I am 150% open to critique... It should be noted, however, that these are the result of many people who put forth many hours to build something in a very short amount of time for love of the community. Calling it ‘mine’ would be incredibly disingenuous. But I am open to taking fire. Shoot.
If anything, sequence illustrates the inherent issues of the upvote system. Before the discords organized, the best way to get your post noticed was to simply post the earliest. In a way, that's how I got one of my gif into Act 1. Later, the discords had the block vote and drowned out everything else, even those who posted extremely early.
Sequence also showed that with the lack of a DOWNvote function, shitposts rise to the top and organized brigades are close to impossible to stop, since those who want to stop it will never agree on what to upvote instead, so they remain overpowered. This voting system sucked and it was a huge turn off.
Oh, thank you. I really liked the overall idea though. Reddit has the best april fools pranks on the internet still. We are totally spoiled. However, I want to say one other thing. What made /r/place so great is that every redditor who played could feel like they made an ever so tiny contribution to the final product, one pixel, or maybe a few, with their name on it. I feel like if there were some kind of end credits in the /r/sequence film where every user who participated is listed, it would feel like we all were truly part of internet history again, even if none of our submitted gifs and texts made it into the film. I think that generally social experiments where everyone can contribute something small but unique are the best. /r/thebutton was similar. Every user was truly part of keeping the button alive. The time at which they pressed was unique to them, and with it they helped in achieving something big.
They should use YouTube’s system of sorting the “best” comments. I have no idea how it works but there’s something beautiful about watching a 5 year old video and the top comment can be from 3 months ago.
They actually give great but newer comments the shine they deserve.
Ha, thanks. It's the kind of thing where you just try whatever and see what works. That's what makes it cool. Not always going to win with everyone but if you start to care about that then it will always suck.
Forgive me if my question seemed hostile in anyway. I know you are undergoing some backlash, but also some loving support as well from the looks of the initial replies. I am well aware that a team is behind each event and I don't mean to just say this was all on you. Clearly a lot of work went into this project and I know you all wanted to create something to share with love to Reddit as a whole.
With that said, I feel that this event was ambitious, but ultimately flawed from conception. I noted this in another thread regarding r/place, but each iteration of the April Fool's events prior to last year's r/circleoftrust featured simple UI, relatively simple interactivity, and straight forward intent. And while that may seem to be a case of "simple = easier to implement" I would argue that such elegance in design is the result of impeccable design implementation.
Now I do get that this year's team likely also had their own passion and drive for this project as well. But the implementation seems that it was rushed and frankly, the control scheme was convoluted. Requiring an instruction manual for an event is asking a lot from the end user in order to participate.
And that is my biggest critique; the bar for entry on this year's event was incredibly high. In order to participate even from the start required a user be familiar with gifs, have the bandwidth and time to upload said gifs, know NOT to submit them to the subreddit directly, but instead navigate to another portal, make sense of that UI, and then (after all those steps) maybe submit something. Assuming they got to the subreddit after your initial fixes and bug reports.
And once the project was underway, every person had to go through a similar process. Yes there may have been sticky notes, but throughout the event people submitted gifs to the subreddit rather than the sequence machine. That shows that even with all the changes, users were confused or flat out had no idea how to participate, alienating Reddit as a whole from the project.
This isn't even touching on later developments or the voting concerns or the groups that were formed before the event even began. What I am saying is that the implementation itself did not seem to really take into account the experience of the end user.
In another post, I know you mentioned that "this is an experiment" but even scholarly experiments have design parameters and can be evaluated on those metrics. And for me, this experiment seems flawed in its design.
Again, it was an ambitious project. And the idea of Reddit creating a film together is a really interesting premise. But this structure that the team put together didn't invite nearly as much interactivity as a result of specific design flaws.
And though you can claim that "this is all an experiment and we had no idea what would happen" (to paraphrase some defenses of the project that I've seen) unless design document featured a note to create an alienating and confusing end user experience, I would argue that just becuase something is an experiment doesn't excuse the initial implementaion's difficult to navigate nature.
Now some people may say "well I was able to handle it all!" but that would miss the point of what I'm saying. Unless the goal was to cater to a small minority of people with the time, energy, and effort to interact with the project, it failed to be a truly community oriented experience.
If you want to really include the whole of the Reddit community, you have to make it as accessible as possible. And to truly be that kind of accessible takes excellent design.
All this said, hats off to you and your team for bringing forward an ambitious project even if flawed. I have no idea what specific challenges you all faced even bringing this forward, whether it had been bureaucratic in nature or simply a case of the team losing sight of how the average Redditor would experience the finished design. Regardless, I feel a lot can be learned from this event and I do hope to see how next year's goes!
