two

actually the number two IRL

Thanks for playing, everyone. I'll see you around.


The art thing where you get to put a coloured pixel down on a shared canvas every 15 minutes. Though, it's July? It was an April Fools thing the first two times - once in 2017 as the last properly good reddit april fools joke before it all went downhill (I used to really look forward to what they were doing! I never would have thought that reddit would have been beaten on really impactful april fools(s) back in 2017, and until this year I wouldn't have guessed a Sonic game would do it, but anyway) and a second time in 2022. Importantly in 2022 everybody knew what to expect and I was on Discord this time! I played with the toki pona crew, and it was a bizarre but incredible experience - forming tense diplomatic relations with Italy, a friendly peace with Catalan, providing aid to foreign "nations" and requesting it in turn by sending "diplomats" to their discord servers, through this process somehow making toki pona a "web serial", collaboratively designing pixel art at alarming speeds, and right at the end attempting to broker a peace between Pakistan and Esperanto. Both iterations of r/place felt like proper "Cultural Events", like what Blaseball was, these huge gatherings of people online to make culture happen. r/place was a cool art project for some, but for me, it was cool for bringing a million online communities together in a tiny space to force them to talk to, work together, and learn about eachother. The juxtaposition looks really weird in hindsight but playing it was social like nothing else. And honestly super exhausting; the consensus among those involved was that, whew, we can be glad that only happens once every five years!

My point being, bringing it back just over a year after last time, at an apparently random point in the year, and when reddit is going through a bit of a rough patch along with apparently every other major social media (that is to say, its users were just recently in active revolt in ways only reddit's infrastructure allows them to be) sort of kills the artifice for me. Oh, this isn't going to be a once every five years check of the internet's collective pulse, where we all come together to make art - this is going to be something that's novel once, interesting the second time, and then that's pretty much it. I'm not ready to put the same level of effort in as I did in 2022, I don't think many are, and with goodwill towards reddit at the level it is I don't think many are going to want to participate in what is transparently an attempt to raise it. And even if this iteration is canned and r/place does come back in exactly five years, something about it just feels spoiled now.

I think I'm just being overly dramatic but, as someone who was never on Twitter, this to me is the signal that the old ways of social media are dead. Though I actually haven't checked the r/place canvas, I'm writing this on my phone cause it's late, maybe everyone is currently playing with it like it's 2022 again, I don't even know, ok that's all bye!!!


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