By opening up r/place again, they've stolen the magic from it.
The first time it happened, it was amazing and novel.
The second time was an incredible surprise each time the board opened up again. I was involved with the r/Beach House community to put up an homage to our favorite band.
But now... It's become repetitive. It feels like just an attention grab, like a ploy to artificially increase traffic to the site. This time, it looks no different from every other time r/place has taken... place. It's flags everywhere, there's so much anger surrounding it, and it's just not fun.
r/place was special because of its spontaneity. But now it's soulless, like every other corporate-owned internet phenomenon is.
Everything from these big corps have no soul. Because we know it's just about exploiting users for money.
I want the old internet back so bad. Hopefully federation can fuel many new actually fun services that are not built to make money but to actually entertain and amuse people, or simply be useful.
I personally feel pleasure from doing good things in the world. But it seems to be a group of people who doesn't feel it's worth doing something for others unless there is money to be made from it.
I feel bad for every user that hasn't experienced an internet before all of this. Golden years to me, was 1996 ~ 2008. To others, far earlier.
The only thing we had to deal with then, was just popups. Now, it's like every fucking thing imaginable has to be turned into some subscription or retooled to be shareholder friendly. Because that's exactly what everything is gearing towards to appease - these fucking shareholders with stakes. Shareholders, who constitute a band of people who have absolutely no knowledge or fucks given as to what made things as good as they were in past internet. It's all about data farming for money to then market people to shit.
Google had to go and acquire YouTube, things seemed okay in the beginning. Now look at it, fucking bombardment of ads if you aren't using an adblocker. Amazon had to go and acquire Twitch and things seemed okay in the beginning. Now look at it, you're meaning to tell me I have to sit through 8 ads, while you minimize a stream of a channel I'm watching?! AND You're going to make YOUR OWN SUBSCRIPTION WHEN AMAZON PRIME ISN'T ENOUGH?! ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?!
Reddit was great until 2016, it broke itself over politics. Then it broke itself even further by 2020 and now we are where we are with it. Social Media, is running in place. It's about statistics anymore. Has Facebook ever been useful and functional? I'm having a hard time now remembering when the last time it even had real people helping you, because now it's just in some stupid half-ass wiki that doesn't even have all of the answers in it's own ecosystem.
Everyone is too politicized now, almost can't go a damn few comments anymore without someone coming up to you with an emotionally charged reply, that's hiding in the background, the basis of their political stance.
I agree and this internet we have now has turned into crap, and it's the corporations who is responsible for it, because they want their profits.
Every big tech service is always nice at first and then the horrific ads and user tracking starts. People use an ad company to search the internet now and that's completely normal appearently. :)
I agree in general, but search feels like an odd example. That space has been dominated by ad companies since even before the internet (e.g., Yellow Pages).
It's pathetic because it's nothing new, it's old code, they just have to run it again to try and distract the users. There's no changes, no creativity, no risk. They're just jangling keys in front of the baby to try and stop it crying
It's now a symbol of how deteriorated Reddit has become. I mean, yeah, you've summarized it perfectly. r/place is now the symbolism of everything wrong with Reddit. It's repetitious, as much as all of the karma farming posts on Reddit have been for years. All the other places had contained a culture snapshot of everything that Reddit brought together.
All that this version of Place has brought, is all of the anguish towards one person and their poor decision making.
I might could live with repetitive if it wasn't for the anger. I've got a 2'x2' print of 2022's canvas sitting next to my desk, and I still get lost in it every now and then. Just another trip exploring a new canvas could be fun.
But then I open the page and 15% of it is just "fuck spez" and everyone is angry. Rightfully so, but... I just don't feel it anymore.
Ehh, flags dominated since the very first r/place.
But yes it's pretty obvious each new edition is ever more astroturfed. The second one had lots of obvious organised bots designing perfect shapes and logos, and moderators' meddling was noticed as well.
It's the ol' Blizzard "Look, we're introducing a new character who might be gay! There's no lore that references it anywhere, we're just tellin' you they're gay or lesbian, aren't we great!" kind of maneuver. Ooh, look at the special thing we're doing, aren't we playful and fun?
For the record, I'm all for inclusiveness, I just use Blizzard as an example since they used to be just so transparent about that before the really dark times.
Yeah, I agree this is most certainly to increase traffic. On the one hand, I like that there are many places on the board where the anti-admin sentiment is very obvious, but it does play into their hands in terms of traffic numbers.