Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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Lemmy's version of Place is so much better than Reddit (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All occurrences of Reddit place after the first were heavily botted. The first one was the best one IMO.

I think this speaks to a general difference between Reddit and Lemmy that we've all experienced: on Reddit, you can participate with a massive community, but your voice will likely be drowned out by everyone else plus all the bots. On Lemmy, you have to engage with a smaller community, but you can be sure your voice will be heard in that community.

With Reddit place, you probably couldn't point to the finished product and say "that pixel right there is one I placed" unless you were exceptionally lucky. With canvas, you absolutely can, but as you rightly pointed out the work itself is less impressive looking.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The first one was botted as well near the end. I know because I wrote a tool to do it in about an hour using my private bot farm I had been building for years. I never gave it to anyone else because it was sloppy and integrated with the bot creation tools I had, and that would have revealed all of the tricks I used to create and protect the bot horde. But I used it myself, and I assume I was far from the only one with the same idea.

The interesting thing is that reddit basically condoned it. They are usually pretty decent at detecting bots if you don't take measures to make them look human, but with place (at least the first time) they seemed to intentionally have that functionality disabled. I kind of assumed that they doing it specifically as a bit detection scheme, but they never cleaned house afterwards like I expected.

[–] Rene_Z 9 points 1 year ago

Reddit actively encouraged bots and automation during the original r/place:
https://www.redditinc.com/blog/how-we-built-rplace/

The API should be generally open and transparent so the reddit community can build on it (bots, extensions, data collection, external visualizations, etc) if they choose to do so.