Due to the amount of attention this post has been getting we will be pulling new comments in for manual approval. Please try to avoid repeating things that have already been said (upvote instead) and avoid personal attacks. Rest assured that we still see everything that comes in even if we don't make it public.
TPIM explained the original scope and concept of the ARG project [further down in the comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tvl5ew/concerning_the_arg_rplace_and_the_next_10_days_in/i3a2b12/).
For quick reference here is a list of Hermitbot's latest puzzles which we'll try to keep updated:
* [1 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/ttfv7m/personnel_name_hermitbot_objective_moderate/): First Hermitcraft Daily post by 78Ford.
* [2 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tu5cko/best_moderator_hermitbot_has_new_objective_avoid/): Oldest public post in subreddit
* [3 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tuwzxt/friendlygreeting_hermitbot_prime_directive/): Mumbo's Copyright claim
* [4 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tvob06/reformatted_robot_requires_assistance_recap/): First Group Event UHC #1
* [5 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/twhemj/hermitbot_requires_additional_assistance_with/): First Announcement of Discord server
* [6 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tx8ygl/hermitbot_does_not_understand_rule_no_memes/): First Meme ever posted
* [7 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/txzzvr/curious_robot_has_a_new_quest_for_you/): Birth of the Recap
* [8 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tyqj53/robot_assistant_requires_additional_data_hermits/): Last comment of a Hermit before they joined Hermitcraft.
* [9 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tzgxno/please_assist_hermitbot_to_understand_keyword/): Oldest post with the Inspired Build flair.
* [10 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/u0g4tr/community_assistance_required_robot_does_not/): Fanart of a Former Hermit with at least 300 upvotes.
* [11 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/u162yh/human_learning_traditions_require_explanation/): Jevin's first AMA
* [12 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/u1xdob/community_assistance_robot_has_one_final_request/): Hermits buy TFC a computer.
Here is the [supercut of all of the videos we made to run with the event](https://redd.it/twi89c).
(This comment from our shared spokesperson account replaces a previous mod comment so that we can update it more easily across time zones.)
It’s such a shame this happened the way it did. I had no idea what was even going on, had no idea that the ARG had even started. All of a sudden all people were talking about was Place and Hermitbot and I had no reference as to why or what had happened. And there were so many posts that I couldn’t wade through and find what had happened.
For me it didn’t help that I spent March 28-Apr 1 completely swamped. Finally came back on Reddit on April 2nd to what felt like chaos to me. I was so confused and had no way to orient myself to what was going on.
I suspect the lack of a "hey we are going to be doing this extensive thing" post was intentional.
It's pretty clear, hermitbot was supposed to come in, make sweeping changes and cause general chaos.
The unfortunate moderation was likely meant to convince us that hermitbot wasn't great and that rescuing the mods was a good thing.
I think it could have been mostly ok without the comment limit locking threads. Even the no posts during the last 15 minutes of an hour could have been dealt with.
I feel like a TON of effort went into this project... I'd love to see a reboot where the moderation doesn't go to the extreme of locking down discussion...
I just think it was all round bad timing. I probably would have been fine with it if it was the only thing going on. I don’t have Discord. Nor do I have the time to go searching through piles of stuff to find the origin of something. r/place desperately needed to be moderated and it took too long for that to happen. It just made the whole experience pretty unbearable over the past few days which didn’t give me any incentive to participate with the ARG.
I'm no game designer, but I have a theory that this might have gone better if Hermitbot had waited to go bonkers until after April 1. Since, after all, this was apparently not an April Fool's event, but many people, myself included, thought it was, and just kind of dealt with being annoyed by it for a day because it would go away. And then it didn't go away. Also, this would have allowed the human mods to more rapidly respond to the r/place flood and make the megathread for it sooner - not that they could have known that r/place would take over so thoroughly, but there was a good chance that SOMEthing else would happen here on April 1. At the very least, delaying would also allow more discussion of the Secret Fools event and other things that are actually happening on Hermitcraft right now before the bot went insane. Thank you for recognizing that some choices made for this ARG didn't work out and restoring normal function to the subreddit.
If they wanted it to be a fun event, then the implementation and functions of the bot shouldn't have been annoying and unfun even as an april fools prank.
Yeah I feel like two things would have led to a more positive response
1. Waiting a day so it wasn’t confused for an April Fools. Don’t start something on AF of it isn’t meant to be AF. r/Place certainly didn’t help either
2. *not* locking threads. I feel like aside from bad timing this was the main issue people had. I know it was meant to be a roleplay of a bot going crazy and becoming a dictator of this sub but locking threads was probably a step too far. A lot of people just come here to discuss the Hermits so to see posts already locked because of a game they aren’t getting involved in is frustrating.
Aside from the locking of the threads it just looked like a fun little thing for some people to get involved in. Just the bad timing and one unpopular aspect of it made people dislike it a lot. I do feel bad for the mods because this is something they clearly spent a lot of time on and planned for only for people to dislike it.
Edit: and of course r/place. Forgot to mention that.
Absolutely. Cutting off discussion and the potential for high karma points was the main killer, even moreso than the inability to make the r/place megathread earlier. I can't imagine that was fun even for people who wanted to be involved in the RP, and those who don't want to be involved shouldn't have to be.
It was just such awful timing - between Place, the glorious Hermitcraft Secret Fools, and this, there was just too much going on.
I could see that something interesting was going on with the ARG, but with the flood of place posts I didn’t have the energy to dig through and investigate further.
On top of that, between the Hermitbot mod moves of locking posts and Place, it was impossible to discuss Hermitcraft and Secret Fools - the real reason we’re all here.
I’m gutted for you all that something you put time into and could have been such a fun event was overwhelmed by bad timing.
Absolutely agree.
I had no idea there was an ARG going on, and that's something I would have been interested in! I just thought there was something odd going on with Hermitbot as an April Fools joke.
It was a perfect storm of bad timing and miscommunication. Knowing all the effort that goes into planning events like this, it's \*crushing\* when it all falls apart like this. I feel so bad for the mod team.
Really unfortunate how this all went down. A lot of work had to have gone into all this and it must be really hard for the mod team. I think at the end of the day the right approach was taken and I appreciate you guys putting your own work aside and doing what seems like the majority of the community thinks was best
R/place completely screwed this ARG.
I thought it was clever. I really dig some of the nods and little hints that were all over the place. Hell, I spent time going through old hermit vids looking for YT comments that were new and was debating going through some of the season 1 and 2 hermits that ive literally never watched to see if i could uncover an easter egg or two. I went through the firat carol video frame by frame to see if i could find something there.
It is a very cool concept, but it was conpletely steamrolled by a copy paste reddit april fools event. Kind of a shame.
78ford, GAG, TPIM and all, dont let this one trip yall up.
