Can spez really be that stupid?

My guess is Reddit is doing this to temporarily raise traffic. It’s like rage bait. They know they’re pissing people off and protestors will flood the site, but traffic is traffic. If they can demonstrate engagement it must be good enough for the upcoming IPO.

Right? I don’t understand why people on the fediverse are getting excited about this. At best, Reddit will have admins to insta-wipe anything objectionable. At worst, Reddit will point to the increased engagement as a sign that the protesters gave up and came back.

The best protest would be a blank canvas.

That’s genius honestly. The void should win this year

It feels like another corporate promotional stunt. Not interested.

Anyone would see that a one time event engagement doesn’t solve anything, you cannot do the r/place every week…

It’s really apparent that Spez and the rest of the admin team don’t actually use Reddit on a day to day basis. Their decisions are like some consultant coming in and recommending ideas.

r/place being filled with API protest signs would be really hilarious

But isn’t that just giving Reddit more traffic and doing exactly what spez wants us to do?

Oh I wouldn’t give spez the satisfaction of me giving him traffic. I’m more talking about the redditors who are still there for some reason.

Use an ad blocker and the traffic is of little value to them. Especially if it only goes to /r/place and doesn’t allow to create much of a profile.

You know admins can easily remove anything drawn there. They are trying to bring traffic back, because of the upcoming IPO.

They also did remove stuff last time. Was a shitshow

I think with the amount of things people are planning to draw the canvas is going to look pretty empty if they remove all of them. Plus, if you wrote something like “API” in small letters everywhere on the canvas they’d have a hard time keeping up

I went easy on myself. I vowed to never comment or post on that account… buuuut I didn’t say I wouldn’t place any dots in protest.

Hmmm I wonder if the V O I D will win out this time.

I’ve been working with some other people on discord. The plan is to spam the entire canvas with tiny API’s like amogus was last time. We’ve got it down to 4x7 pixels

Can you share the current design?

Anyone over there using the service and still trying to protest are just lost.

They already went through the hard part PR wise

Perhaps some will try plaster LEMMY across the board. Who knoes.

It would be a shame if someone conspired to coordinate such a thing…

Would be even better if we did our own on lemmy.

Wouldn’t be surprised at all at this point if Reddit manipulates this version of r/Place to make it look like the protests are smaller than they are.

I would not be surprised if this is an experiment to see the effect of killing API on the event. I mean, really, not many accounts have left reddit (a lot have showed up on lemmy/kbin, but a small fraction of reddit), and I remember a lot of complaints of bots in the last place. It’s just 3 months since the last one, so they should get great data on the effect of API charges on their bot access.

I hope they do. Would be an obvious wake up call to more people on reddit.

Why is that? Covering up the protests would be the opposite of drawing attention to it surely?

Streisand Effect, which historically is something the people of Reddit LOVE to enforce

The fact that they would be obviously covering it up would be noticeable to people and would cause what they are trying to cover up to become more prominent in the news and on the site.

I can’t even view it on mobile without logging in or getting an app.

He seems desperate to make Reddit work. It seems that he can’t take the ego hit to back pedal his decision and is trying to figure out a way forward.

My gut says this is an effort to make employees feel good after layoffs and protests, but also this looks to be someone to juice the monthly active users metric before an IPO roadshow or fundraising or something.

Ironically /r/place would be a good opportunity to win users to the official app, they probably should have done that before the API price changes to shake the tree of third party apps, so to speak.

Anyways, this is going to be 80% “fuck /u/spez” memes, a German flag, the Apollo logo, and a perfect OSU game logo.

I almost decided to make an account just to participate in the new /r/place, but then I would be supporting Reddit.

Maybe some employee suggested r/place a joke, fully knowing it would be a bad idea and management just ran with it.

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