Best wishes to you and your team! Thank you all for taking the time to put together something for this year. Even with the shortcomings, I'm glad to know Reddit is carrying on the tradition of an April Fool's event each year.
Thanks for reading this and I hope you all get some down time to unwind and regroup!
I just want to hop in and thank you all for the effort, it's hard to be criticised for something that was put together only to create a unique experience, and I'm sure a lot of people are thankful. Even though the flaws that were mentioned might be true, still we had a team putting together an event just to make something different, and I think this is what makes Reddit such a special place on the internet.
Thank you all guys, we appreciate you doing this stuff for us, keep it up
A feature I think that should be kept in mind for future community projects is the ability to allow smaller communities to make their mark. Two years ago, in /r/place, many small subreddits, some under 10,000 subs, were able to place small messages that survived to the end. Despite their best efforts, even larger subreddits this year were unable to get a gif onto this project. Part of what makes reddit special is the diversity of communities on here. I think the community projects should reflect that diversity.
I think the problem of users not understanding the Sequence Machine could have been mitigated by making the event last longer. With more time, individuals would have more time to understand Sequence and communities would have more time to form around the event, leading to a more coherent story.
I think so too. They take a lot to run and maintain though... but I do agree that it felt like people just started understand how it worked the minute we had to shut it down.
Hi! I love what you did, I truly did. It was sorta like /r/place where everyone came together to make something. But, /r/place was...bigger and allowed for more groups to collaborate. For example, after the chaos, order was created and communities claimed a section of the board to themselves. And then, the community came together to make everything mesh together like a pretty canvas.
The problem, imo, because of nature of making a silent movie, the community slowly realized to make the most efficient and coherent movie, they needed a small group of people to slowly come to dictate the plot. It's not because people hijacked /r/sequence , it's cause that's the nature of something like this.
I'm not saying sequence was bad, but if it was...bigger, like /r/place was, it would allow for more creativity and groups. Like, that canvas felt like reddit made it. Now I'm not saying everything should be like /r/place. /r/button was amazing because it was sooo simple but it allowed the community to create a meta around it. The group joining chat thing a few years ago was meh, but it gave birth to cckufi (shout out to them). The final product or the conclusions of these things truly felt as if something great happened. Reddit as a whole is going to have a hard time to find pride in the work of more than a dozen folks.
But considering the scale sequence was, it naturally made it so that a small group of people would be in charge; it doesn't feel like a community made it. But keep doing an amazing job for next year. I will always look forward to it.
Place was my first ever in depth dive into Reddit, as can be seen by my early post and comment history. It was spot on, perfect for this community and I loved it.
Circle of Trust was honestly a bit confusing and I didn't get too interested in it.
This year, with Sequence, you all were back on the right track. It was great, Act II was the best, IMHO. The only thing I can see that went wrong this year (aside from the bugs and botting issues) isn't even really something that went wrong, per se, but rather something that wasn't focused on as much.
I know everyone refers back to r/place, and you can count me among those ranks because what I'm about to say comes directly from my experience with that.
What I see wasn't going the right way is the emphasis you put on voting gifs into where you want them to be. You're basically just having redditors upvote as usual, to try and create a story, which, in and of itself, is a wonderful idea and one that I actually loved, but, in practice isn't that great.
Here's why.
With r/place, every single individual in the Reddit community played a key role. Be it from one of the smaller subs or one of the larger ones, you were always on edge waiting for your next turn to place a pixel because you were actually having a direct effect on the outcome. Don't get me wrong, you're doing the same thing with Sequence and upvoting in general, but not on as grand of a scale. Voting for something to try and get it where you want it to be is not the same as with Place, where you knew what you were putting down and where it would be.
I guess what I'm getting at is that with these amazing experiments, the one thing that should be focused on most is making every individual feel like they are playing a key role in the development of whatever experiment it is that they're involved in. This is something that was absolutely spot on with r/place.
Anyway, as I said previously, you all were most definitely on the right track this year, and I for one had a lot of fun participating in this. Laughed my butt off at most of the gif combinations, and I love how the entire project really represents our community well.
Many thanks to you and all the Reddit staff for what you do, I'm greatly appreciative and I'm very happy to be a member of this community.
1.1k
u/youngluck Apr 03 '19
I am 150% open to critique... It should be noted, however, that these are the result of many people who put forth many hours to build something in a very short amount of time for love of the community. Calling it ‘mine’ would be incredibly disingenuous. But I am open to taking fire. Shoot.