no fun, and that a small act of rebellion by someone anonymous makes a monotonous train ride pass with a little humour.
Just as the fleas in your head sign was restored every few months on seat pairings, so were user contributions of 'art' to this football club's banner. Both by very serious anonymous people. While I never knew the names of train maintenance staff, Reddit made the names of these people known, but made them no less anonymous. A bot army of 3-8 letter word + 3-8 letter word + 2-4 digits at the end.
Fine, some people take their football club vary seriously, and would likely not be much fun in the terraces. To each their own.
But it wasn't just a serious fan of a football club. There were numerous examples of a voice shouting disproportionately and artificially louder over, well, over a lot of pixels. Ego? Other?
And that was entirely disengaging.
Reddit is, by subreddit definition, a place of sharing common interest, herding, or denying others' contribution to common interest through such herding. But Place was not just a place for herding, of tuning into and manipulating a group for one's own aims, it was an affirmation of the dominance of bots, alts as magnifiers of this, in discussion and voting in all but the most resilient subreddits, or subreddits of the most inert subject matter.
I love a good pun! Even if it makes me feel old.
<a href="https://www.redditinc.com/blog/how-we-built-rplace" rel="bookmark" tabindex="-1">
<time class="entry-date published" datetime="2017-04-13T00:00:00-04:00">April 13, 2017</time>
<time class="updated" datetime="2021-08-30T16:09:26-04:00">August 30, 2021</time>
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