Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

Re:Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment by pavel_lishin on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @11:48AM (#14033942)

> I think the one thing this really showed was most people on reddit don't really care about politics, but the vocal minority on there makes it seem like it's the forefront of every issue.

Isn't it also possible for the reverse to be true? That a very vocal minority cared very much about r/place, and that vocal minority happened to not care enough about politics to show up on Place?

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Re:Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment by rmccoy6435 on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @12:30PM (#14034478)

That's actually a really interesting thought. I hadn't even considered that.

I don't currently have the time to find all of the analytics about pixel placement, but I would assume there were tens of thousands of users who aligned with some 'faction' and had more than 20 pixel placements in the entire 72 hours (I would say that is a large enough number to identify people who actively participated), which is by no means a minority of individuals who frequent reddit. Most of the subreddits I visit all had some plans to organize something on there, so there was a very diverse crowd that organized around it.

I draw my conclusion about politics based on the fact that it wouldn't have been very hard to get one of the larger political subreddits to get something on the board and maintain it for the weekend, yet that didn't happen.

I have filtered all political subreddits via RES, and it's surprising how little politics is discussed on reddit once you remove the epicenters.

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Re:Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment by softawre on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @01:30PM (#14035197)

/r/the_donald tried to get their mascot on /r/place many times, only to be destroyed.

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Re:Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment by rhizome on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @12:52PM (#14034756)

it wouldn't have been very hard to get one of the larger political subreddits to get something on the board and maintain it for the weekend

I'm not so sure this is actually true. Have you ever tried to organize a large number of people?

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Re:Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment by sqeaky on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @01:16PM (#14035033)

For something like this the level of organization is tiny. I added to tux, and all I need was the picture of tux. I barely needed that because I just refilled pixels people poked into him.

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Re:Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment by greenhatman on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @09:48PM (#14038994)

/r/place made me realize that I care about Linux than my country.

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Re:Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment by rhizome on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @09:04PM (#14038798)

Does it make sense that you'd really only need about 300 people, one for every second in 5min? After that, the group can pretty much add squares constantly, one per second. Maybe that wouldn't be fast enough, but it's a good head start on offense, and I'm obvs not accounting for defense.

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Re:Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment by rmccoy6435 on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @02:09PM (#14035613)

Organizing groups of people for something as menial as this isn't a hard task. Many subreddits had a pixel template they posted for the content they wanted that made it to those communities front page, and users generated it. Upkeep after that wasn't much of an issue unless they were being raided.

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Re:Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment by the_watcher on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @12:29PM (#14034460)

It seems that given the restrictions on how often a single user could actually visibly change the image, coupled with the sheer volume of changes, no, the reverse is almost certainly not true.

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Re:Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment by pavel_lishin on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @01:13PM (#14035010)

As I understand it, most organizers used bots to help coordinate the process. People who care about politics on Reddit are no less likely to be tech savvy.

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Re:Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment by Gaelan on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @03:16AM (#14040359)

The image I worked on only got a bot put together mid-day 3. Many factions refused to use bots at all.

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