I’m trying to transition off of reddit completely and I dislike what they have done. But that being said, I thought it was quite honorable of them to not censor the ‘fuck spez’, be it comments throughout the site or on /r/Place. They even left the giant fuck spez ending in the official time lapse of /r/Place and the highest ranked post is a screen shot of the same.
They have many reasonable sounding excuses available to censor excessive use of the word ‘fuck’, and I don’t see how they benefit by leaving it up there. It’s not like censoring swear words is beyond the pale compared to other things they have done. They didn’t even need to do /r/Place, they knew full well what was going to happen but they did it anyways.
I know many people think this is some 4D chess move or a fear of the Streisand effect. They are not that clever.
I just wanted to point out that it does in fact look like they have a line that they won’t cross and they are holding to it.
Also, fuck spez.
Even though Reddit knew that r/Place would attract an obvious message, what’s left after it’s done?
Reddit has already shown they’re contemptuous of their users and do not care about their opinions.
Is a protest that boosts site engagement really effective to a site that exists because of engagement?
I don’t think I’m being cynical when I say I think bringing back r/Place was a means to juice their numbers - a way to cover up falling user engagement.
My suspicion is they’re trying to buy time to come up with a better plan. r/Place represents another month of fooled advertisers.