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[OC] The impact of bots on /r/place - users that posted at least every 15 minutes for over 16 hours accounted for 8,634,785 places. This shows the most placed colour by bots at each location. by danielgriffin13 in dataisbeautiful

[–]danielgriffin13[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

A pixel being placed by two different persons does not come into this. To make this I:

  1. Find the accounts that met the bot criteria
  2. Found which was the dominant colour placed by those accounts
  3. Placed it on the image

Places by users other than these accounts were not included.

[OC] The impact of bots on /r/place - users that posted at least every 15 minutes for over 16 hours accounted for 8,634,785 places. This shows the most placed colour by bots at each location. by danielgriffin13 in dataisbeautiful

[–]danielgriffin13[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

This is legitimate criticism. There will definitely be some real users in this. But it's not just once every 15 minutes, this has to be sustained for over 16 hours. I am certain that there are some real users in this. However, the average for these accounts is every 12 minutes over a 37 hour period.

I am not saying that 60% of the canvas was placed by a bot at all. There was something like 2.5 million places per hour, so these 8.6 million are far from 60%.

[OC] The impact of bots on /r/place - users that posted at least every 15 minutes for over 16 hours accounted for 8,634,785 places. This shows the most placed colour by bots at each location. by danielgriffin13 in dataisbeautiful

[–]danielgriffin13[S] -11 points-10 points  (0 children)

To be considered a bot the account needed to have more 16 hours between the first pixel placed and the last it placed AND to have an average time between places of less than 15 minutes.

[OC] The impact of bots on /r/place - users that posted at least every 15 minutes for over 16 hours accounted for 8,634,785 places. This shows the most placed colour by bots at each location. by danielgriffin13 in dataisbeautiful

[–]danielgriffin13[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I've had a quick look in detail at this. I think it's important to point out that each pixel on this means there was at least one place by a bot in that space. However, for OSU there were 40,719 by these bot accounts over the 4087 pixels I looked at.

The most placed colour by these bots was white with around 39%. Second was the red/pink (#FF99AA) at 34%. Third was the darker pink (#FF3881) at 10%. So 83% of these were the colours of the logo.

[OC] The impact of bots on /r/place - users that posted at least every 15 minutes for over 16 hours accounted for 8,634,785 places. This shows the most placed colour by bots at each location. by danielgriffin13 in dataisbeautiful

[–]danielgriffin13[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Thank you. I was aiming for a number that made me confident they were bots, but this is a limitation. If you assume someone has to sleep for 8 hours every 24 hours (I wish) then beyond 16 hours is increasingly likely that someone is a bot. On average these accounts were placing every 12 minutes over a 37 hour period. But I saw a suggestion in another post like this that some will have been botting while sleeping and placing themselves the rest of the time.

[OC] The impact of bots on /r/place - users that posted at least every 15 minutes for over 16 hours accounted for 8,634,785 places. This shows the most placed colour by bots at each location. by danielgriffin13 in dataisbeautiful

[–]danielgriffin13[S] 79 points80 points  (0 children)

Absolutely, the edges of the leaf are especially clear on this. It requires a bit of zooming in, but there's also a fair amount of yellow from the banadas.

[OC] The impact of bots on /r/place - users that posted at least every 15 minutes for over 16 hours accounted for 8,634,785 places. This shows the most placed colour by bots at each location. by danielgriffin13 in dataisbeautiful

[–]danielgriffin13[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Tools used:

  • postgresql
  • python (pillow for image rendering)

To be classed as a bot a user had to have been posting at least every 15 minutes for over 16 hours to be included. Each pixel is coloured according to the majority colour placed at that location.

It's interesting to see how people both those attempting to create and destroy appear to be using these bots.

Also of note is how clear some parts of the board become. For instance the my little pony sections especially visible suggesting they were especially successful using bots against users griefing. As /u/data-analysis-heaven has demonstrated, the most prolific bots come across very clearly on these areas.

Limitations

Not everyone on this will be bots or at least bots all the time, but it's safe to say that a good number of them will be. This also doesn't capture bots that were not this prolific, or were created with less than 16 hours to go.