I’d imagine there are a few reasons, but the TL;DR is… money.
- This year’s April Fools event was terrible. Most people were unable to participate as they didn’t understand it and those that did participate worked on the event in a couple of different Discord servers, not on Reddit itself (because Reddit is terrible for real-time communication). It was also largely unannounced so it was pretty challenging to find and that couldn’t have been good for the site’s revenue - as controversial as r/place is going to be this year, it’s going to bring in a lot of money for the site (and increase the number of active users) because even people that have left Reddit will probably return to put “FUCK SPEZ” on the canvas.
- The API controversy is ongoing and shows no signs of ending currently. I think they’re trying to distract people from the API changes and hope that people think “wow, Reddit is fun, I’ll stick around” after r/place ends instead of becoming less active or leaving the site entirely. r/place will also probably be discussed quite widely for the next few weeks and Reddit probably hopes that this will lead to the API changes being forgotten about (like plenty of other controversies in the site’s history - newer Redditors have no idea about the r/jailbait controversy or u/spez editing comments, for example).
Ultimately, Reddit are going to be collecting data from r/place and using it to encourage investors to invest in Reddit.
teolan@lemmy.world 11 months ago
To boost the active users numbers
sicjoke@lemmy.world 11 months ago
And based on everyone’s excitement to participate seems like their plan is working.
matt@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Agreed… Feels like everyone is falling for this hook, line, and sinker.
The goal is to get people back on Reddit, doesn’t matter what you’re doing. For how many people are still on Reddit complaining, it clearly doesn’t matter that much to people.
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
99.999% of people never left reddit in the first place… this is our chance to get some of those people that either never heard about Lemmy or were discouraged by the complexity of the while thing the first time around, but might be primed to make the leap now
oce@jlai.lu 11 months ago
I think they made the bet that they will earn more from boosting the monthly active user numbers than they would lose from the bad image drawn by Lemmy trolls, and I’m not sure the outcome is obvious.
TheLowestStone@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The outcome is obvious. Admins will remove anything they don’t want people to see and they’ll have accomplished their goal of pumping their engagement numbers.
Getawombatupya@aussie.zone 11 months ago
Bread and circuses 🎪
Savirius@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Which raises the question: if the point is to raise the number of active users for July, what do they plan on doing for August? Like, a slow descent from June to July to August wouldn’t look great to a potential investor, but surely a steady increase to July followed by a sheer cliffface down to August would look even worse right??
Gork@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Launch their IPO? Get the capital while the numbers are hot?