r/place (at least last year's did) ends with a whiteout. I was asleep when this happened, but I'm 90% sure this happened because r/place was ending and not the other way around.
There's no evidence. If they wanted to censor "fuck spez" they would have done it from the beginning. They were censoring nipples and piss - why did they leave those? There were tons of them all over the canvas, with a big one by various communities towards the end. Plus, it's a known fact that admins remove all color but white towards the end - that's why this was planned when people knew r/place was ending.
I also don't see anyone mentioning reddit going down anywhere. You're the first one to mention it that I've seen. You have links that reddit went down? Legit Q because not even the discords I'm in mention anything about that.
Everyone had a different overlay first, which is why it looks so chaotic, but it's not botted. They made tampermonkey overlays for the most art pieces. Otherwise there is no way you can defend an attack. They did the same for 'fuck spez'
I'm not sure how many people might have done that, but the overlays the person you're replying to mentions is not that. The overlays literally just show you what colour each pixel should be and a human must place the pixel. Those are used by tons of legit people. While I have no doubt that there is botting, large communities on Reddit can have millions of people. They only have to convince less than one percent of their most dedicated members to use an overlay and they'll be able to defend a sizable chunk of the canvas.
r/place would have been successful even if zero protestors even thought about going there. That's the unfortunate reality. You gotta understand that in terms of traffic (this includes bots and streamers), we're nowhere near reddit to make any difference.
Given that, what would we have accomplished had we just stayed silent? I'm not saying all of us must participate (that would be stupid of me), but we can still do something despite the odds.
A lot of people are blissfully unaware of the protests. A lot of people don't even know spez. Much less knows about the fediverse or other alternatives. I think it's worth it to even get those people thinking why a lot of people are reacting to spez that way.
You gotta understand that in terms of traffic (this includes bots and streamers), we’re nowhere near reddit to make any difference.
What I don't understand is why that matters. Why make it an us vs them thing?
If you want to move on from R, move on.
Given that, what would we have accomplished had we just stayed silent?
Exactly what was achieved, nothing. The API blackouts showed the admins don't care what the community thinks or wants, and no amount of fuck spez on r/palce was going to change that.
If you want to save R, this is not the place to do it. (and it cannot be done.)
A lot of people are blissfully unaware of the protests.
And the majority of R users will never care. That is my point. Most people go there for fun and do not care about anything else.
Because of this lots more people got to know about reddits api problem.. the bigger streamers had 100k viewers each and they worked together to create it. I would say it's fair to assume that more than a million people could see this yesterday, because it was also on the twitch frontpage for a decent amount of time.
The german steamer's manager even got a call by reddit if they need anything, a day before he helped to create this piece haha
I am not saying the effort was worthless, but the reality is it changed nothing. The admins road it out and the reddit user base (the vast majority) rolled over and accepted it.
Protesting reddit by being on reddit is worse than nothing. You are still pumping up traffic number to a site that has proven it does not give one shit what the users think.