April Fools has become a day that I do enjoy nowadays, mainly because no one really plays practical jokes on one another anymore, but there's a whole bunch of hilarious stuff that various companies do online.
I didn't place a single pixel, I usually preferred to stay by the sidelines and watch how these things develop, but I have to say as a spectator, it was great. I myself follow the dota and one piece subreddit so it was interesting to see their discussions, and how people would actually write scripts for others to run so they could automatically defend their images. There was the classic rivalry between LoL and Dota where both sides tried to destroy each other's artwork for awhile.
My favourite parts were:
- The invasion of France by Germany was hilarious for it's 'historical accuracy'.
- The attacks of the void. In particular, the defense of Osu was pretty amazing to watch
- Rainbow road was fun for awhile, until there were too many things and there wasn't space for it, but it was fun to watch it bounce around and give the images it touches a rainbow border
- I thought the windows interface was pretty meta
- The creativity in modifying some pieces, look at Germany and Belgium for example
There's one place on the internet which does something a little different though. Reddit doesn't do hilarious stuff on April Fools. Instead every April Fools, they run a social experiment. Two years ago for example, they had a button and a timer which counted down from 60 seconds. Every reddit user could click on it once and only once. Each time the button was clicked, the timer reset to 60 seconds globally. Reddit doesn't say anything about what happens when the timer hits zero, it just puts it out there and says 'here you go'. It spawned 'press the button' factions which tried to coordinate button pressing so they aren't wasted and 'do not press' factions which wanted to see the timer hit zero.
This year, I think reddit had their best social experiment yet. The premise is simple. The announcement simply went like this:
That's it. A blank 1000 x 1000 canvas where you can place one pixel once every 5 minutes. What could happen?
I really thought it was amazing. What started as a blank canvas became a work of art. What I found even more fascinating though was how the canvas became what it is. Looking at just the end result, it doesn't seem like much. Remember though, that anyone could place a pixel every 5 minutes, overwriting any existing pixel. The story of how the canvas became what it is is thus incredible. Take a look at these two comments which well describes what the experience of r/place was.
I didn't place a single pixel, I usually preferred to stay by the sidelines and watch how these things develop, but I have to say as a spectator, it was great. I myself follow the dota and one piece subreddit so it was interesting to see their discussions, and how people would actually write scripts for others to run so they could automatically defend their images. There was the classic rivalry between LoL and Dota where both sides tried to destroy each other's artwork for awhile.
My favourite parts were:
- The invasion of France by Germany was hilarious for it's 'historical accuracy'.
- The attacks of the void. In particular, the defense of Osu was pretty amazing to watch
- Rainbow road was fun for awhile, until there were too many things and there wasn't space for it, but it was fun to watch it bounce around and give the images it touches a rainbow border
- I thought the windows interface was pretty meta
- The creativity in modifying some pieces, look at Germany and Belgium for example
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