Yes. Yes he can.

  • @lightninhopkins@beehaw.org
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    172 years ago

    I’m not sure why Huffman doesn’t just do away with their PR department and respond to media inquiries with a poop emoji like his hero.

    • @Uniquitous@lemmy.oneOP
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      92 years ago

      Probably he just doesn’t want to be accused of being unoriginal. He wishes he’d thought of it first.

  • @lasagna@programming.dev
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    2 years ago

    When you have that much money, does it matter?

    Trump and Musk are great examples of being too rich to fall. Once you get to that point, you can fuck the poor as much as you want. The only way for you to fall is to fuck with other powerful people a la that pedo ring leader who was murdered by guards after getting caught.

  • @patchymoose@lemmy.ml
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    1402 years ago

    It’s really apparent that Spez and the rest of the admin team don’t actually use Reddit on a day to day basis. Their decisions are like some consultant coming in and recommending ideas.

  • tal
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    212 years ago

    Not really the focus of the article, but I think that /r/place was a neat idea, but hard to produce much with.

    I feel like maybe there are forms of collaborative art that might go further, like letting people propose various changes to a chunk of pixels on an artwork and letting people vote on the changes.

  • @SalaTris@beehaw.org
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    222 years ago

    Engagement is what matters, and that’s driven by habits. The protests were disruptive. The switching of apps is disruptive. I see this more as a way to distract and bring up engagement again.

    Is it a good idea? Honestly, if they want to succeed I think they should focus on what has become broken with reddit first

      • @morrowind@lemmy.ml
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        52 years ago

        I’m already seeing users working together to put up protest banners and void everything else. The internet is beautiful

    • Rentlar
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      52 years ago

      Hahahaha, uh oh I might see if there’s going to be a join lemmy logo effort.

    • tal
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      2 years ago

      It looks like people have created /r/place alternatives. If you like /r/place, could just use one of those and go draw something neat and popularize that. I don’t really see what drawing a bunch of images complaining about spez using the service that spez runs is going to accomplish. On the other hand, if people are doing neat things elsewhere, then other people might want to participate.

      https://old.reddit.com/r/place/comments/64zlnw/an_easy_guide_for_r_place_alternatives/

      That was six years ago, so could be newer stuff out.

      • pbjamm
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        22 years ago

        What made Place special was the rarity. It created a sort of internet time capsule of what was popular or in the collective mind at that point in time. If you wanted to get what was important to you on the board then you had to act with purpose RIGHT NOW because it would be over and gone in a couple of days. Even with all the effort put in it would be erased at the end. Just Dust in the Wind.

        • tal
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          2 years ago

          I remember, as a kid, once going to a Buddhist sand-painting exhibition at an art museum. They made these huge, beautiful mandalas by carefully shaking colored sand into designs. When they were done, they dumped it out into the ocean. I remember – being pretty impressed with it – asking something like “but why would you destroy it”, and the Buddhist monk guy said something like “it reminds us not to be too attached to material things”.

          Don’t know if I agreed with the guy, but I think that there is probably a very real perspective out there that ephemerality has intrinsic value.

          • pbjamm
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            12 years ago

            Exactly what I was thinking. Place would not be as compelling if it were a regular occurrence or if it were a permanent never-ending contest.

  • @Mane25@feddit.uk
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    542 years ago

    Wouldn’t be surprised at all at this point if Reddit manipulates this version of r/Place to make it look like the protests are smaller than they are.

    • @tburkhol@beehaw.org
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      132 years ago

      I would not be surprised if this is an experiment to see the effect of killing API on the event. I mean, really, not many accounts have left reddit (a lot have showed up on lemmy/kbin, but a small fraction of reddit), and I remember a lot of complaints of bots in the last place. It’s just 3 months since the last one, so they should get great data on the effect of API charges on their bot access.

      • @Mane25@feddit.uk
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        2 years ago

        Why is that? Covering up the protests would be the opposite of drawing attention to it surely?

          • @Mane25@feddit.uk
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            22 years ago

            My presumption is the kind of people who would notice that kind of thing are either OK with it or are already off of Reddit.

        • @Master@beehaw.org
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          12 years ago

          The fact that they would be obviously covering it up would be noticeable to people and would cause what they are trying to cover up to become more prominent in the news and on the site.

    • @NaoPb@beehaw.org
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      22 years ago

      While I agree with that cause I would like to point out to other readers that it is not directly related to the spez situation.

  • Foreigner
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    2 years ago

    My guess is Reddit is doing this to temporarily raise traffic. It’s like rage bait. They know they’re pissing people off and protestors will flood the site, but traffic is traffic. If they can demonstrate engagement it must be good enough for the upcoming IPO.

