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