Large-scale Collective Dynamics in the Three Iterations of the Reddit r/place Experiment
<|reference_start|>Large-scale Collective Dynamics in the Three Iterations of the Reddit r/place Experiment: The Reddit r/place experiments were a series of online social experiments hosted by Reddit in 2017, 2022, and 2023, where users were allowed to update the colors of pixels in a large shared canvas. The largest of these experiments (in 2022) has attracted over 100 million users who collaborated and competed to produce elaborate artworks that together provide a unique view of the shared interests connecting the diverse communities on Reddit. The user activity traces resulting from these experiments enable us to analyze how online users engage, collaborate, and compete online at an unprecedented scale. However, this requires labeling millions of updates made during the experiments according to their intended artwork.   This paper characterizes large-scale activity traces from r/place with a focus on dynamics around successful and failed artworks. To achieve this goal, we propose a dynamic graph clustering algorithm to label artworks by leveraging visual and user-level features. %In the first phase of the algorithm, updates within a snapshot of the experiment are grouped based on proximity, color, and user embeddings. In the second phase, clusters across snapshots are merged via an efficient approximation for the set cover problem. We apply the proposed algorithm to the 2017 edition of r/place and show that it outperforms an existing baseline in terms of accuracy and running time. Moreover, we use our algorithm to identify key factors that distinguish successful from failed artworks in terms of user engagement, collaboration, and competition.<|reference_end|>
@article{wu2024large-scale,
    title={Large-scale Collective Dynamics in the Three Iterations of the Reddit
  r/place Experiment},
    author={Yutong Wu, Arlei Silva},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.13236},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.13236},
    primaryClass={cs.SI}
}