    • Sinnerman
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      702 years ago

      Right? I don’t understand why people on the fediverse are getting excited about this. At best, Reddit will have admins to insta-wipe anything objectionable. At worst, Reddit will point to the increased engagement as a sign that the protesters gave up and came back.

        • quortez
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          332 years ago

          That’s genius honestly. The void should win this year

          • pbjamm
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            62 years ago

            Last Week Tonight is on break so The Void should be available for engagements.

          • ReMikeAble
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            12 years ago

            I recall watching the The Void form in a timelapse and just how it consumed everything around it.

    • @XTornado@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      Anyone would see that a one time event engagement doesn’t solve anything, you cannot do the r/place every week…

    • @morrowind@lemmy.ml
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      272 years ago

      I’ve been working with some other people on discord. The plan is to spam the entire canvas with tiny API’s like amogus was last time. We’ve got it down to 4x7 pixels

    • @Contend6248@feddit.de
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      242 years ago

      Anyone over there using the service and still trying to protest are just lost.

      They already went through the hard part PR wise

      • takeda
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        192 years ago

        You know admins can easily remove anything drawn there. They are trying to bring traffic back, because of the upcoming IPO.

        • Big P
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          22 years ago

          I think with the amount of things people are planning to draw the canvas is going to look pretty empty if they remove all of them. Plus, if you wrote something like “API” in small letters everywhere on the canvas they’d have a hard time keeping up

      • Rentlar
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        52 years ago

        I went easy on myself. I vowed to never comment or post on that account… buuuut I didn’t say I wouldn’t place any dots in protest.

        Hmmm I wonder if the V O I D will win out this time.

  • @worfamerryman@beehaw.org
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    512 years ago

    I can’t even view it on mobile without logging in or getting an app.

    He seems desperate to make Reddit work. It seems that he can’t take the ego hit to back pedal his decision and is trying to figure out a way forward.

    • soft_frog
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      322 years ago

      My gut says this is an effort to make employees feel good after layoffs and protests, but also this looks to be someone to juice the monthly active users metric before an IPO roadshow or fundraising or something.

      Ironically /r/place would be a good opportunity to win users to the official app, they probably should have done that before the API price changes to shake the tree of third party apps, so to speak.

      Anyways, this is going to be 80% “fuck /u/spez” memes, a German flag, the Apollo logo, and a perfect OSU game logo.

      I almost decided to make an account just to participate in the new /r/place, but then I would be supporting Reddit.

      • @B0rax@feddit.de
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        62 years ago

        Maybe some employee suggested r/place a joke, fully knowing it would be a bad idea and management just ran with it.

    • Chozo
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      342 years ago

      It’s a limited-time event that Reddit occasionally does where users can all draw on a large, shared board, one pixel at a time. There’s a time limit on how often you can draw a single pixel. A lot of subreddits would get together to organize and plan out images for their communities to draw. And since it’s a single, shared whiteboard, you have a lot of communities competing with each other over space and vandalizing each other’s works. Then usually at the end Reddit will create a full-size PNG of the “completed” work and end the event.

      It’s usually seen as a melting pot of the communities, where people could get together and interact with groups they probably wouldn’t have otherwise. Launching this now, when they’re facing so much backlash over a slew of ridiculous policy changes that have forced many users off the platform, is an incredibly delusional move on their part.

      There are two things that Reddit wants to do with opening /r/Place again:

      1: Trick the users into thinking that Reddit still cares about the community that they’ve nickeled and dimed off the platform
      2: Force more people into using the official app and new web layout, since /r/Place can’t be interacted with using third-party apps or old.reddit

        • Rentlar
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          112 years ago

          Definitely this, they have probably been planning this to pump their engagement numbers up. If I am gonna engage, then I’d better be doing it to give Reddit the middle finger.

      • @Mothra@mander.xyz
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        132 years ago

        Yeah I deleted the comment immediately as soon as I read the article but I guess I still got replies

        • LEX
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          82 years ago

          It’s not deleted for me, I can still see it.

          • @14th_cylon@lemm.ee
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            132 years ago

            deleting works like that. when you delete a comment, you delete it from your own instance where you created it, but it is not deleted from all the other instances where it propagated meanwhile.

            i have no idea whether it is a bug or feature.

            • Chozo
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              152 years ago

              I believe it’s a sync issue between instances. Eventually, his comment should update and show as deleted on the instance you’re viewing from. New material seems to sync immediately across most instances, but edits/deletions appear to be lower-priority and take longer. Some mod actions like thread removals also don’t appear to sync correctly right away.

              At least, that’s been my experience, not sure how much truth there is to that. I’m using Kbin, which is also a bit weird with Lemmy content in the first place (for instance, Kbin apparently does not recognized locked threads from other instances, and will still let you comment, though they won’t appear on the original instance at all).