Call me a conspiracy theorist but the amount and intensity of data they must get out of this is huge. They will know all the accounts that are anti-spez which they can monitor and algorithmically demote (soft censorship).
Reddit, like most captive-tech these days, is shifting to optimizing only for providing endless distraction to the 90% of mindless hoards which are easy to monetize.
I suspect Youtube will be next in line to squeeze the lemon, now that they are trying to block adblockers.
If they haven’t figured out which accounts are anti-Spez from their plain text comments I doubt they’ll get much extra insight out of pixels on the canvas.
You also give too much credit to what Spez & co. are doing (his little tantrums aside). Reddit has no value as a free platform, which is why they don’t care if those values get destroyed. They want to sell the content, get their money and call it a day.
Then Reddit gets fed into a LLM and becomes a sandtrap for the clueless netizens who stumble across it. It will be a bot-filled cesspit within the year after the sale/IPO.
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What I dung understand is why they’re all trying to become tictok when advertisers are starting to pay less and less for endless-scrolling platforms.
Yeah, people will spend hours zombie-scrolling through 30-second content, but within 2 minutes they’ve forgotten what they’ve watched. That makes ads on the platforms worthless.
Youtube is on the way to doing it right. Use the shorts to get people to follow an account and then start watching longer videos.
Yeah I thought ads are worthless too, as everyone I know just blocks them. But that’s when I realized the people like us who block ads ARE the 10% they now neglect! the other clueless 90% of masses are the ones they are after. There are so many more of them and they are so much easier to monetize
They gave up on us because we are too smart and they cant squeeze anything out of us.
IMO that’s why we have to accept that its time to leave and build our own better internet lol
YouTube is getting a lot worse too, though. It’s packed full of gimmicky content creators at this point who just make basically the same video over and over and over again. Sometimes their one point has some value worth considering, but even then much of the time they reduce themselves to a fake brand pandering to some small subsection of users.
this is like following your ex on instagram. time to let them go
True, but also, this is a community for talking about reddit
Gotta vent about our ex at some point.
I need the shadenfreud of seeing what shitty life choices shes making.
By opening up r/place again, they’ve stolen the magic from it.
The first time it happened, it was amazing and novel.
The second time was an incredible surprise each time the board opened up again. I was involved with the r/Beach House community to put up an homage to our favorite band.
But now… It’s become repetitive. It feels like just an attention grab, like a ploy to artificially increase traffic to the site. This time, it looks no different from every other time r/place has taken… place. It’s flags everywhere, there’s so much anger surrounding it, and it’s just not fun.
r/place was special because of its spontaneity. But now it’s soulless, like every other corporate-owned internet phenomenon is.
Fuck Steve Huffman.
Everything from these big corps have no soul. Because we know it’s just about exploiting users for money.
I want the old internet back so bad. Hopefully federation can fuel many new actually fun services that are not built to make money but to actually entertain and amuse people, or simply be useful.
I personally feel pleasure from doing good things in the world. But it seems to be a group of people who doesn’t feel it’s worth doing something for others unless there is money to be made from it.
I feel bad for every user that hasn’t experienced an internet before all of this. Golden years to me, was 1996 ~ 2008. To others, far earlier.
The only thing we had to deal with then, was just popups. Now, it’s like every fucking thing imaginable has to be turned into some subscription or retooled to be shareholder friendly. Because that’s exactly what everything is gearing towards to appease - these fucking shareholders with stakes. Shareholders, who constitute a band of people who have absolutely no knowledge or fucks given as to what made things as good as they were in past internet. It’s all about data farming for money to then market people to shit.
Google had to go and acquire YouTube, things seemed okay in the beginning. Now look at it, fucking bombardment of ads if you aren’t using an adblocker. Amazon had to go and acquire Twitch and things seemed okay in the beginning. Now look at it, you’re meaning to tell me I have to sit through 8 ads, while you minimize a stream of a channel I’m watching?! AND You’re going to make YOUR OWN SUBSCRIPTION WHEN AMAZON PRIME ISN’T ENOUGH?! ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?!