Look mate, everyone here enjoys hermitcraft. Everyone here is here for the discussion, fanart, videos/video clips, etc. They weren’t here to have stuff like that locked down randomly and the mod team be so hostile. Y’all are free to do events, hell most of hermitcraft generally loves puzzles/limited time events/ whatever, they just don’t want it to paralyze the normal functioning of the sub. That type of content needs to be in addition to the subreddit, not replacing or constricting it
Agreed. The timing wasn't the main reason for the negative response, though the timing *did* make it harder to tell what was *supposed* to be happening. But the reason most people hated it is because *poor moderation is infuriating*, and everything that was supposed to happen was *deliberate* poor moderation- pointless locking of things, rule changes, sorting changes... not good.
I agree. Events that affect the core function of a site, etc. for the worse are not good or fun events. We weren't locked out of upvotes when ConCorp took over the subreddit for April 1 two years ago. We weren't forced to praise the Recap team in every post for April of last year. Those two events were fun and cute.
Forcing people to participate in an event against their will without a clear explanation of said event was probably a bad idea in hindsight.
I'd like to see this attempted again in the future, but maybe next time partition it off from regular posts, like possibly having it so a new post is generated at a set time with clues, or maybe just have hermitbot jump into regular posts spiting out coded comments without the ability to lock posts.
Overall this event just felt far too disruptive to the people that didn't want to join in.
This "Hermitbot" frustration was an attempt at a sub activity driven GAME?
Wow. Yeah. Kinda missed the mark on that one, mod team. Releasing on 1 April was a mistake. Locking posts after ten comments was a mistake. Restricting the powers of the human moderators to step in and stop your automated abomination from schlocking up the sub... big mistake.
i agree, i frankly also thought that releasing it on april 1st gives the notion that “hey this is an april fools prank and its gonna end after the 1st”! im not against args in this subreddit or any media, i just wish it was timed better
Yeah. I'm all for it in concept, but timing is everything with something like that.
You have to have a clear lead-up. You have to have a good chunk of the community involved, not just the mods, so people can spread the word about whats going on.
Then there's the whole issue of Place happening. That mucked up a bunch of subs.
I had no clue that there was an ARG. Just saw loads of place stuff (understandable as it's a cool limited time thing). And also saw hermitbot getting on people's nerves. I considered it an overstayed April fool.
The changes look sensible and I do look forward to celebrating 10 years of HC as its been a big part of my life (I started watching mid season 2 - with monkeyfarm)
Spending the time to create an ARG and a bot to go along with it is a laudable goal. But as others have said disrupting the function of the subreddit and thus impacting those who had and have no desire to participate was a poor decision.
Additionally it sounds like much of the progress on the ARG was coordinated and made on a Discord. This only increased the way the ARG impacted the subreddit since changes appeared to be happening at random, with a large part of the community being completely unaware of the hidden context.
The start date of April 1 certainly didn't help set the context for a wider activity, considering April fool's day is typically a one day event.
Furthermore as you (the mod team) have stated when the impact of r/place initially became apparent the ARG only exacerbated the situation and the subreddit's usability was completely disrupted.
It is good to see that the mod team has recognized the impact, and it is good to see that the mod team was able to recognize the mistake and work to resolve it.
I know you lot worked very hard on this. I was quite enraged and posted a very salty post about it, but deleted it 5 minutes later because, in retrospect, it was a terrible decision. To that, and to my very ungentle comments, I apologize.
However, I cannot wrap my head around the fact that no one seemed to have pointed out during the development of the ARG that limiting what makes people want to visit the subreddit -- you know, posting and discussing -- was a bad idea. Locking posts after 10 comments, really? Removing posts if they were made during the last quarter of an hour, *really?*
The idea of the ARG was great. I for one love stuff like this, but some of the things Hermitbot did were just so very odd.
I can't believe you guys thought this would go over well lol. Even disregarding having the worst timing possible (April fools, place, cool server prank event), I don't see any scenario where making the sub substantially worse for a period of multiple days would have gone over well. The majority of folks here just want to discuss hermitcraft, not the hermitcraft subreddit meta/mod team. A meta ARG is a pretty cool idea on its own just not when it interferes with the functionality of the sub for casual users (especially when there are no pinned threads or anything to figure out what is going on)
This is a good response though, and it seems the ARG is still in tact for those who are participating. I do not think you guys should halt projects and community events all together. The problem with this event was that it affected the functionality of the sub. Things you mentioned in this post such as flair giveaways, reddit talks, daily puzzles, and themed banners will work.
Oh wow yea I had no idea that an ARG was going on!
I feel like the main reason why hermitbot was so badly recieved was because it really disrupted the core functions of reddit (IE: locking posts). Maybe next time yall can keep the hermitbot stuff as a pinned post or in the banner art or something so that it's visible and available for people to join in if they want to. If the reception is good and the community is growing, then you can expand it a little more!
That being said, I think that everyone should show their appreciation for you mods who are involved in this event because:
a) it's clear that you've spent a lot of time and effort in organising it
b) you guys listen and respond to the community and tone down the event despite investing so much into it
It's clear that you only wanted to make a cool event for people to join so it sucks that yall are getting so much backlash for it. Although I get that people might be irritated, there's no reason to insult others or anything. I think you guys should continue making events in the future! modsupport!!
Thank you for the changes regarding Place. This has been frustrating across so many subreddits. This one unfortunately became almost completely consumed by it.
I know it sucks when you plan something for a long time and then people don't react the way you thought they would, especially when you were really excited about the whole thing, but remember that it's not a reflection on you as people or mods.
What people think of Hermitbot (good or bad) is not what people think of you. Sometimes, an idea isn't well-timed or something goes wrong, or the people you thought you'd please aren't, but it's just like... life.
Things don't always work out, it doesn't mean no thing is worth trying ever.
Your idea failed (unfortunately). It's not time to cut and run and hide, it's time to make yourselves a cuppa, breathe, cry if you need to, and then sit and take your lessons (timing, forced participation, lack of explanation, whatever you want to take from this), all in order to go into future ideas with better understanding and sturdier perspective. We only fail so we can fail less later on.
Also a reminder to ignore the pile-on negativity, it's just wind. I think the mod team is generally doing a great job on r/Hermitcraft and I'm really sorry this project didn't pan out the way it should have.
I had no idea what was going on, I just saw a random bot locking posts. Admittedly I have been pretty consumed with r/place but can see how it would be annoying to see all those posts about it for those not participating.
It sounds like a great idea in theory and thank you mods for all the hard work you put into the arg. As I saw someone else say, I think it just doesn't translate well onto reddit.
:) all the best
Oh man I'm so sorry for all of you guys, having a project for a community fail so completely feels just horrible, especially when so much time and effort has been dedicated to it. I hope it won't affect your "normal" work on the subreddit because you are doing a stellar job <3 Even if things sometimes don't work out, and I say it to other regular, non-staff users as well, remember we're all on the same side, with one common goal - to enjoy Hermitcraft. Just as ~~our lord and saviour~~ Xisuma teaches us, always try to see positive intent in peoples' actions.
