User collaboration is not an unusual way of creating content on the internet; in fact many websites such as Wikipedia and Medium rely on collaborative effort for their contents. However, output of user collaboration is published after evaluation of the content according to different measures of adequacy which indicates the actions that users take are not directly observable.
r/place is a collaborative art project that was conducted on Reddit which lets users place a tile on a 4 million-pixel canvas for every 5 minutes. For the 2022 version of the r/place, over 10 million users attended and around 70 million tiles ( 2.5 million tiles per hour) were placed. Unlike websites where user interactions are under review, on r/place user actions are not restricted except the time limitation which makes it possible to analyze users and their actions not as independent actors but as communities that can take actions en masse.
In this work, we analyze the r/place data in order to detect communities with specific intentions and their interactions with other communities in accordance with their intentions. In order to create an interaction network where communities would be detected, we consider users as nodes and tile placements of two users on a given area of the canvas at a specified time interval as edges. We identify and classify communities by focusing on interactions which occurred on time intervals where events such as demolition of artworks, resistance against sabotage attempts and reinstatement of the demolished artworks. It is expected that network analysis will reveal communities that aim to sabotage artworks, communities that try to rebuild those demolished and unification of small communities against bigger communities for different intentions.