Reddit was great until 2016, it broke itself over politics. Then it broke itself even further by 2020 and now we are where we are with it. Social Media, is running in place. It’s about statistics anymore. Has Facebook ever been useful and functional? I’m having a hard time now remembering when the last time it even had real people helping you, because now it’s just in some stupid half-ass wiki that doesn’t even have all of the answers in it’s own ecosystem.
Everyone is too politicized now, almost can’t go a damn few comments anymore without someone coming up to you with an emotionally charged reply, that’s hiding in the background, the basis of their political stance.
FUCK WEB 3.0 AND ALL THAT IT HAS WROUGHT!
I agree and this internet we have now has turned into crap, and it’s the corporations who is responsible for it, because they want their profits.
Every big tech service is always nice at first and then the horrific ads and user tracking starts. People use an ad company to search the internet now and that’s completely normal appearently. :)
I agree in general, but search feels like an odd example. That space has been dominated by ad companies since even before the internet (e.g., Yellow Pages).
It’s pathetic because it’s nothing new, it’s old code, they just have to run it again to try and distract the users. There’s no changes, no creativity, no risk. They’re just jangling keys in front of the baby to try and stop it crying
I might could live with repetitive if it wasn’t for the anger. I’ve got a 2’x2’ print of 2022’s canvas sitting next to my desk, and I still get lost in it every now and then. Just another trip exploring a new canvas could be fun.
But then I open the page and 15% of it is just “fuck spez” and everyone is angry. Rightfully so, but… I just don’t feel it anymore.
It’s now a symbol of how deteriorated Reddit has become. I mean, yeah, you’ve summarized it perfectly. r/place is now the symbolism of everything wrong with Reddit. It’s repetitious, as much as all of the karma farming posts on Reddit have been for years. All the other places had contained a culture snapshot of everything that Reddit brought together.
All that this version of Place has brought, is all of the anguish towards one person and their poor decision making.
It seems emptier this time. Like lots of uncontested space there.
Ehh, flags dominated since the very first r/place.
But yes it’s pretty obvious each new edition is ever more astroturfed. The second one had lots of obvious organised bots designing perfect shapes and logos, and moderators’ meddling was noticed as well.
So, at the end, it worked?.. shame
Reddit does not need love, people enjoying it or whatever, they need traffic. Advertisers dont care if you are there just to express how awfull reddit is, they need views. I would have love to see this shit staying blank.
I think even if users actually abstained, bots would get involved to make place look active. maybe. I don’t know how far reddits willing to go to make it seem like they’re a good platform
But wouldn’t that open them up to serious litigation for misleading shareholders when they drop the IPO?
They’re going to IPO on the basis of content that’s already there. If they have two braincells to rub together they won’t make any promises about current and future content and how it gets in.
How many of them don’t know about Lemmy yet and would switch in a second if they found out?
I don’t know if the comparison applies here cause whats happening in reddit is a little bit more aggressive, but i have been in another more local based dying internet community (Taringa was pretty popular in latinamerica, 15 years ago or so)… we all knew the moment in which the site died. We expressed ourselves, made jokes about the owners, tried to fight back… nothing changed and people continued to use the site, mostly because we didnt have a replacement for it. At the end it took aprox. 10 years to settle down to the dead site that it is now. Its like a candle, slowly devouring itself to the end. I guess the same will happen with reddit.
I think a lot of reddit users havent even thought about looking for a replacement, they dont know about lemmy and they wouldnt switch either. I may be wrong.
I was on Digg before switching to Reddit 14 years ago and once people were told Reddit existed there was a landslide of people switching because Digg admins were being such jackasses.
Our French compatriots are giving Spez the guillotine!
lmao I didn’t know what was happening in this one for a moment
There are a bunch of posts of people recording the admins censoring it now.
Yep saw the guillotine thanos snapping before my eyes… This could’ve actually been fun but fucckkiinnnggg reddit.
Can we start out own lemmy place?
It’s seemingly true. If not admins (who else would it be?), it’s absolutely getting botted like crazy. Here’s the evidence
How much is Spez paying their admins to stay up all day and night censoring place? lmao
That’s pretty damning. At best, it’s a bot. Individual users would pick less random colors like predominantly white and black.
So at best, it’s a troll with a bot that is beating their anti bad actor measures.
It’s basically bots vs admins now. Most pixels are places by new accounts or by entities without accounts at all.
