• Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It boosts traffic during a time a lot of ex-redditors scraped/nuked worthwile content and left. If people are annoyed and want to show that off, but they can only change a single pixel every-so-often, then they will refresh / check the site VERY often to make sure their hard-earned single-pixel contribution isn’t overwritten by someone else.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if that was one of the reasons, trying to profit from the agitated masses somehow.

    • Teppic@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      But r/place is ruled by bots… I bet the kind of people who develop bots are reeeeaaaly pleased about the API changes…

      • JDubbleu@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I haven’t done so, but r/place would be extremely easy to write a bot using Selenium to place pixels without an API. It is a giant grid, and once you write a function to place at coordinates on the grid (which would be the hardest part, but still trivial) you can parallelize it and do whatever you want.

        • Teppic@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Oh absolutely, but the venn diagram of people who can do this, and people who value open APIs is pretty close to a circle.

    • JGrffn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah honestly it’s pretty appealing of an idea to go back just to make a mess on the canvas or send a coordinated message, but - and I know most won’t do this - the best strategy is to just…not engage. Avoid participating, avoid going to check the canvas or the site… just pretend it isn’t happening.

      Sadly, it’s pretty much a fact that this will bring back tons of traffic, even if the event itself results in popcorn-worthy drama. Spez seems to be subscribed to the notion that any kind of publicity is good publicity, and it might just work out for him and his IPO.

      At this point, the best that we can do is just care for our mental health and let things be. It’s what I plan on doing, and I can’t put “sticking it to reddit” as a priority while doing so, it’s for me and for me alone.