Which is the point of all of this. They've been flexing their ability to control the flow of information on their site to show off for investors since the minute they announced the API changes. They're going to use Place to further demonstrate the level of control they have over the userbase by "shutting down the protests." Advertisers and investors are going to be eating this up, especially since so many people are still engaging and giving hate-clicks along the way. Imagine how attractive a completely pliable and obedient userbase of literal millions of progressive swing voters is going to look.
I notice they've left in all the Fuck Spez stuff, while removing anything "promoting violence".
Eventually he'll see himself out the door with an enormous payoff. The reddit faithful will cheer his departure, but none of what he's done will be reversed.
Reddit wants to be TikTok because that makes money.
They don't have a meeting with Toyota and say "check out the community banner our users created"
They say "we launched a promo that lasted 48 hours (or w/e the fuck it is) and community engagement was through the roof. We had an increase of x% users during this time. The next time we will do this it will be $X amount for X amount of ad space so you can get in front of X amount of users"
I haven't seen r/place but I bet there are 0 ads on that page. Reddit is smarter than to sell ad space next to FUCK SPEZ and My Little Pony Porn. What they will do is increase ad prices for the next "event".
No matter what you think, this engagement is supporting them.
It's really not. They do not give a shit about what it looks like. All they care about is clicks for ad revenue. They waited from 2017 to 2022 to re-do place, then they do it again a year later, directly after introducing a ton of unpopular changes?
Naw fam, this is 100% them generating traffic and anyone that keeps going to place is falling right into their hands, regardless of what message they think they're sending.
The advertisers aren't going to care about a banner. Reddit is going to tell them, "yeah there were some protests and a minor dropoff in traffic, but see how well we rebounded and even grew in July!". Every single click on that thing counts as "traffic" and you can bet that that's exactly how reddit is going to sell it.
Canada cursed to never produce a maple leaf. The guillotine replaced by an Ariane rocket. An unnaturally thicc Pikmin. Fuck spez scattered across the world.
Also, DEEPCOCKGALACTIC 😂
It's a shame Reddit is a mess, because these sort of silly community events are one of the best parts of the internet. Though some fools turned the dick in the DICKS piece into just a normal I. That was art.
As an aside, while staying off Reddit has the greatest impact on the company itself, Lemmy's population is negligible compared to the number of angry redditors on Reddit itself. Advertising Lemmy as an alternative and guiding more people to join is going to have a much larger long-term impact than being a thousandth of a percent of their engagement numbers. That said, it looks like the Lemmy add disappeared as well.
Unfortunately I will have to lock this post. There have been multiple reports about comments, and it has nothing to do with the OP. We have plenty of new content to monitor today and I assume new posts will be coming in about the updates to r/place today. I hope OP will start a new post with updated pictures. I wish we had the ability to lock just one thread, but we do not.