‘FUCK SPEZ’: Reddit Users Unite to Turn r/Place Mural Into a Protest::Reddit’s collaborative art project seemingly has one overarching message to Reddit’s CEO.
There’s something weird about “protesting” a site by continuing to use their site. Hopefully it’s just bot traffic flooding /r/place rather than real people coordinating in real time.
Exactly. The real protest would have been to totally ignore r/place. Could you imagine a blank canvas. That would have been epic.
Problem is, that reddit themselves would just start using bots to create simulated pixel placements so it would look like people are interacting such that people feel they must start playing as well. Much like agar.io or similar .io games that are actually not real multiplayer games untill they gain critical mass, bit still probably contains bots.
Ya all weird as heck. People who decided to not leave reddit because that’s still their main content provided try to vent their anger in any possible way. And while there’s no thing like bad PR, according to the saying, the truth is that media coverage is underlining bad management from reddit side and how uncooperative it’s users became (they literally fight administration at this point ). So while reddit may have gained numbers in interaction, I don’t believe potential investors can simply omit all these news and quite evident burning of company.
I’d say if they ain’t gonna leave, doing this is the second best thing. Keep it up, redditors, keep it up.
And then they went back to using reddit. Hell of a protest. /s
That’s the reddit logic for you.
Make a huge, heavily invested deal about a cause.
Do something that suggests that there’s going to be a follow-up of change.
But actually do nothing about it and resume status-quo, while talking about how there could’ve been change, what can be done and act all defeatist.
I’m on a private sub with a whole cross section of people (it’s a Keble sub) and so many of them where angry and never gonna use Reddit again, none of them have left the sub and still post though.
That’s disappointing, Lemmy is fantastic but I guess I understand it’s hard to break up with what’s familiar
I’m firmly in the camp that once the major 3rd party apps end up making lemmy apps there will be a gradual migration
I think it’s chicken and egg.
I find it hard to spend much time on Lemmy cause there’s not as much content being posted… Which is because there aren’t as many users… But users won’t come until there’s content…
I also still stand by the whole instance thing being confusing for someone to join (though I do understand its benefits I guess)
It takes a commitment. I still use Reddit, but only if I run out of content on fedi.
causing users to suggest that Reddit admins are interfering with their art (there is no evidence so far that would prove this)
If you watch the time lapse, you’ll see that the guillotine was wiped away in an instant, which would either require mass coordination or admin privileges. There’s also the fact that it was removed in chunks, not pixel-by-pixel. Also, it was proven last year that one of the mods didn’t have a cooldown.
Reddit has been thrown into chaos because the company began charging for access to its API
No, it’s because they began charging an amount that isn’t affordable to third-party app developers and with very little notice. They also lied about being willing to work with developers and they made false allegations against Apollo’s developer.
In some of the screenshots, it’s clear that a brush is being used by the uniform distribution of pixels in the same size/pattern in multiple areas.
I don’t really think the admins are concerned about concealing their actions anymore. They’re just trying to cashout on a sinking dumpster fire while its valuation plummets.
Actually it’s because he’s a pissbaby
The point of opening it this early again was to garner traffic. Don’t go there at all. It would have been best if only mods and corpo shills were placing pixels.
This 100%. Engagement to show your protest is still engagement. Give Reddit your absence.
I wish I did this. I went to check if there were any signs of the protest and couldn’t help but contribute to one of the “fuck spez” signs
I then realized that place already felt kind of overdone last time they did it, this time it just feels completely meaningless
Place is cool when its people just working together to draw things. What is not cool is the corpo bots instantaneously placing their logo and people fucking with the art outside of the given rules to users. That ruins it completely.
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As much as I’ve been enjoying Lemmy and really like it as a platform, I don’t think any of this this is fine because there are just too many niche communities that are either unwilling or unable to just pick up and move, which means that in practice to the extent that I only participate here and not on Reddit I am missing out on a lot of content that I used to look forward to.
This was actually how the internet was before Reddit as well.
People move and adapt. Reddit wasn’t always the shining beacon of communities you think it currently is.
Activity Pub is a clear improvement over Reddit, and separating from Spez’s incompetence is a bonus.
Reddit wasn’t always the shining beacon of communities you think it currently is.
You are putting words into my mouth that I did not speak nor do I think; I have only pointed out that there are communities on Reddit that do not have a strong presence here whose absence I miss.
People move and adapt.
While I hope you are correct in this case, this is not always true. Sometimes good things are simply lost.
Activity Pub is a clear improvement over Reddit, and separating from Spez’s incompetence is a bonus.
I agree, which is why I have shifted the vast majority of the time I spent on Reddit here instead.
Edit: Ah, lovely, a downvote without a reply. Glad to see that the Lemmy community is such a dramatic improvement over the Reddit community. :-)
I actually find it kind of freeing. With Reddit I kept scrolling in hopes of finding something interesting through one of those niche communities, with Lenny I find myself doomscrolling a lot less
I get it, and that is a totally valid experience that you and probably many other people have had, but I personally never considered myself to be doomscrolling when seeing what was new with the Haskell programming language, going through what crazy experience people have had playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup lately, learning from the the really insightful in-depth explanations of history that were posted to AskHistorians, and so on. I do not consider the subtraction of these things from my life to have ultimately been a benefit, it just makes me feel less in the loop about the things that I care about.