The highlight this year is going to be that animation by the Osu! I think.
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I’m glad that this does nothing for me.
I’m disappointed that this is how I learned that.
You have ruined my day man why
you can see the eness stream of black dots harassing the LGBT flag.
I’m glad I finally found someone referencing this. It made me so sad to see. I really feel like this wave of anti LGBTQ+ sentiment is spreading and all from a fucking pointless culture war started by absolute morons.
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yeah.
You missed the best part, in the German Flag, they’ve written “u/spez ist ein Hurensohn!”
Translation: u/spez is a son of a whore/bitch (Google says bitch, commenters are saying whore.)
Welp, that’s my vocabulary lesson for the day. Screenshot:
Also, the dino in the upper right is cute.
no one cares about the dino, I just wanna read “FUCK SPEZ!”
I think the Dino is cute :c but I agree I would prefer more “FUCK SPEZ”.
i’m gonna write the italian version, if i can
What’s that mean?
I don’t know any German, so this is a complete guess, but I think it’s spez is a whores son
Good guess.
Hure [ˈhuːrə] = whore Sohn [ˈzøːnə] = son
Why do u act like everyone knows German?
It’s not hard to look it up.
Hurensohn - son of a bitch.
Yeah, before I looked up the translation I figured it was “whore’s son” which is close enough.
That’s actually exactly what it means, not “son of a bitch.”
Or whoreson if you want to go a bit Shakespeare.
I always want to go a bit Shakespeare!
Shall I compare the to a Summer‘s day? Thou art hot
Are you telling me I can put words into the internet and it will just tell me what it means??
I just assumed it was something disparaging him and was satisfied
It’s not hard to guess since it’s basically whoreson
Are you trolling? Because your username is literally a German word
You re the only one got it and it upsets me
Usa un traductor, son solo 3 palabras
BONER KEBAB
the admins are using their powers to remove things.
Just stop giving it attention. This is driving traffic and ultimately increases the number of interaction, which is good for reddit. I see people post screenshots of their phones, again driving numbers for the app that they just propped up by killing 3rd party apps.
I’m somewhat okay with someone having posted a screenshot, but 100% agree that we don’t need to send traffic to Reddit.
That doesn’t seem particularly realistic at this point… ~Cherri
should’ve written join lemmy
Really disappointed by all the “fuck Spez” instead of “join Lemmy,” you’d think advertising a competitor would be much more hurtful to Reddit…
I think all the Lemmy folks don’t want to give Reddit the traffic. At least that’s my theory.
That’s been the overwhelming response each time I’ve seen it brought up. I want to help put little Lemmy symbols or something, but I haven’t seen one forming when I’ve had a chance to check
I see that, but that’s not the way.
Guerrilla marketing is still needed and if you use the proper tools (I guess everybody has browser extentions here!), your interactions won’t give a coin to reddit.
I get a lot of pleasure, even laughing by myself hysterically, when I help “Deep Rock” become “Deer Cock”, when I help make “Connecting” into “Cumnecting”, and when with one little pixel I make “Factorio” into a slur…
Is there something wrong with me?
You’re just doing the Lord’s work, thank you for your service 👍
I fought against the Canadian flag last time. I’m off reddit now, but will remember the good memes.
I printed off a large 18x18 inch vinyl decal of last years /r/Place and put it on my fridge. I love looking at it every time I am cooking, because I see something new every time.
Can’t wait to print this years off and stick it blow.
every time they do r/place it feels a little less special
I think it felt fine in 2022, the five year gap was long enough. But this year… it just feels hollow to me. Can’t tell if that’s from repetition or just me being burnt out on Reddit, or both.
For me the biggest problem is nationalism here, you can paint anything and the map is just fucking flags
Have you seen America lately? Them removed drive around in their truck flying their flag with a vinyl decal of their flag on their back windshield, wearing a flag hat, shirt, and shorts, with sunglasses with their flag, blasting their anthem, with their lawn chairs in the back.
EDIT: omg… lemmy can edit my comment and censor stuff when I click post? That’s concerning.
Every time you do anything more and more often it feels less special. That’s how things work.
I can imagine they attempted to save face after all the 3rd party app mess, of course it’s an ill-advised decision and backfired on them as it should.
