Highlight of /r/place this year for me was Canada narrative.
Initially that community struggled to decide on cannabis leaf or maple leaf, just like 5 years ago, leading to inevitable griefing campaigns taking advantage of the internal volatility to successfully turn it into "Bananas" with a yellow flag and a banana in place of the leaf for a short time.
But then the Canadians prevailed in the last hour, with Canada spelled correctly and the maple leaf and even all their provincial flags were added.
At some point during the volatile Canadian flag period the Germans made a perfect maple leaf inside the German flag in about 3 minutes which was amusing.
You can see the Canadian leaf was one of the most volatile map areas on this pixel volatility heatmap:
Yeah, r/place generated so many miniature dramas it was wild.
The US flag drama was also an interesting lesson in coordination. Obviously it drew a lot of attack / defense, beefs, etc, but a lot of the early support was uncoordinated and also hindered bringing the artwork to the next level. The hivemind was good at local fixes but bad at global fixes -- our equivalent of the merple leaf was that the flag would always tend towards 100 stars in a grid instead of 50 stars in staggered rows. Attempts to add artwork or remove & fix stars were rejected by the hivemind trying to defend the flag. I'm embarrassed to admit that I may have put 2 or 3 reverts against what, in hindsight, was an attempt to add Iwo Jima to the lower left.
After seeing the US flag disappear, supporters flocked to the subreddit and the discord. This tipped the balance away from self-sabotaging hivemind and towards coordination. There was a dynamic of "minimum viable change," where the hivemind would stop fighting artwork only once it could recognize it, so the key was to organize enough people on discord to push out an identifiable chunk (say, the space shuttle) in a single wave. I'm sure this dynamic played out in hundreds of communities, but in the end good art and organization won:
The big French flag (bottom left) was mostly drawned and defended by the French streamers.
There were more than 400k viewers last night on Kameto Twitch channel to defend the area (probably 600-700k for all French streamers) and they were regularly attacked by Spanish + US streamers who were trying to destroy the flag.
I did not participate in the reddit place event, but I did witness this drama play out as I was browsing the site.
The psychological response to this was also fittingly Canadian. Ultimately the chaotic symbol was dubbled the "merple lerf", and accepted in the good humour that it deserved to be.
Now allow me to take 20-50 minutes to dissect what this event means to the Canadian identity, and how the chaotic aspect of the symbol may reflect deeper schisms and currents that underscore the Canadian experience.
Tonight at 8:00pm on CBC Radio. 7:30pm in Newfoundland.
the whole thing was hilarious. the memes that came out if it were also hilarious. at some point i saw a meme with a minion complaining that the Canadians are trying to take over his country’s flag.
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Highlight of /r/place this year for me was Canada narrative.
Initially that community struggled to decide on cannabis leaf or maple leaf, just like 5 years ago, leading to inevitable griefing campaigns taking advantage of the internal volatility to successfully turn it into "Bananas" with a yellow flag and a banana in place of the leaf for a short time.
But then the Canadians prevailed in the last hour, with Canada spelled correctly and the maple leaf and even all their provincial flags were added.
At some point during the volatile Canadian flag period the Germans made a perfect maple leaf inside the German flag in about 3 minutes which was amusing.
You can see the Canadian leaf was one of the most volatile map areas on this pixel volatility heatmap:
https://mobile.twitter.com/Mehdi_Moussaid/status/15112531929...
Yeah, r/place generated so many miniature dramas it was wild.
The US flag drama was also an interesting lesson in coordination. Obviously it drew a lot of attack / defense, beefs, etc, but a lot of the early support was uncoordinated and also hindered bringing the artwork to the next level. The hivemind was good at local fixes but bad at global fixes -- our equivalent of the merple leaf was that the flag would always tend towards 100 stars in a grid instead of 50 stars in staggered rows. Attempts to add artwork or remove & fix stars were rejected by the hivemind trying to defend the flag. I'm embarrassed to admit that I may have put 2 or 3 reverts against what, in hindsight, was an attempt to add Iwo Jima to the lower left.
In the end, what rallied the troops was a retreat. https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/tvhtgv/american_flag...
After seeing the US flag disappear, supporters flocked to the subreddit and the discord. This tipped the balance away from self-sabotaging hivemind and towards coordination. There was a dynamic of "minimum viable change," where the hivemind would stop fighting artwork only once it could recognize it, so the key was to organize enough people on discord to push out an identifiable chunk (say, the space shuttle) in a single wave. I'm sure this dynamic played out in hundreds of communities, but in the end good art and organization won:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericanFlaginPlace/comments/twg11p...
I'd love to hear the French story. They rotated through a few designs and look heavily contested on the heatmap: https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/twryzd/frequency_of_...
The big French flag (bottom left) was mostly drawned and defended by the French streamers. There were more than 400k viewers last night on Kameto Twitch channel to defend the area (probably 600-700k for all French streamers) and they were regularly attacked by Spanish + US streamers who were trying to destroy the flag.
I did not participate in the reddit place event, but I did witness this drama play out as I was browsing the site.
The psychological response to this was also fittingly Canadian. Ultimately the chaotic symbol was dubbled the "merple lerf", and accepted in the good humour that it deserved to be.
Now allow me to take 20-50 minutes to dissect what this event means to the Canadian identity, and how the chaotic aspect of the symbol may reflect deeper schisms and currents that underscore the Canadian experience.
Tonight at 8:00pm on CBC Radio. 7:30pm in Newfoundland.
sounds like an afternoon for crosscountry checkup
Even more interesting, Quebec got their shit together in a better way than Canada and had a larger physical presence on the board.
the whole thing was hilarious. the memes that came out if it were also hilarious. at some point i saw a meme with a minion complaining that the Canadians are trying to take over his country’s flag.