Current state of Place 2023

Eh, could use more fuck spez

Ya, fuck spez

Hi, I seem to be reposting this comment everywhere there is discussion of r/place on Kbin and now Lemmy. I just haven't really seen those points being made so I thought they were worth highlighting. Sorry for the spam, this is the last one I promise. I need to go to work.

After giving it some thought, I think you should indeed do that. For Lemmy AND Kbin and more.
tl;dr: Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don't know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms

The major objection is that going to r/place gives Reddit the engagement and numbers they want for the IPO, and I think that's a compelling point but I don't think it's as obvious as the people making that point seem to think. The idea of "don't go on Reddit to protest Reddit, that's just helping Reddit" has some "But you live in a society, curious" vibes to it; I think the question of whether to protest vs abstain and how to best protest is always going to depend on the details of what you're protesting or abstaining from.

In this case I think Kbin and Lemmy users should put their names on the r/place board according to the following reasoning:

The argument that you shouldn't go on r/places is essentially saying that the best protest against Reddit is people leaving Reddit, which I agree with
Like all protests however it's not that impactful if it's a few isolated people doing it, you need to find a way to have users do it en masse. Coordination is key.
Same thing for going on Kbin and Lemmy and others - these platforms become good if they have enough users to sustain vibrant communities, they rely on network effects.
r/place as an event is a showcase of a community's coordination. It both requires a community to be large and well-communicated and it gives a very practical, visible way of advertising that coordination to both rivals and random observers (there's a paper out there proposing that this is why music evolved btw, hmmm that's pretty cool)
what ultimately made me decide to post this is going on the thread for r/place's first day. Look at the conversations, this is exactly what they're doing: discussing the communities participating, commenting on what they draw and explicitly talking about what it means for those communities' size and coordination
These comments also included people asking "why fuck u/spez ?" and "the only reason I'm still on Reddit is that there aren't any alternatives"
This means there is a pool of normie users who aren't aware of the protest, but are following r/places, and the "fuck u/spez" movement is effective in bringing their attention to it
By the same token there are tons of users who aren't aware of existing potential Reddit alternatives (one of those comments got "Lemmy" as a recommendation in replies and said "interesting I'll check it out" - they legit hadn't heard about it).

In conclusion:
Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don't know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms.

Now in practice I don't know that these platforms actually have the size and coordination to showcase that on r/places and that's fine, clearly a huge percentage of people here believe that boycotting Reddit entirely is more effective or more convenient. But if the question is "which hurts Reddit more, promoting Lemmy/Kbin on r/places or avoiding r/places", I've come to believe the answer is the first.

EDIT: oh right another objection I saw was "but the admins will just erase it", and there again look at the comments on r/place. Clear streisand effect on the guillotine, if there's stuff for lemmy/kbin/squabble that's visible enough and admins erase it it still works fine from a comms perspective.

Anybody who gives the slightest fuck about finding an alternative is already aware of kbin/Lemmy. By trying to “advertise”, you’re only opening up the platform to brigading. Anybody who actually cares has already made the switch.

Oh, and on top of that, you’re giving Reddit additional traffic, which is exactly what they want right now. Just leave it alone!!
- Anybody who gives the slightest fuck about finding an alternative is already aware of kbin/Lemmy.
  
  you exist in a filter for people who know about kbin/lemmy. I only ever heard about them because of hackernews, which is a strong filter.
- Anybody who gives the slightest fuck about finding an alternative is already aware of kbin/Lemmy.
  
  That's just empirically not true and it's not how people and internet communities work. But I guess a more important question is, are you saying this because you believe it to be true or because you are happy with the size Kbin and Lemmy currently are and would prefer not to have a mass migration from Reddit that would change the vibes ? Because that's absolutely a valid concern. If that's not where you're coming from and you really do just think that sentence is true, at what point in time would you say we reached the point where everyone who needs to be aware of kbin/Lemmy became aware of kbin/Lemmy?
  
  By trying to “advertise”, you’re only opening up the platform to brigading.
  
  You WISH kbin or Lemmy were big and well-known enough to be worth brigading. Or maybe you don't, which would be valid as I said above and is a different conversation. And it's possible that by "brigading" you mean "an influx of newbies who ruin the vibe", in which case I agree that this is a possible effect of what I suggest. In fact it's the desired effect. However if this does in fact result in a mass of people going onto the platform with the intention of ruining conversations who would not have gone on it instead, that would suck but I'm not sure it couldn't also be leveraged as a streisand effect. Kind of like how for a nobody like Rocky Balboa just being in the ring with Apollo Creed was a win.
  
  Oh, and on top of that, you’re giving Reddit additional traffic, which is exactly what they want right now. Just leave it alone!!
  
