Look how many people engaged only works if you manage to supress the context. Which -given the fact that r/place war already reported about each prior year- is not going to happen.

So you are basically saying people looking for advertising are going for a platform full of fucks, insults and destructive comments/behavior struggling to moderate because they are too stupid to look at anything but numbers of how many people loggend in?

Reddit is looking for the extreme engagement of Place to have great stats to show investors and advertisers.

Do you think investors and advertisers are brain-deadly stupid? If they can see “great stats” on one hand while the media is full of reports about the ongoing protests of reddit users, they will be able to see the whole picture.

Especially as r/place was all over the media in past years anyway. Only this year it’s full of destructive behavior and trying to destroy everything with fuck-messages. Sure, that’s totally good advertising for reddit somehow and not scaring advertisers away because “but look at the amount of people who koined to hate us”…

Or maybe you would realize that a lot of people think the same but are also convinced to be alone and unable to change anything… Just like it happened for me back then the moment the first few made the effort to change. We will never know.

I live in Germany

Same here… and most of my contact list (and I) dropped WhatsApp when Meta bought them or a year later when the eavesdropping and phoning home to Meta was publically discussed in the media. The remaining minority is able to use another alternative on top of WhatsApp (that’s one of the reason I like to remond them that they provide Meta with data from the people opting out…). That was also nearly a decade ago (2014/2015), so pretending that you need to use WhatsApp in 2023 is indeed a choice.

I use WhatsApp as well for the people I keep in touch with

And everyone in your address book not using WhatsApp should come by once in a while and slap you for selling their numbers for your convenience… You are right… keeping a basically inactive Facebook profile is harmless in comparison.

You didn’t know because that’s mostly a bullshit pretense. Do you want to know actually happened between Munich going OpenSource and then reverting back to MS? Munich was bribed with a shiny new European Headquarter and the promise of additional taxes.

but will it even be the same now that you know how little control you actually have?

Some communities weren’t even the same anymore after those 48h protests. And you can basically feel which parts of the community instantly left the moment they realized all that talk about protesting was bullshit and it was purely symbolic.