Got any explanation that doesn’t involve visiting reddit?
Kadu’s summary is pretty good so I’ll only mention a few details/conjectures.
Odds are that Reddit did this 1) to drive engagement up (for the sake of metrics) and 2) to distract the userbase from the recent events. The second goal was a failure, but the first one was rather successful.
Bots were a big issue in both the 1st and 2nd editions of r/place. And Reddit’s answer for that, now, shows that they didn’t really give a fuck. “It’s hard to detect mkay.” Nationalists erasing drawings for the sake of their bloody flags were also an issue, but nobody addressed it.
The event was mocked by the userbase, that joked that the top pixel placer was “admins”, and the second top “bots”. The guillotine being erased pissed a lot of people. People also complained a lot about censorship in the subreddit itself; the admins removed some criticism at the start, but eventually gave up, and most threads have “fuck spez” as one of the top comments.
Overall the event itself is a shadow of what it was in the first edition. Just like Reddit is a shadow of what it used to be.
It was already planned to end. The canvas wide FUCK SPEZ! has nothing to do with it. It was actually coordinated because they know it’s ending. The white FUCK SPEZ! is only done during the white out, where to get the canvas deleted to blank (which also happened last year), users are only able to add greyscale tiles and eventually just white. There were plenty of other fuck Spez messages and art, and some were censored like the guillotine or when the name Steve Huffman was used directly, but this wasn’t one of them.
Wait, so the whiteout on last year’s canvas was due to limited color? I thought it was organically done. Now my non-appreciation with last year’s r/place canvas is less.
Haha, yea. I don’t think you can make people coordinate that much unless it’s bots.