  Yes, giving Reddit additional traffic sucks and is what they want. If there were a way of participating in r/places without doing so I'd recommend that as a no-brainer. However it doesn't just give Reddit additional traffic and "what Reddit wants" isn't necessarily what's actually best for Reddit. I made an argument for why I think it would also cause a certain amount of migration from Reddit and we can get more into it once I better understand whether that's something you want to avoid or not. The question then becomes what the net effect will be, and I don't think that's easy for anyone to know, including Reddit. But numbers-wise, given the number of people in these threads compared to the audience of r/places and the percentage of that audience who would be nudged towards checking out/contributing more to kbin or lemmy from seeing them on r/places, I really feel the net effect is more likely to be on our side.
I'd be on board with this, but as you say it's a show of a community's coordination. Are there any lemmy communities coordinating anything? I couldn't see any in a brief search, but I very well might have missed something.
- I don't think there currently are but I haven't searched either. I will say there were two separate "how about we do this" on kbin.social/m/redditMigration (where I first posted this comment), and given most replies seems to agree on shunning r/place I'd guess that nobody has started anything at this time. This comment isn't me volunteering to do it either, I wouldn't even know how to start, I just decided I disagreed with people's arguments and wanted to throw my thoughts out there. I might participate if something did get coordinated though; I don't have the app but when I was checking out r/place on my browser I seemed to hit a page where it looked like I could participate. Dunno if they changed things or if I misunderstood.
  
  Anyway ISTM lemmy.world/c/reddit (is this where this is?) and kbin.social/m/redditMigration would be the logical places for such coordination if it were to happen. They're the places I've seen people talk about it.

can`tada is at it again
and so many fuck spez, it is glorious
and thank you for sharing the progress so i can watch it a bit without generating traffic

without generating traffic

That was my intent ;)

The canvas looks so bland this year

No big community organization, mostly simple flags and f spez
- Yeah the flags just take up too much space (thanks france). Previous ones had lots of flags too but because of a more diverse community back then, the flags had artwork in them. I'm actually dissappointed about the osu! logo being so much smaller and blander this year.

Wow. They put a huge American flag over most of the 'Fuck Spez' stuff. I can't help but wonder if the admins had a hand in that because it sounds like a very specific 'fuck you' back.

This looks more like forced corporate games you have to participate for team building.

Aside from fuck spez, I think my favorite thing on there is Deep Cock Galactic

As a fan of DRG, this put a smile on my face

I remember taking part in /place before Reddit sold out. It was an amazingly fun time. But now the veneer has peeled off. I no longer see Reddit as a benevolent community focused and motivated platform. Rather, it is another Meta. Another shitty company that turned on its community and the people who make the place so interesting. It’s a pretty fucked up tactic in my book.

Reddit won’t be dying anytime soon, so I agree with the OPs approach. And yes, most of us found Lemmy/Kbin because we thought it was fucked up what Reddit did, but I’m guessing most of us are a little more on the tech side of things and willing to branch out beyond Meta and now Reddit.

Also, Place returning right now is too soon. It feels forced. It’s clearly motivated by the IPO and that bothers me. It’s not organic. It’s carefully calculated by a bunch of greedy assholes.

… which is exactly why we should give it zero attention or traffic. They’re using this as a pathetic attempt to bolster their traffic ahead of the IPO so they can point to this and say “HEY LOOK HOW AMAZING OUR TRAFFIC IS!!! Think of the potential ad revenue!”
- I get this perspective, but the reality is that Reddit has a lot of users that don’t care. Similarly, millions of people signed up for Meta’s Threads forking over a shitload of privacy. The majority of people aren’t educated enough to know or care about the issues at hand. So rather than us trying to fight a behemoth, we have to work alongside it to siphon off its community one member at a time.
I think it's interesting. In my perspective, reddit sold out many years ago when they started banning subs and more heavily regulating the subreddits in order to appease advertisers. For example on both /r/ketamine and /r/kratom you couldn't post vendors anymore without getting banned. Some subs like/r/steroidsourcetalk and /r/fakeids got banned outright. That was maybe 10 years ago? I feel like it was less maybe 6 or 7 I'm not sure. Also, they started banning radical political subs.

To you, they sold out in the last year or so. If you'll indulge me, how long have you been on reddit? I was around since 2008. Am I getting old? 🤔

Now this does put a smile on my face

It's around 88 233 if anyone wants to defend it, we lost half of it to an Italian flag

Ok alright. Even with the whole Reddit debacle and obvious attention/traffic grab...r/place seems to be working. I just spent 4 minutes staring little pixel details now present in day 2.

Probably the best collaborative creative idea to come from Reddit.

It really reminds me of this paper that was discussed on the Many Minds podcast awhile ago, about a new hypothesis on the evolution of music. Basically this person argued that music evolved as a credible signal for group cohesion - working together is a critical adaptive skill for humans (I recently finished Michael Tomasello's book "The Evolution of Agency" which I think drives that point home even harder), and singing and doing music requires coordination. And putting on a good performance requires really good coordination. So the idea is that it evolved as a signal of "you don't want to fuck with us, look at how much of a well-oiled machine we are".

It's just one hypothesis among others of course but it's compelling enough to me that it's wormed itself into my brain as being obviously true.

Anyway, I kind of want to find that author and link them to r/place and just go like "whaddaya think, is there a paper in this". There are quite a few ways internet communities flex and compete in terms of "we're more numerous and better organized than other communities" but I'm not sure there are others that are as performative as r/places. And I don't think it was intended that way, was it? Like, today's r/place says "alone you can do something, together you can do more" but when they originally did it had they expected explicit subreddit coordination to be such a big part of it? Or were they expecting something much more random and individual-driven?

I thought it wasn't too bad unitl I zoomed in...