I’ve seen some people talking about how the lemmy developers are planning for the ability to “group” communities (of the same name or something like that) on different instances together.
I’m taking this as those communities then forming one community that doesn’t have to rely on a single instance’s community to “survive”.
Haven’t put too much thought into this but I think that would at least lessen that problem, especially for new niche subjects popping up. The difficulty for existing niche communities starting anew here will probably remain but I’m hopeful for the future.That does sound like a reason to be hopeful for the future. Thank you for telling me about this.
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Oh come on, Germany is a beautiful, civilized country.
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In order to make something good you must have a clear vision of how it truly is. That means recognising it’s negatives but also allowing space to recognise it’s positives to. Germany is not entirely good or bad. Even if you feel it is largely or overall bad, if you want it to be good you must celebrate and support where it is good to nurture those positives.
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How can you not be patriotic when you have so good doner kebab?! I live kinda near Köln and there is a kebab place near the Belgian quartier, mem-et, and I regularly think about it because it’s so good.
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Freiersohn then
Best protest would be if people didn’t obsess over clicking pixels in r/place, giving the site traffic. I can’t stand these people.
somebody should really build a Fediverse version of r/place so anybody from any ActivityPub-powered site can join in and place a pixel every 5 minutes
It’s not federated but there is pixelcanvas.io, which is like r/place but infinite and not controlled by Reddit
You might have something here. Development would be easy but maintenance and moderation is another beast.
which is why it should be limited as a yearly event similar to r/place right now.
Bizarre that people are on Reddit complaining about reddit still
Half the problem is, that’s where people are.
The network effect exists because adoption is a feature you can’t design.
I also think this whole place thing being back up is a test from Reddit how engaging the community is in their “Quarterly Reports!”. Many people and old time users left Reddit stating that losing the active or dedicated users will be enough for them to go down and Reddit needs data to support the opposite. In Reddit’s eye if “F u/spez” generates clicks and ad revenues, why not letting it loose!
Louis Rosmann put it nice on his series of videos about the topic. And unfortunately Reddit will still have that portion of users that are so invested in it, that will play along with whatever Reddit cooks for them.
For me, the simple fact that Reddit thinks they “own” the data that millions of people have put the time into making, was an enough reason to stop participating in anything there. Including upvoting and downvoting.
I don’t think enough folks even know what Lemmy is.
I have a product I’m trying to build and will be launching shortly to allow folks easy access to their own lemmy servers and I plan on running some ad campaigns.
The problem is people are selling Lemmy the wrong way, lol. The average user doesn’t give a fuck about decentralization or federation. If you want to convince people that Lemmy is a good Reddit alternative, you have to show them the content/discussions and the UI/UX.
UI/UX is getting better, but still far away. The mobile apps are okay. Content is still behind, mostly because most lemmings aren’t helping their communities in generating content and engagement. The moderators can only do so much in curating. You got to help them out by posting content as well or at least commenting on the threads. Don’t just lurk.
There’s a group of us working on a join-lemmy banner, it’s a struggle tho since it’s such a small group.
Our Matrix chat is here for any who want to join in on the effort: https://matrix.to/#/!hiNoQZCxnHSsATzzmo:data.haus?via=data.haus&via=matrix.org
This is an awesome idea! I need to test my matrix setup anyways maybe I’ll set up my server then join
If they still don’t know what lemmy is, they aren’t the type of educated we need to be pushing towards lemmy.
This has been my thought… I’m sure there is still an extremely large number of productive, healthy users left on reddit. However, I think the proportion of the userbase sways very heavily towards trolls, bots, and toxic users at this point.
I feel okay with shutting the hatch to a flooding chamber at the cost of a few, to save the many others on the ship…
Most of the healthy users have left reddit. Now just let reddit consume itself and fulfill its new destiny to become a bot-filled, anti-intellectual, hate-filled, giant corporate circle-jerk.
EDIT: I attached this to the wrong comment
if you don’t want the drama, you can always block the reddit communities from your account, be a pioneer for the new culture of Lemmy, ping me if you found something cool. we are constantly getting new people who aren’t over our “shared Ex” yet. be patient with them.
Worth noting, this was posted to a technology community, not a reddit community, so you can’t escape it entirely.
!technology@lemmy.world is a place for news and drama, it can be blacklisted too, i would love to see the community renamed to reflect that
Over the last few hours, many of the “FUCK SPEZ” drawings have started to be taken over by other image, causing users to suggest that Reddit admins are interfering with their art (there is no evidence so far that would prove this).
Except the fact that the over writing pixels all arrive in large blocks at the same time rather than individually like real users would place them, and also that they appear with no username attached to them like user placed ones?
They also went out of thier way to use the same checkerboard overwrites that they used on the guillotine, on a QR code that took people to a website promoting veganism.
