The only thing those people are signalling, in my opinion, is that it doesn't take much to bait people into engaging with reddit to give them traffic, can't wait for an article about how metrics are going up so investors have nothing to worry about.
Investors aren’t idiots. Advertising is a major draw for investors if the subscription model isn’t great. A site that serves millions of views of fuckspez isn’t attractive to advertisers.
You might of had a point of investors being able to look the other way during tech bro funding time, but a lot of the free cash has dried up. Reddit has to convince Betty Crocker that their platform is a great place for cake recipes. If everything goes “ ¼ sick of butter, 2 eggs, 1 pound of fuckspez.” They’re going to have a really hard time driving that point.
This is why it seems all the social media platforms are flying apart at the seams here. Pretty much all of them were flying high on the free to low interest cash. Now that a lot of them have to justify things for every penny and nickel they want, they’re realizing they didn’t have a great model to begin with and are hoping users will snap in place with the new “paradigm”.
But that’s the thing. Employees snap because their check relies on it. A lot of users don’t snap the same for the reason that lot of them just use social media as an outlet. Which for the users that are using these platforms for a source of income/word of mouth, they’re just watching this conflagration in tears.
I have the sinking feeling that they don’t care if anything is sustainable. They just want the IPO to happen with the highest inflated numbers then run away as soon as possible, leaving the whole thing burning behind them. It’s not about marking Reddit successful again, it’s about getting rich fast.
This was probably the most cynical move Reddit could have made. A big part of what made r/place special was that it was so rare. I have such good memories of the first one.
It’s also just incredibly boneheaded. The API changes happened three weeks ago. People have not forgotten, they are still removing/threatening mods even today, hell there are almost 2000 subs still protesting. And now they give people a microphone during an incredibly public event that they coordinated with twitch?
/r/Place has always had massive country flags whenever it ran. But the way I see it, the largest murals need the most people working on it, and getting many people involved means having them all be connected in some way, and country-of-origin is the easiest way to do that. Combine that with the fact that the biggest non-English communities on western social media like Reddit (and Lemmy too, now) tend to be German or French, and it's no surprise that the two largest murals are those flags.
You'd wish people would find something else to represent them and have fun with things like this, but people gravitate towards the largest groups they feel a part of. Low hanging fruit, I suppose.
I was watching it for a little while, and it makes me sad that so many people are just spending all their time griefing the pride flags.
Then I realised that it’s actually pretty telling. At the end of each r/place event, Reddit end up with a piece of art that represents the communities.
With all the people who’ve moved out, if r/place 2023 ends up full of angry text and swastikas, that’s going to be more damaging than low engagement. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that’s what they end up with.
I can't imagine how something like this might exist solely to boost engagement and draw additional user accounts. I'm sure that would be incredibly shocking (or just obvious as hell with user numbers being boosted by numerous bot accounts, as well as increased user time on site). "Reddit migration? What migration? Just look at how many users are coming back."
It's comically tragic how utterly gullible people are in general.
I really enjoyed the 2022 one. Some of the smaller indie game alliances turned me on to some really cool games. And some of the artwork was legitimately beautiful. It had great twists, like doubling the canvas.
I was online when they changed it to white pixels only. Watching the board be erased was weirdly emotional. It was cool seeing the community naturally come together to delete it all from the inside out, in the shape of an expanding heart (roughly).
Not saying it’s not a gimmick or anything. Just a cool event that a lot of different communities have fun with
A place clone would still be hosted on a single instance (presumably). It would be good if someone could develop a multi-user event that took advantage of the federated nature of kbin/lemmy or even the wider fediverse also. No idea what that could be though.
I like the sabotage but when this was announced I 100% assumed it was an attempt to boost engagement numbers as they approach their IPO, and looks like it's working for that.
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