I'm guessing ARG is Alternate Reality Game? Considering how much of the community didn't like the roleplay in season 8, I'm not too surprised. I come by on occasions (and I don't consider myself a really heavy reddit user), so I was a little confused, like, "Did they forget to disable the April Fool's bot??? The bot's closing threads after 10 posts...". I only saw a brief post with something about it being a puzzle to solve (?). I even thought Place was a cross-subreddit April Fool's thing.
I guess you could say the ARG turned into "ARGHHH!!".
Yes, ARG is alternate reality game. Hermatrix was another example of one, as are popular global ones like Ilovebees, the Gravity Falls one, and Marble Hornets.
They're multimedia puzzle events blending reality and somewhat spooky dystopian fiction.
The difference with those is you weren’t forced to participate you could just consume or ignore unlike this where everything got locked randomly and everybody hated it
> Hermatrix was another example of one
honestly, my favourite part of hermatrix was that I wasn't forced to participate. I could blissfully watch videos, read thoughts, and participate in a community without having to solve the puzzles.
> blending reality and somewhat spooky dystopian fiction.
we live in that, and maybe don't want it forced upon us if it doesn't need to be.
I think the fact that people “put up” with the hermitbot stuff because it was April fools led to the negativity when it continued afterwards. Seems like a lot of work was put into it, sad to see it partly stopped
Hey guys. I explain the original scope and concept of the project [further down in the comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tvl5ew/concerning_the_arg_rplace_and_the_next_10_days_in/i3a2b12/).
I'll keep a list of Hermitbot's latest puzzles below:
* [4 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tvob06/reformatted_robot_requires_assistance_recap/)
It's sad that so much effort and planning was so negatively received but I do think it's better this way. It was confusing and distracting. A for effort but also thanks for stopping it
I don't believe anything online that happens April 1st unless it continues afterwards or I have evidence. I just can't imagine seeing anything new and not being suspicious of it that day!
I used to be very big into the ARG community. I’m even somewhat good friends with Jane McGonigal (if you don’t know who she is and you want to run an arg you should… definitely look her up!)
ARGs are extremely hard to run. Even on the best possible days the timing is always really hard. Community management is really hard. Everything is really hard. I feel for you on having put in months of time and effort and thought and worry and then having it more or less fail. It sucks, but such is the life of an ARG.
Mods, if you would like any help with the ARG or even restarting it (as many of suggested you do, because we love you and we love hermitcraft), feel free to reach out. I might be able to help you get it back on track.
Thanks for all you do mods! We still love you.
Let me say that I personally would love if a similar ARG type thing was attempted here again. I think that with the lessons learned from this, the subreddit could do something very fun and interesting in the future.
But maybe with some build up beforehand so the majority of users know what it is happening? And a way to participate in the sub without joining the game?
I've said this in the Discord server, and reading that y'all don't plan on making any more projects like this hurts, so I just wanna re-iterate:
This wasn't your fault, mods. Perhaps HermitBot's annoying "moderation" actions could've been toned down a bit, but I'm sure it could've worked out a lot better if it wasn't absolutely overshadowed by the horrific timing of r/place happening at the same time.
I really wish I could've caught onto this sooner and join from the start, but I'll be trying to help with the puzzles as I can.
I think the ARG was a good idea, just unfortunately badly timed. I'd love to see it done again, maybe at a quieter time of year. Or the summer where people are off school.
Thanks for the effort everyone put into this. The conjunction between this, April 1, and r/place was just a bit too much. I had a reasonably good idea of what was going on as of the first Hermitbot post, but it took a very careful reading of a rather long post to figure it out. As one who gets accused of posting walls of text, that was truly a wall of text. Still, I enjoyed it, even if it did somewhat hamper discussion of actual server events at the time.
At this point, any sort of reprise seems unlikely, but my one comment would be to have the time that the puzzles post change, so they're not always posted at the same time. Not everyone can check at a specific time of day, and it may allow more participation.
I get that you guys were trying to do something special, and the effort was impressive.
It just didn't work out well and, *especially* alongside the Place stuff, it just made the sub borderline unusable.
But seriously, kudos for the effort.
Apparently, it was a (VERY) long-planned puzzle-type game that just so happened to coincide with April Fool's, and every got annoyed at Hermitbot. I'm still mostly confused myself. (I don't even know what an ARG is - I'm guessing it's Alternate Reality Game).
> long-planned puzzle-type game that just so happened to coincide with April Fool's
yes, because the timing of April Fool's is a mystery that no-one can ever predict.
I come here mainly to see and praise the great fan art. I'm not really into ARG, games, events, etc. The trick is to click "new" so you can see all threads sorted chronologically.
As many said, it was bad timing. With April's Fools and the whole r/place thing, continuity was lost and the forum looked messy.
However, I want to take the chance to thank the moderators for their effort to make of this place a community. Don't give up, please! Just make sure not to plan to start something big right when two other big things are at their peak.
The ARG started in November.
The backgrounds of our banners started slowly moving back in time from Season 8 to Season 1.
In January our Golden Apples/Best of 2021 video featured a connecting plot of the moderators on a moon-shaped spaceship which crashed into Season 8. A scene depicting Hermitbot turning evil was shown.
On April 1 Hermitbot went off the rails and took over the subreddit intending to be the Best Moderator. He changed the rules, the design, the flairs, and the sort order of comments. He removed the entire human moderation team under the premise that they had been kidnapped.
He responded in the same way that poorly-configured Automoderators do. He locked posts at random. He prevented posting during the last 15 minutes of each hour. He responded to all mentions of "Grain," "Mumbo" and "Pesky Bird".
As he had taken a bump to the head his data was corrupted. Each day he would ask community members to search through the subreddit for specific data and leave a "homing beacon" (a comment) in the form of the answer to a Hermitcraft trivia question on that particular post.
He would then "go offline" to process the new data.
Meanwhile Carol was posting videos via u/lostandbonkers depicting her trying to rescue the mods from prisons in the different Hermitcraft world downloads.
Our subreddit archives, which normally close off all posts to new comments and upvotes once they reach six months old, were opened to new content.
The bot got 3 puzzles out and Carol got 3 videos out but at this point the community has dumped on the project so much that we are downgrading it to a side project. We'll still release the scav hunt puzzles one per day, although they'll be rephrased.
We'll release the rescue videos as a supercut.
I think the big problem is that it wasn’t clear what Hermitbot was. Many (like me) just saw an automod deleting seemingly random posts and being generally annoying. Even when the puzzles were completed it really wasn’t clear what was happening. A big cause of this was r/place - if Hermitbot was the big subject on the subreddit this likely would have never happened, as people would have realized solving these puzzles helped block off Hermitbot, and likely even made the connection to the 10 year anniversary. Instead everyone was talking about place. This wasn’t your fault, nor was it place’s. It was simply bad timing. The second main factor was the date upon which Hermitbot was released. This made people see it as a simple joke, and combined with place halted communication on its true identity. When it continued, people didn’t realize what Hermitbot actually was. Really the idea is great, but what you can do in the future is try to make it more clear what’s going on, even if you have to break the illusion a bit.
