Yesterday we talked about Reddit Place, that fool that has had half the internet fighting and trolling at the stroke of a pixel. This particular digital canvas ended up becoming a battlefield between French and Spanish streamers, who did not stop trolling each other and erasing each other’s logos and flags. The unique pixel war has served to demonstrate the power and influence of streamers and how we have gone from large social networks to a fragmented internet.
How Reddit Place works. Any registered Reddit user who accessed ar/Place could change a pixel (with 16 different colors as an option) on that gigantic canvas, but you could only do it every five minutes: the system made you wait so that the creations had time to settle.
Not many lasted very long, and the communities that formed joined forces and coordinated to remove a previous design and put their own: the more users you had, the bigger and faster you could create your image on Reddit Place and fight to keep it there.
Twitch, Twitter and Discord as platforms to “fight”. The user communities that, as we said, joined efforts began to unite in subreddits. On r/trees they struggled to fill a certain space with a large marijuana leaf, while on r/ukraine they orchestrated the creation of a large Ukrainian flag. r/starwars could not miss with the recreation of a famous poster of the saga. And so many others —such as the one dedicated to the Spanish flag and its symbols, r/esPlace— who left messages in those subforums to organize themselves.
It soon became clear how there were even more powerful tools to coordinate these communities, such as Discord. Things soon escalated, with streamers joining the fray, leveraging their massive fan communities to promote all-out matchup efforts.
This is (pixel) war. The success of the initiative was such that Reddit decided to expand the mural to accommodate more user creations. This was taken advantage of by streamers like the French Kamet0, who tried to reserve a huge space in the lower left corner thanks to his community of followers, which on Twitch is 1.3 million users. This streamer indicated in his video yesterday how the French were “at war against the world on r/Place”.
That did not sit well with other communities that saw the need for the canvas to be more distributed. The Hispanic community joined forces and at that moment began the “warlike” activity of streamers like Ibai Llanos, elRubius or Auronplay, who tried to coordinate their users to stand up to French users. Despite being more, they could not recover the space occupied by French users. Why? Easy.
bots. The French were found to be using bots: new accounts were being created on Reddit with very similarly formatted names, but these streamers were also using scripts that made it easy for their followers to make up lost ground if Spanish-speaking users tried to win those battles for those “territories”.
BTS ARMY ATTENTION! 🇺🇲 | Please help in r/place! In exchange, the biggest streamers from Spain will stream the next BTS single.
We are trying to defend the reddit community from the French bots taking up a lot of space. Let’s Paint together #BTSARMY #BTSARMY pic.twitter.com/xJVsmuP6AV
– Ibai (@IbaiLlanos) April 4, 2022
Help BTS fans. Efforts to recover that part of the mural made Spanish streamers like Ibai or elRubius they asked help to the huge community of fans (referred to as #btsarmy) of the Korean K-pop group BTS. That made it possible for part of the French flag that occupied that region to be adorned with a BTS logo. Other streamers were involved in that effort, such as the American xQcOW, who harangued his 10.4 million followers on Twitch to “destroy their enemies.”
The international community seemed to join this effort to recover a space that should be more distributed, although here the Spanish streamers also wanted to take advantage of scripts —such as this one published on GitHub— to fight against the French, something that was not allowed according to the r/Place terms of service.
How has the war ended? Well, with the ‘big blur’, the total disappearance of the canvas, which already appears as a large blank space in r/Place, although a user has offered a vision of the canvas as it was before it disappeared in just 30 seconds. Some users even took the opportunity to order a large poster with this mural with one of the latest versions of it in which the French flag and French symbols featured prominently.
In the last hours the gigantic French flag and the French symbols represented in that image—Zinedine Zidane, the Louvre or the Arc de Triomphe— ended up fading. The creators of Reddit Place decided at the last minute that only white pixels could be placed on the canvas, which caused the entire mural to disappear, although the first region to do so it was the one that had occupied the gigantic French flag. Ibai and Kameto, yes, said goodbye amicably and commented that it had been a “beautiful battle”.
fragmented internet. What this unique experiment has shown is that the internet has become a stark testament to the growing power of online communities. The platforms have experienced great fragmentation, they indicated in The Washington Post, where they explained how younger users prefer closed communities, more restricted, than the large traditional social networks.
However, these communities and these influencers really want to emulate those large social networks and bring together as many users as possible. Place was never about people collaborating massively on a common goal, rather it has served to create a space in which these new communities exert their influence. Reddit Place is, according to Eugene Wei, a technology entrepreneur, “the perfect metaphor for the internet, in which the power of one person to shape discourse or exert influence online is as great as the collective [comunidad, grupo] of which he is a part.”
Image | elRubius
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism