LessWrong meets /r/place
- [Open in Google Maps] [Open in local app]
- 13 November 2019, 6:00 pm—9:30 pm
- Montreal, QC, Canada
- Contact: Yohan 514-562-7682
Facebook Event Link & Google Calendar Link
Hello friends,
So this is a meetup I’ve been wanting to do since this summer, but I haven’t gotten around it, so here it is!
In this meetup, we’ll explore the 72h lifespan of the ”/r/place” experiment, what we are confident in asserting regarding it, what is outside of our prediction models, and hopefully what conclusions and insights we can draw from it.
What is /r/place?
In just 72 hours, over a million redditors placed 16.5 million tiles to transform a simple, white, 1000×1000-pixel canvas into a surprisingly beautiful clash of communities, nations, ideologies, and fandoms. Because each user could only place one tile every five minutes, any single individual would have struggled to create a meaningful image on their own. However, through community collaboration, users quickly produced complex creations, surpassing all of our expectations about how this project would turn out once the 72 hours were up.
Basically, as far as transitivity in memetic structures go as a function of in-groupishness, r/place and the subsequent studies are pretty much the place to be.
After the experiment, the subreddit stayed open for a while, but I haven’t focused on that part of the adventure, and more on the experiment itself. If anyone wants to do a quick research and present something about it for the meetup, feel free to do so!
** r/place Links **
Recap Description of the Whole Thing
Fully Interactive Map of /r/place
Atlas of All the Memes that Were Created
Glorious Moments of /r/place as a Function of Time
** Recommended Readings **
Latent Structure in Collaboration: the Case of Reddit r/place
Coordination in a Peer Production Platform: A study of Reddit’s /r/Place experiment
** Screening at Meetup **
r/place: an Incomplete History
VR Data Visualization Learnings from the Place Viewer
** Format **
We meet and start hanging out at 6:00pm, and at around 6:45pm, we’ll do a (very) short recap of what these events are about.
We’ll then watch four short videos covering the basic dynamics at play (totaling <20 minutes), after which we’ll dive into an open discussion about this entire phenomenon.
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What is LessWrong? Good question! The answer lies here.
When: Wednesday, November 13th 2019, 6:00pm–9:30pm
Where: L’Infini
Cost: Free (duh!)
Language: The meetup will be EN/FR with live translations as necessary.
Questions? Contact Yohan: 514-562-7682 ; 1806992[at]gmail[dot]com
Why come? To get to discuss with like-minded people in a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.
I’ll arrive late, is it fine? Yes.
Anything else I need to know? Yes. L’Infini is a sober space, so no drugs/alcohol consumption inside.
Can I invite friends? If you think we’ll all get along, yes! :)
See you all very soon,
Yohan
Not from Canada but you have a fascinating topic. Wish I could be there.
What I found most intriguing about r/place is that my intuitions were that at the end of the experiment a lot of the canvas would still be in flux or highly controversial / conflict prone. This was very wrong. If I recall, the majority of the map was reasonably settled by the end with many participants defending what had already been created from interference, along with some lingering pockets of dynamic change right up to the end. The emergence of large scale order was a surprise, for me at least.
I think that part of the reason for this was that many of the representations had been collaboratively created, so there were groups of participants whose incentive to maintain their collective creations and relatively higher capacity to ‘spend’ pixels to do so, often outweighed those organised capacities for those who would disrupt their creations.
Another reason may have been the tendency for borders between representations to get settled as participants on either side adapted their creations to prioritise ongoing stability than ongoing conflict, given their goals to create.
Seems to share some self organising properties with other collaborative crowd intelligence experiments such as Twitch plays Pokemon.
Best of luck for your Meetup Yohan!