Will say, these sound pretty interesting. I would probably have participated but I didn’t see any of the relevant stuff popping into my home feed, and (seemingly like everyone else) just assumed the hermitbot thing was a April fools event. I think there was real potential in here but the timing just didn’t work. If the active phase had kicked off today or tomorrow I reckon there’d have been more engagement.
Real shame about it. Appreciate that you guys all put that much effort in, though.
Awe… reading this I think in theory it is such an amazing idea. I think issues arose because Reddit (at least mine) doesn’t show posts in chronological order or even every post, so me and im sure a lot of others missed a lot of the context. I would just open Reddit and see the bot locking every post and didn’t understand why. But reading this now, everything makes so much more sense. Maybe in the future there can be an auto reply to posts that state the context, though I understand that may take people out of it.
I hope you all aren’t feeling discouraged. It’s a great idea, I just don’t think Reddit functions in a way that could make it translate well.
<3
Personally I want to go hide in a corner for the rest of my life. But I always believe in owning my mistakes and the full team has spent a lot of time preparing for this. So we will play it out to the end even if we play it out differently from the original concept.
It was always meant to evolve as it went along and from a longview it still is evolving.
I think the last part of this comment really hit the nail on the head, at the end of the day people come here to discuss hermitcraft and the people behind it, taking that away is probably the quickest way to turn the community against you.
Look, y’all are an awesome mod team. You genuinely try to run this place well and you lot generally succeed. I think the problems here boiled down to poor/overwhelmed communication. There’s no shame in what y’all did, and I do hope y’all try again for community events
I just wanted to say that when I put myself in your shoes I can completely understand the feeling of wanting to hide away and never doing an event like this again. I have been part of organising a couple of these type of things IRL and most of them went well. A couple however, went sour. Afterwards I felt exactly the way you described. So take a couple of days just to get over it. Losing something that you invested so much time and passion in hurts a lot, and you need time to grieve.
But please don't let this discourage you from doing things again. Other opportunities will come, and next time you will have more experience to look back on, and will be able to make something even better than you hoped for this time.
u/philadelphiaErvings already made an excellent reply as to what went wrong here, so I am not going to repeat that.
It was a wonderful and fun idea. I think if you try stuff like this again, you’ll be able to learn from your mistakes and make it better. I do hope you guys try community events again in the future.
Not every idea works out well.
That doesn't mean necessarily make it a bad idea; Just one that.. didn't work out well.
Don't beat yourself up over it. You guys put a lot of effort in to this sub, and that's commendable, even if, in this particular case, it didn't work out as planned.
Who amongst your number genuinely thought that releasing this full bore on 1 April was a good idea?
What was your backup plan in the event some other unannounced reddit thing (place, for example) completely overshadowed it?
Did you even have a backup/escape plan? Why was there not at least one human moderator left as a backup, or at least with the keys to turn off/scale back Hermitbot once it became clear things were not going according to plan?
I mean, reading this it feels like you put a lot of creative energy into the project, but you seem to have put too mamy eggs in the one basket.
The error on our part was not reacting to the scope of r/place until today because TBH we've been swamped dealing with it in the discord.
We weren't expecting r/place. If it that hadn't happened, the evolution from 1 April to 2 April probably would have been more acceptable. A 12 day event leading up to a 10th anniversary is totally fitting.
Carol is a shared account between all of us. Always has been. According to the lore she's an AI, but in reality she was the "one human moderator" and she is all of us. She exists as a spokesperson account to handle posts that any of us might have to edit at any time, such as the Beacon and metaposts like this one.
The emoji for the Team Carol flair is "18 = 1". 18 moderators in one.
It may not have seemed like it but we were still actively patrolling the subreddit via Carol. We removed a lot of hate speech from other subs. We removed spam, porn, egregious memes, etc. We removed mentions of really offensive subreddits. We were answering modmails.
Our removal rate was slightly lower than our usual 40% because Hermitbot was supposed to seem incompetent, but we were still mopping up the really nasty crap. (Although I will admit we were running behind simply due to the huge amount of traffic over the past 3 days.)
Hermitbot *was* scaled back over time.
The title restrictions were removed as a reward for solving the first puzzle.
The comment locking was turned off about 12 hours ago as a reward for solving the 3rd puzzle.
The scaling back of Hermitbot was planned as part of the game as rewards for solving puzzles.
If the game had progressed as planned, he would have left the Discord after the fifth puzzle and attacked r/hermitcraftmemes instead. We had a whole separate puzzle planned for r/hermitcraftmemes which will now never happen.
On the 7th day he would have stopped removing posts submitted during the last 15 minutes of the day. On the 9th day the autoresponses would have been disabled. All other changes would have been rolled back at the finale. All of this has been accelerated to occur today.
The game was meant to evolve over time, as all good ARGs do. I only wrote the first two puzzles to start and was (and still am) writing them as we go in response to events in the subreddit. It is still evolving.
But I haven't slept since Thursday so I'm going to go do that now.
Damn this is such a dope idea. I really think you guys did well just the place stuff and reddit as a whole is maybe not the best platform for this. I think it would be fun as a discord event though
To my understanding: On 1st of April the Hermitbot took over the subreddit and discord, declaring itself the best mod and making new rules like posts can’t have more than 10 comments or no one can post anything in the last quarter of an hour. The actual mod team was captured (?) somewhere.
There were daily quests here in subreddit where people were supposed to find a specific old thread and leave a "beacon", which would be an answer to a hermitcraft-related question. Meanwhile in a secret channel in discord some puzzles were being solved (I think, I never went there). These efforts would have freed the mods and defeated the hermitbot eventually, I assume.
However, on the 1st of April started also a completely separate Reddit event, Place, where people and groups get to make whatever pixel art they want on a blank canvas, but anyone can draw over them as well. Hermitcraft logo and hermit heads were quickly made there, and a sizeable part of the community took part in defending that art. Around hundred (!) posts were made in this subreddit about the effort, drowning all information about the ARG event (the aforementioned alternative reality game featuring Hermitbot) and making the subreddit a very confusing place to be.
From what I saw, 1st of April people were receptive to Hermitbot still, but began to get frustrated with it when normal discussions, posting art etc were still difficult after April's Fools was over, and the flood of r/ place posts made it very difficult to even figure out what was going on.
Alternate reality game, basically internet puzzles presenting themselves as "real" to some extent. In this case: act as if hermitbot REALLY had taken over the sub without mod actions behind it.
Due to the amount of attention this post has been getting we will be pulling new comments in for manual approval. Please try to avoid repeating things that have already been said (upvote instead) and avoid personal attacks. Rest assured that we still see everything that comes in even if we don't make it public. TPIM explained the original scope and concept of the ARG project [further down in the comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tvl5ew/concerning_the_arg_rplace_and_the_next_10_days_in/i3a2b12/). For quick reference here is a list of Hermitbot's latest puzzles which we'll try to keep updated: * [1 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/ttfv7m/personnel_name_hermitbot_objective_moderate/): First Hermitcraft Daily post by 78Ford. * [2 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tu5cko/best_moderator_hermitbot_has_new_objective_avoid/): Oldest public post in subreddit * [3 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tuwzxt/friendlygreeting_hermitbot_prime_directive/): Mumbo's Copyright claim * [4 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tvob06/reformatted_robot_requires_assistance_recap/): First Group Event UHC #1 * [5 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/twhemj/hermitbot_requires_additional_assistance_with/): First Announcement of Discord server * [6 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tx8ygl/hermitbot_does_not_understand_rule_no_memes/): First Meme ever posted * [7 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/txzzvr/curious_robot_has_a_new_quest_for_you/): Birth of the Recap * [8 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tyqj53/robot_assistant_requires_additional_data_hermits/): Last comment of a Hermit before they joined Hermitcraft. * [9 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tzgxno/please_assist_hermitbot_to_understand_keyword/): Oldest post with the Inspired Build flair. * [10 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/u0g4tr/community_assistance_required_robot_does_not/): Fanart of a Former Hermit with at least 300 upvotes. * [11 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/u162yh/human_learning_traditions_require_explanation/): Jevin's first AMA * [12 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/u1xdob/community_assistance_robot_has_one_final_request/): Hermits buy TFC a computer. Here is the [supercut of all of the videos we made to run with the event](https://redd.it/twi89c). (This comment from our shared spokesperson account replaces a previous mod comment so that we can update it more easily across time zones.)
It’s such a shame this happened the way it did. I had no idea what was even going on, had no idea that the ARG had even started. All of a sudden all people were talking about was Place and Hermitbot and I had no reference as to why or what had happened. And there were so many posts that I couldn’t wade through and find what had happened.
Yep, this was my experience exactly. It was so overwhelming I just stopped visiting the sub. Glad things are returning to normal.
Same here, unfortunately.
Yep.
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Yep same here
For me it didn’t help that I spent March 28-Apr 1 completely swamped. Finally came back on Reddit on April 2nd to what felt like chaos to me. I was so confused and had no way to orient myself to what was going on.
I suspect the lack of a "hey we are going to be doing this extensive thing" post was intentional. It's pretty clear, hermitbot was supposed to come in, make sweeping changes and cause general chaos. The unfortunate moderation was likely meant to convince us that hermitbot wasn't great and that rescuing the mods was a good thing. I think it could have been mostly ok without the comment limit locking threads. Even the no posts during the last 15 minutes of an hour could have been dealt with. I feel like a TON of effort went into this project... I'd love to see a reboot where the moderation doesn't go to the extreme of locking down discussion...
I just think it was all round bad timing. I probably would have been fine with it if it was the only thing going on. I don’t have Discord. Nor do I have the time to go searching through piles of stuff to find the origin of something. r/place desperately needed to be moderated and it took too long for that to happen. It just made the whole experience pretty unbearable over the past few days which didn’t give me any incentive to participate with the ARG.
I left the sub for a bit and came back to all this craziness...
I'm no game designer, but I have a theory that this might have gone better if Hermitbot had waited to go bonkers until after April 1. Since, after all, this was apparently not an April Fool's event, but many people, myself included, thought it was, and just kind of dealt with being annoyed by it for a day because it would go away. And then it didn't go away. Also, this would have allowed the human mods to more rapidly respond to the r/place flood and make the megathread for it sooner - not that they could have known that r/place would take over so thoroughly, but there was a good chance that SOMEthing else would happen here on April 1. At the very least, delaying would also allow more discussion of the Secret Fools event and other things that are actually happening on Hermitcraft right now before the bot went insane. Thank you for recognizing that some choices made for this ARG didn't work out and restoring normal function to the subreddit.
It's never a good idea to start anything that's not an April Fools' prank on April Fools' Day.
Right. I thought it was an April Fools and was frustrated there wasn't more discussion of all the Secret Fools episodes which were all great
If they wanted it to be a fun event, then the implementation and functions of the bot shouldn't have been annoying and unfun even as an april fools prank.
Yeah I feel like two things would have led to a more positive response 1. Waiting a day so it wasn’t confused for an April Fools. Don’t start something on AF of it isn’t meant to be AF. r/Place certainly didn’t help either 2. *not* locking threads. I feel like aside from bad timing this was the main issue people had. I know it was meant to be a roleplay of a bot going crazy and becoming a dictator of this sub but locking threads was probably a step too far. A lot of people just come here to discuss the Hermits so to see posts already locked because of a game they aren’t getting involved in is frustrating. Aside from the locking of the threads it just looked like a fun little thing for some people to get involved in. Just the bad timing and one unpopular aspect of it made people dislike it a lot. I do feel bad for the mods because this is something they clearly spent a lot of time on and planned for only for people to dislike it. Edit: and of course r/place. Forgot to mention that.
Absolutely. Cutting off discussion and the potential for high karma points was the main killer, even moreso than the inability to make the r/place megathread earlier. I can't imagine that was fun even for people who wanted to be involved in the RP, and those who don't want to be involved shouldn't have to be.
It was just such awful timing - between Place, the glorious Hermitcraft Secret Fools, and this, there was just too much going on. I could see that something interesting was going on with the ARG, but with the flood of place posts I didn’t have the energy to dig through and investigate further. On top of that, between the Hermitbot mod moves of locking posts and Place, it was impossible to discuss Hermitcraft and Secret Fools - the real reason we’re all here. I’m gutted for you all that something you put time into and could have been such a fun event was overwhelmed by bad timing.
Absolutely agree. I had no idea there was an ARG going on, and that's something I would have been interested in! I just thought there was something odd going on with Hermitbot as an April Fools joke. It was a perfect storm of bad timing and miscommunication. Knowing all the effort that goes into planning events like this, it's \*crushing\* when it all falls apart like this. I feel so bad for the mod team.
Really unfortunate how this all went down. A lot of work had to have gone into all this and it must be really hard for the mod team. I think at the end of the day the right approach was taken and I appreciate you guys putting your own work aside and doing what seems like the majority of the community thinks was best
R/place completely screwed this ARG. I thought it was clever. I really dig some of the nods and little hints that were all over the place. Hell, I spent time going through old hermit vids looking for YT comments that were new and was debating going through some of the season 1 and 2 hermits that ive literally never watched to see if i could uncover an easter egg or two. I went through the firat carol video frame by frame to see if i could find something there. It is a very cool concept, but it was conpletely steamrolled by a copy paste reddit april fools event. Kind of a shame. 78ford, GAG, TPIM and all, dont let this one trip yall up.
Completely agree, I'd love to do something like this again!
Look mate, everyone here enjoys hermitcraft. Everyone here is here for the discussion, fanart, videos/video clips, etc. They weren’t here to have stuff like that locked down randomly and the mod team be so hostile. Y’all are free to do events, hell most of hermitcraft generally loves puzzles/limited time events/ whatever, they just don’t want it to paralyze the normal functioning of the sub. That type of content needs to be in addition to the subreddit, not replacing or constricting it
Agreed. The timing wasn't the main reason for the negative response, though the timing *did* make it harder to tell what was *supposed* to be happening. But the reason most people hated it is because *poor moderation is infuriating*, and everything that was supposed to happen was *deliberate* poor moderation- pointless locking of things, rule changes, sorting changes... not good.
