“Oh shit user engagement is dropping, quick do something interesting!”
literally lol, the idea of doing a r/place every year was already really unpopular as there was little cultural change. I wonder if they’re going to do anything unique compared to last time.
Yeah. The original place was super unique because it was a brand new idea dropped with no warning. That was a one time community development. Even the second Place revival was only marginally better, but a third? Really can’t repeat that magic especially when its such an obvious user grab.
I know I’m gonna sound like a total knob, but I didn’t even like the idea of a second place. Every April Fool’s event was unique and treasured-- Reddit mold, orangered vs periwinkle, Robin, even 2nd or circle for as bad as it was. Place 2017 (or was it 2016?) was obviously the best April Fool’s ever, and part of its treasure was its temporary nature. Doing place again in 2022 just felt wrong to me. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but this time around it felt like it was almost undermining the first one, and with talks of doing place again the next year or every X years just felt so corporate and faceless among a new reddit that was running out of ideas.
And now here we are. They’re not just running out of ideas, they’re running the site into the ground and dangling a carrot in front of users like, “hey, didn’t you all like place the last two times? Here it is yet again!”
They’d probably discouraged their workers from new ideas since this one got into news and got copied by other sites. Super good metrics, need to stick with it.
Them posting it now is just fucking a corpse to show user engagement for their IPO or hiding damage they’ve caused. Overall pathetic.
Yeah, and it’s not even subtle to boot. If they had done it this past April Fool’s day after making an API announcement at the beginning of the calendar year, they might have had a smidge of plausible deniability. But now, three weeks after the beginning of some of their most controversial changes yet, on a random mid-July week, it’s an incredibly obvious drive to boost engagement, from both the current userbase and perhaps even a boost from the users who left to return to place a “fuck /u/spez”.
I don’t even understand how this gets greenlit. I mean, it’s definitely going to work, their engagement for the next week will be a YTD record without a doubt. But this just feels so mustache-twirlingly evil.
Reeks of desperation. Thankfully, it looks like everybody knows what to do, although I think there will be the very natural counter-protest where contrarian redditors will say “Can’t we just paint flags without complaining about the API or Spez?”. We’ll have to wait and see I guess.
Just an attempt to get people back to the platform, but those who left know better imo.
Love all the “API” comments haha. I’ll be skipping this one, no thanks, reddit :)
I feel like this is a good time to dust off the reddit account and help make a giant advertisement for lemmy.
Can’t recapture the magic of the first /r/place. That was something else. Move on.
It really was. The second we neat but like you said the magic was gone and people clearly knew how to game it by then.
The first one grab everyone by surprise and automation tools took a couple of days to dominate, the second one it just took a couple of hours to update those tools. This time? Pretty sure that tools are going to work from the get go.
Exactly, with bot accounts and so on. The biggest fun was following the communities that competed and how politics erupted. I kept looking to see if anyone wrote an article on the first one focused on the human condition but I never did find one.
this is so pathetic
Just like spez himself.
A modest proposal. Which Lemmy server can finish with a prominent place in the r/place final image!
can’t wait to see all the bots force an image into it
the brightside is that it’ll be a great place for the protestors to revolt
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Has that new car smell.
Gonna be amazing drama when the admins wipe “fuck spez” off the page
10000% a play to get people to install their mobile app. They don’t care that it’s just so they can contribute one pixel to a giant “fuck spez” banner, all that matters is their app metrics will grow a bit.
It’s fantastic that whoever designed this animation managed to get away with presenting Reddit as a freaking dumpster fire. You’d think someone in the higher ranks would request a change of iconography.
They could spend time and resources improving their site experience for blind users, moderation tools, or improving their shoddy mobile app, but instead they do r/place.
It will keep the plebs happy while cleaning house of those pesky moderators.
Well that’s going to backfire spectacularly then. The plebs are going to cover their stupid wall with Fuck Spez, API, and Apollo icons.
yeah, Nah.
Wow, millions of
botspeople can fight over which national flag or corporate logo gets to be the biggest.Might as well just link to a big png of the Ukrainian flag and call it a day rather than wasting everyone’s time.