QR code was a mistake and does not suite that use case. Changing a few spots would have corrupted the URL whereas a “Lemmy” sign would’ve been much better. Even with corrupted pixels, it would still be distinctly recognizable.
This is not true: QR codes have built in error correction, they are designed specifically for the purpose of working when many pixels are distorted
QR codes have error corrections up to about ~30% error tolerance when using the highest error correction level
It’s worth noting the QR code from earlier went to this site and was not lemmy related
(there is no evidence so far that would prove this).
i saw a (likely deleted) post saying there were pixels with no user names of those who changed it “aint that sus”
And yet this is probably good for reddit. They live on amount of engagement and you dummies just fell for it.
You can’t spend engagement. It’s not real.
But you can convince advertisers to give you money based on how much engagement the site gets and therefore how much engagement their ads are likely to get. ~Cherri
The admins can push whatever stupid numbers they want. People were not somehow tricked into giving the site a second wind, by turning this desperate exploitation of a beloved icon into a vulgar billboard against the fucker selling us out, or by dumping all the soon-to-be-stolen awards onto comments asking what the fuck he thinks he’s doing.
The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer. Any response, including no response, will be twisted around and treated as victory, because the person being condemned for making shit up gets to make shit up. There are no circumstances where they don’t go “Ah-HA!” There is no point scolding people for not doing the thing that would stop this, because that thing does not exist. People who care what’s real just have to deal with it and act in spite of it.
Reddit has the worst per-user stats of any social media site, by an order of magnitude… and the bump in engagement here is bluntly saying it’s time to leave.
Exactly, I’m fully expecting the admins to wipe out any undesirable things off the wall the second the timer runs out. And that’s the wall they’ll show to their investors.
If you run an ad blocker and no ads turn up when you browse , they they won’t get ad money from you. Negating the value of engagement.
You went there, generated content for them which is generating publicity. Other people, without ad blockers, are going there to see it …
Pathetic the people that participate in this r/place, such protesting! wow! you’re so brave! You’re still giving reddit traffic btw…
please be patient, people cant know everything, teach them to stop but don’t jeer at them.
Okay I admit I was a bit harsh, but arghhh, sometimes it gets frustrating…
This r/place is a great visualization of the damage done to Reddit. Previous r/places have been much more interesting and vibrant. The current canvas has large portions covered with boring flags and overall there’s just less going on, much less depth and variety. A great confirmation that Reddit has indeed changed, and a great visualization of how it has changed.
The fact that they’re bringing this back in a month other than April is pathetic. I don’t know what species is worse. You don’t see them trying to fuck each other over for a goddamn percentage.
Even if the designs are less fancy than before it is still very active.
its bot traffic, copy+pastes, or meta commentary
its debatable if r/place is used by humans in any notable capacity.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. The fact that these articles are making fairly large headlines is proof enough that this event is backfiring.
A couple days of engagement traffic do not outweigh the negative PR and advertising impact from this event.
If you were a company, you might think twice before advertising on a site that has their users actively, publicly, and loudly trashing on the CEO. It says a lot that it’s happening in the first place. Says even more that they aren’t able to stop it.
Also, look at the activity numbers here. I’m not trying to trash on Lemmy, but we are a drop on the bucket. It’s far more effective for us to be visible and loud than silent and ignored.
For clarity sake, I’m not encouraging anyone to go do anything, nor the other way around. But if you want to, ignore the comments, saying that this is going to say, Reddit with traffic and engagement from you if you go. It clearly isn’t, and your loud protest is valuable. 
If you were a company, you might think twice before advertising on a site that has their users actively, publicly, and loudly trashing on the CEO.
Isn’t this just wishful thinking? Let’s be 100% real for a moment, those people posting fuck spez on r/place aren’t doing it because they’re moving or have moved to an alternative, they’re doing it because they are addicted to Reddit and can’t stop using it. The true protest is moving to an alternative like Lemmy.
If I’m an advertiser, all I see is a very captive audience. This isn’t like the Twitter situation, where your ads will be shown to increasingly objectionable content. In fact, with all the users begrudgingly downloading the official Reddit app, the value of advertising on Reddit may be going up not down.
That being said, Reddit has never been a good place for advertising outside of a few niches, and that hasn’t changed, so in the long run Reddit most likely won’t survive. But in the short run, I don’t think this is the victory lap.
There is no true protest. Let people react how they want. I don’t understand the gatekeeping on how to respond against spez. If you want to leave Reddit completely and stay on Lemmy, great. If others want to burn the site down in protest, that’s great as well. Why are so many people on Lemmy trashing people who similarly hate how Reddit is now? As if it would make a difference anyhow if they listened to you.
Because they’re fans of ostrich protesting, put your head in the sand and pretend the problem dissappears.
That or they’re the same content junkies who can’t seem to scroll past or block things that don’t interest them like some self hating masochist.
Why do people even participate after all this mess
Because they’re hopeful they can save the site through activism. What they forget is that they are not protesting a government, they are trying to stop a corporate entity from fulfilling it’s legal obligations to make money for it’s investors.