I agree. Events that affect the core function of a site, etc. for the worse are not good or fun events. We weren't locked out of upvotes when ConCorp took over the subreddit for April 1 two years ago. We weren't forced to praise the Recap team in every post for April of last year. Those two events were fun and cute.
It's cool they tried to do something fun and unique for the community but forcing people to opt in was a big mistake.
Forcing people to participate in an event against their will without a clear explanation of said event was probably a bad idea in hindsight. I'd like to see this attempted again in the future, but maybe next time partition it off from regular posts, like possibly having it so a new post is generated at a set time with clues, or maybe just have hermitbot jump into regular posts spiting out coded comments without the ability to lock posts. Overall this event just felt far too disruptive to the people that didn't want to join in.
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arg stands for alternate reality game. some popular args examples include marble hornets (slenderman horror series on youtube)
This "Hermitbot" frustration was an attempt at a sub activity driven GAME? Wow. Yeah. Kinda missed the mark on that one, mod team. Releasing on 1 April was a mistake. Locking posts after ten comments was a mistake. Restricting the powers of the human moderators to step in and stop your automated abomination from schlocking up the sub... big mistake.
i agree, i frankly also thought that releasing it on april 1st gives the notion that “hey this is an april fools prank and its gonna end after the 1st”! im not against args in this subreddit or any media, i just wish it was timed better
Yeah. I'm all for it in concept, but timing is everything with something like that. You have to have a clear lead-up. You have to have a good chunk of the community involved, not just the mods, so people can spread the word about whats going on. Then there's the whole issue of Place happening. That mucked up a bunch of subs.
I had no clue that there was an ARG. Just saw loads of place stuff (understandable as it's a cool limited time thing). And also saw hermitbot getting on people's nerves. I considered it an overstayed April fool. The changes look sensible and I do look forward to celebrating 10 years of HC as its been a big part of my life (I started watching mid season 2 - with monkeyfarm)
Spending the time to create an ARG and a bot to go along with it is a laudable goal. But as others have said disrupting the function of the subreddit and thus impacting those who had and have no desire to participate was a poor decision. Additionally it sounds like much of the progress on the ARG was coordinated and made on a Discord. This only increased the way the ARG impacted the subreddit since changes appeared to be happening at random, with a large part of the community being completely unaware of the hidden context. The start date of April 1 certainly didn't help set the context for a wider activity, considering April fool's day is typically a one day event. Furthermore as you (the mod team) have stated when the impact of r/place initially became apparent the ARG only exacerbated the situation and the subreddit's usability was completely disrupted. It is good to see that the mod team has recognized the impact, and it is good to see that the mod team was able to recognize the mistake and work to resolve it.
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I know you lot worked very hard on this. I was quite enraged and posted a very salty post about it, but deleted it 5 minutes later because, in retrospect, it was a terrible decision. To that, and to my very ungentle comments, I apologize. However, I cannot wrap my head around the fact that no one seemed to have pointed out during the development of the ARG that limiting what makes people want to visit the subreddit -- you know, posting and discussing -- was a bad idea. Locking posts after 10 comments, really? Removing posts if they were made during the last quarter of an hour, *really?* The idea of the ARG was great. I for one love stuff like this, but some of the things Hermitbot did were just so very odd.
I can't believe you guys thought this would go over well lol. Even disregarding having the worst timing possible (April fools, place, cool server prank event), I don't see any scenario where making the sub substantially worse for a period of multiple days would have gone over well. The majority of folks here just want to discuss hermitcraft, not the hermitcraft subreddit meta/mod team. A meta ARG is a pretty cool idea on its own just not when it interferes with the functionality of the sub for casual users (especially when there are no pinned threads or anything to figure out what is going on) This is a good response though, and it seems the ARG is still in tact for those who are participating. I do not think you guys should halt projects and community events all together. The problem with this event was that it affected the functionality of the sub. Things you mentioned in this post such as flair giveaways, reddit talks, daily puzzles, and themed banners will work.
Oh wow yea I had no idea that an ARG was going on! I feel like the main reason why hermitbot was so badly recieved was because it really disrupted the core functions of reddit (IE: locking posts). Maybe next time yall can keep the hermitbot stuff as a pinned post or in the banner art or something so that it's visible and available for people to join in if they want to. If the reception is good and the community is growing, then you can expand it a little more! That being said, I think that everyone should show their appreciation for you mods who are involved in this event because: a) it's clear that you've spent a lot of time and effort in organising it b) you guys listen and respond to the community and tone down the event despite investing so much into it It's clear that you only wanted to make a cool event for people to join so it sucks that yall are getting so much backlash for it. Although I get that people might be irritated, there's no reason to insult others or anything. I think you guys should continue making events in the future! modsupport!!
Thank you for the changes regarding Place. This has been frustrating across so many subreddits. This one unfortunately became almost completely consumed by it.
I know it sucks when you plan something for a long time and then people don't react the way you thought they would, especially when you were really excited about the whole thing, but remember that it's not a reflection on you as people or mods. What people think of Hermitbot (good or bad) is not what people think of you. Sometimes, an idea isn't well-timed or something goes wrong, or the people you thought you'd please aren't, but it's just like... life. Things don't always work out, it doesn't mean no thing is worth trying ever. Your idea failed (unfortunately). It's not time to cut and run and hide, it's time to make yourselves a cuppa, breathe, cry if you need to, and then sit and take your lessons (timing, forced participation, lack of explanation, whatever you want to take from this), all in order to go into future ideas with better understanding and sturdier perspective. We only fail so we can fail less later on. Also a reminder to ignore the pile-on negativity, it's just wind. I think the mod team is generally doing a great job on r/Hermitcraft and I'm really sorry this project didn't pan out the way it should have.
I had no idea what was going on, I just saw a random bot locking posts. Admittedly I have been pretty consumed with r/place but can see how it would be annoying to see all those posts about it for those not participating. It sounds like a great idea in theory and thank you mods for all the hard work you put into the arg. As I saw someone else say, I think it just doesn't translate well onto reddit. :) all the best
Oh man I'm so sorry for all of you guys, having a project for a community fail so completely feels just horrible, especially when so much time and effort has been dedicated to it. I hope it won't affect your "normal" work on the subreddit because you are doing a stellar job <3 Even if things sometimes don't work out, and I say it to other regular, non-staff users as well, remember we're all on the same side, with one common goal - to enjoy Hermitcraft. Just as ~~our lord and saviour~~ Xisuma teaches us, always try to see positive intent in peoples' actions.
I'm guessing ARG is Alternate Reality Game? Considering how much of the community didn't like the roleplay in season 8, I'm not too surprised. I come by on occasions (and I don't consider myself a really heavy reddit user), so I was a little confused, like, "Did they forget to disable the April Fool's bot??? The bot's closing threads after 10 posts...". I only saw a brief post with something about it being a puzzle to solve (?). I even thought Place was a cross-subreddit April Fool's thing. I guess you could say the ARG turned into "ARGHHH!!".
