I usually get my /r/place news from communities such as [email protected], but I kinda lost interest after the inevitable admin meddling has been made obvious (the guillotine being thanos-snapped, for example).

This is a pretty decent write-up from the Verge. What follows is my own personal summation of what’s been going on.

/r/place was supposed to have been brought back this April 2023–supposedly. There’s a consensus (among the communities I’ve followed) that it’s just an effort made by the admins to drive up user engagement (after the shenanigans they’ve pulled these past few months), and make it more attractive to investors.

Things have gone pretty much according to plan: if the plan was to use hate to drive engagement numbers. There were several lovely messages to /u/spez, most notably, in German (/u/spez ist ein Huresohn). There’s also the very peculiarly French depiction of a snoo (with the name tag /u/spez) being guillotined.

However, the admin shenanigans got more obvious after that guillotine was completed, with it being thanos-snapped. Some people have investigated the issue, with some finding out that while usually, placed pixels have a user associated to it, the “random noise” that snapped the French message didn’t. This also happened in some of the English messages to /u/spez.

I basically lost interest at this point, and the coverage on the communities that makes it to my front page has pretty much dried up too. I don’t have much of an idea what happened next but I hope that the previous paragraphs made for an accurate summary about what happened.

As a large language model, … wait, no!! Sorry about that.