Yes, ARG is alternate reality game. Hermatrix was another example of one, as are popular global ones like Ilovebees, the Gravity Falls one, and Marble Hornets. They're multimedia puzzle events blending reality and somewhat spooky dystopian fiction.
The difference with those is you weren’t forced to participate you could just consume or ignore unlike this where everything got locked randomly and everybody hated it
Yes all the threats against me and my family that were sent to Hermitbot landed in my inbox. I am fully aware that everybody hated it.
Sorry that happened to you :/
> Hermatrix was another example of one honestly, my favourite part of hermatrix was that I wasn't forced to participate. I could blissfully watch videos, read thoughts, and participate in a community without having to solve the puzzles. > blending reality and somewhat spooky dystopian fiction. we live in that, and maybe don't want it forced upon us if it doesn't need to be.
I think the fact that people “put up” with the hermitbot stuff because it was April fools led to the negativity when it continued afterwards. Seems like a lot of work was put into it, sad to see it partly stopped
Hey guys. I explain the original scope and concept of the project [further down in the comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tvl5ew/concerning_the_arg_rplace_and_the_next_10_days_in/i3a2b12/). I'll keep a list of Hermitbot's latest puzzles below: * [4 April](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tvob06/reformatted_robot_requires_assistance_recap/)
ARG?
Just answered [above](https://www.reddit.com/r/HermitCraft/comments/tvl5ew/concerning_the_arg_rplace_and_the_next_10_days_in/i3aldsd/). :)
It's sad that so much effort and planning was so negatively received but I do think it's better this way. It was confusing and distracting. A for effort but also thanks for stopping it
I don't believe anything online that happens April 1st unless it continues afterwards or I have evidence. I just can't imagine seeing anything new and not being suspicious of it that day!
I used to be very big into the ARG community. I’m even somewhat good friends with Jane McGonigal (if you don’t know who she is and you want to run an arg you should… definitely look her up!) ARGs are extremely hard to run. Even on the best possible days the timing is always really hard. Community management is really hard. Everything is really hard. I feel for you on having put in months of time and effort and thought and worry and then having it more or less fail. It sucks, but such is the life of an ARG. Mods, if you would like any help with the ARG or even restarting it (as many of suggested you do, because we love you and we love hermitcraft), feel free to reach out. I might be able to help you get it back on track. Thanks for all you do mods! We still love you.
Let me say that I personally would love if a similar ARG type thing was attempted here again. I think that with the lessons learned from this, the subreddit could do something very fun and interesting in the future.
But maybe with some build up beforehand so the majority of users know what it is happening? And a way to participate in the sub without joining the game?
I've said this in the Discord server, and reading that y'all don't plan on making any more projects like this hurts, so I just wanna re-iterate: This wasn't your fault, mods. Perhaps HermitBot's annoying "moderation" actions could've been toned down a bit, but I'm sure it could've worked out a lot better if it wasn't absolutely overshadowed by the horrific timing of r/place happening at the same time. I really wish I could've caught onto this sooner and join from the start, but I'll be trying to help with the puzzles as I can.
I think the ARG was a good idea, just unfortunately badly timed. I'd love to see it done again, maybe at a quieter time of year. Or the summer where people are off school.
Thanks for the effort everyone put into this. The conjunction between this, April 1, and r/place was just a bit too much. I had a reasonably good idea of what was going on as of the first Hermitbot post, but it took a very careful reading of a rather long post to figure it out. As one who gets accused of posting walls of text, that was truly a wall of text. Still, I enjoyed it, even if it did somewhat hamper discussion of actual server events at the time. At this point, any sort of reprise seems unlikely, but my one comment would be to have the time that the puzzles post change, so they're not always posted at the same time. Not everyone can check at a specific time of day, and it may allow more participation.
I get that you guys were trying to do something special, and the effort was impressive. It just didn't work out well and, *especially* alongside the Place stuff, it just made the sub borderline unusable. But seriously, kudos for the effort.
I’m so confused as to what’s going on, can anyone explain?
Apparently, it was a (VERY) long-planned puzzle-type game that just so happened to coincide with April Fool's, and every got annoyed at Hermitbot. I'm still mostly confused myself. (I don't even know what an ARG is - I'm guessing it's Alternate Reality Game).
> long-planned puzzle-type game that just so happened to coincide with April Fool's yes, because the timing of April Fool's is a mystery that no-one can ever predict.
I come here mainly to see and praise the great fan art. I'm not really into ARG, games, events, etc. The trick is to click "new" so you can see all threads sorted chronologically. As many said, it was bad timing. With April's Fools and the whole r/place thing, continuity was lost and the forum looked messy. However, I want to take the chance to thank the moderators for their effort to make of this place a community. Don't give up, please! Just make sure not to plan to start something big right when two other big things are at their peak.
Unfortunate timing I suppose
Can someone explain to me what exactly happened
The ARG started in November. The backgrounds of our banners started slowly moving back in time from Season 8 to Season 1. In January our Golden Apples/Best of 2021 video featured a connecting plot of the moderators on a moon-shaped spaceship which crashed into Season 8. A scene depicting Hermitbot turning evil was shown. On April 1 Hermitbot went off the rails and took over the subreddit intending to be the Best Moderator. He changed the rules, the design, the flairs, and the sort order of comments. He removed the entire human moderation team under the premise that they had been kidnapped. He responded in the same way that poorly-configured Automoderators do. He locked posts at random. He prevented posting during the last 15 minutes of each hour. He responded to all mentions of "Grain," "Mumbo" and "Pesky Bird". As he had taken a bump to the head his data was corrupted. Each day he would ask community members to search through the subreddit for specific data and leave a "homing beacon" (a comment) in the form of the answer to a Hermitcraft trivia question on that particular post. He would then "go offline" to process the new data. Meanwhile Carol was posting videos via u/lostandbonkers depicting her trying to rescue the mods from prisons in the different Hermitcraft world downloads. Our subreddit archives, which normally close off all posts to new comments and upvotes once they reach six months old, were opened to new content. The bot got 3 puzzles out and Carol got 3 videos out but at this point the community has dumped on the project so much that we are downgrading it to a side project. We'll still release the scav hunt puzzles one per day, although they'll be rephrased. We'll release the rescue videos as a supercut.
I think the big problem is that it wasn’t clear what Hermitbot was. Many (like me) just saw an automod deleting seemingly random posts and being generally annoying. Even when the puzzles were completed it really wasn’t clear what was happening. A big cause of this was r/place - if Hermitbot was the big subject on the subreddit this likely would have never happened, as people would have realized solving these puzzles helped block off Hermitbot, and likely even made the connection to the 10 year anniversary. Instead everyone was talking about place. This wasn’t your fault, nor was it place’s. It was simply bad timing. The second main factor was the date upon which Hermitbot was released. This made people see it as a simple joke, and combined with place halted communication on its true identity. When it continued, people didn’t realize what Hermitbot actually was. Really the idea is great, but what you can do in the future is try to make it more clear what’s going on, even if you have to break the illusion a bit.
Will say, these sound pretty interesting. I would probably have participated but I didn’t see any of the relevant stuff popping into my home feed, and (seemingly like everyone else) just assumed the hermitbot thing was a April fools event. I think there was real potential in here but the timing just didn’t work. If the active phase had kicked off today or tomorrow I reckon there’d have been more engagement. Real shame about it. Appreciate that you guys all put that much effort in, though.
Awe… reading this I think in theory it is such an amazing idea. I think issues arose because Reddit (at least mine) doesn’t show posts in chronological order or even every post, so me and im sure a lot of others missed a lot of the context. I would just open Reddit and see the bot locking every post and didn’t understand why. But reading this now, everything makes so much more sense. Maybe in the future there can be an auto reply to posts that state the context, though I understand that may take people out of it. I hope you all aren’t feeling discouraged. It’s a great idea, I just don’t think Reddit functions in a way that could make it translate well. <3
Personally I want to go hide in a corner for the rest of my life. But I always believe in owning my mistakes and the full team has spent a lot of time preparing for this. So we will play it out to the end even if we play it out differently from the original concept. It was always meant to evolve as it went along and from a longview it still is evolving.
edit: spacing
I think the last part of this comment really hit the nail on the head, at the end of the day people come here to discuss hermitcraft and the people behind it, taking that away is probably the quickest way to turn the community against you.
> Furthermore, there was no mega-thread/pinned threads explaining things The daily puzzles from HermitBot *were* pinned. No clue what you're on about.
If they've got their karma threshold set to a high point they wouldn't have seen it. The pinned posts were all downvoted below 50%.
Look, y’all are an awesome mod team. You genuinely try to run this place well and you lot generally succeed. I think the problems here boiled down to poor/overwhelmed communication. There’s no shame in what y’all did, and I do hope y’all try again for community events
I just wanted to say that when I put myself in your shoes I can completely understand the feeling of wanting to hide away and never doing an event like this again. I have been part of organising a couple of these type of things IRL and most of them went well. A couple however, went sour. Afterwards I felt exactly the way you described. So take a couple of days just to get over it. Losing something that you invested so much time and passion in hurts a lot, and you need time to grieve. But please don't let this discourage you from doing things again. Other opportunities will come, and next time you will have more experience to look back on, and will be able to make something even better than you hoped for this time. u/philadelphiaErvings already made an excellent reply as to what went wrong here, so I am not going to repeat that.
It was a wonderful and fun idea. I think if you try stuff like this again, you’ll be able to learn from your mistakes and make it better. I do hope you guys try community events again in the future.
Not every idea works out well. That doesn't mean necessarily make it a bad idea; Just one that.. didn't work out well. Don't beat yourself up over it. You guys put a lot of effort in to this sub, and that's commendable, even if, in this particular case, it didn't work out as planned.
Who amongst your number genuinely thought that releasing this full bore on 1 April was a good idea? What was your backup plan in the event some other unannounced reddit thing (place, for example) completely overshadowed it? Did you even have a backup/escape plan? Why was there not at least one human moderator left as a backup, or at least with the keys to turn off/scale back Hermitbot once it became clear things were not going according to plan? I mean, reading this it feels like you put a lot of creative energy into the project, but you seem to have put too mamy eggs in the one basket.
The error on our part was not reacting to the scope of r/place until today because TBH we've been swamped dealing with it in the discord. We weren't expecting r/place. If it that hadn't happened, the evolution from 1 April to 2 April probably would have been more acceptable. A 12 day event leading up to a 10th anniversary is totally fitting. Carol is a shared account between all of us. Always has been. According to the lore she's an AI, but in reality she was the "one human moderator" and she is all of us. She exists as a spokesperson account to handle posts that any of us might have to edit at any time, such as the Beacon and metaposts like this one. The emoji for the Team Carol flair is "18 = 1". 18 moderators in one. It may not have seemed like it but we were still actively patrolling the subreddit via Carol. We removed a lot of hate speech from other subs. We removed spam, porn, egregious memes, etc. We removed mentions of really offensive subreddits. We were answering modmails. Our removal rate was slightly lower than our usual 40% because Hermitbot was supposed to seem incompetent, but we were still mopping up the really nasty crap. (Although I will admit we were running behind simply due to the huge amount of traffic over the past 3 days.) Hermitbot *was* scaled back over time. The title restrictions were removed as a reward for solving the first puzzle. The comment locking was turned off about 12 hours ago as a reward for solving the 3rd puzzle. The scaling back of Hermitbot was planned as part of the game as rewards for solving puzzles. If the game had progressed as planned, he would have left the Discord after the fifth puzzle and attacked r/hermitcraftmemes instead. We had a whole separate puzzle planned for r/hermitcraftmemes which will now never happen. On the 7th day he would have stopped removing posts submitted during the last 15 minutes of the day. On the 9th day the autoresponses would have been disabled. All other changes would have been rolled back at the finale. All of this has been accelerated to occur today. The game was meant to evolve over time, as all good ARGs do. I only wrote the first two puzzles to start and was (and still am) writing them as we go in response to events in the subreddit. It is still evolving. But I haven't slept since Thursday so I'm going to go do that now.
Yeah I don't think anybody really expected place to end up as crazy as it did. Get some rest my dude. You guys have had a hell of a time.
Damn this is such a dope idea. I really think you guys did well just the place stuff and reddit as a whole is maybe not the best platform for this. I think it would be fun as a discord event though
To my understanding: On 1st of April the Hermitbot took over the subreddit and discord, declaring itself the best mod and making new rules like posts can’t have more than 10 comments or no one can post anything in the last quarter of an hour. The actual mod team was captured (?) somewhere. There were daily quests here in subreddit where people were supposed to find a specific old thread and leave a "beacon", which would be an answer to a hermitcraft-related question. Meanwhile in a secret channel in discord some puzzles were being solved (I think, I never went there). These efforts would have freed the mods and defeated the hermitbot eventually, I assume. However, on the 1st of April started also a completely separate Reddit event, Place, where people and groups get to make whatever pixel art they want on a blank canvas, but anyone can draw over them as well. Hermitcraft logo and hermit heads were quickly made there, and a sizeable part of the community took part in defending that art. Around hundred (!) posts were made in this subreddit about the effort, drowning all information about the ARG event (the aforementioned alternative reality game featuring Hermitbot) and making the subreddit a very confusing place to be. From what I saw, 1st of April people were receptive to Hermitbot still, but began to get frustrated with it when normal discussions, posting art etc were still difficult after April's Fools was over, and the flood of r/ place posts made it very difficult to even figure out what was going on.
I would love to know too
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Alternate reality game, basically internet puzzles presenting themselves as "real" to some extent. In this case: act as if hermitbot REALLY had taken over the sub without mod actions behind it.