CASE-078: Who keeps placing on r/place: the proposed survival analysis of the released placement logs, testing whether participants return while their art survives and whether unaffiliated placement cools

The case

The owner asked for it to be filed as a potential experiment, after CLAIM-274 said: “The released logs (2017, 2022, 2023) would allow a survival analysis”. It tests three things, in order of difficulty.

1. Cooling. Does the rate of unaffiliated placement fall over an event?

• Measure. Fix a set of plans: artwork outlines from the community atlases for 2017 and 2022, or coalitions recovered from the log as Wu and Silva do (THEORY-216). An unaffiliated placement is one that matches no artwork’s colour at its site. Estimate its rate per hour and per region, the canvas temperature T(x, t) of TERM-054.
• Decompose the change in T into fewer active participants and less unaffiliated placing per participant. Only the second part, together with test 2, says anything about selection.
• Caveat. The set of plans is a choice (TERM-054). Falmagne et al. could not tell an attack from an adopted “innovation” (THEORY-214). Report T under at least two plan sets.

2. Selective retention. Do participants stop sooner when the art they placed into is lost?

• Unit. A participant in one edition. User ids are hashed separately per edition.

• Outcome. Time to last placement, with stopping defined as no placement for G hours. Report several values of G. A recurrent-event model of the gaps between placements is the alternative.

• Exposure, time-varying. The share of a participant’s placed pixels that still show the colour they placed. Separately, whether the artwork or artworks they contributed to are still standing.

• Controls. Event time, as the baseline hazard, which absorbs novelty wearing off for everyone. Also the participant’s placements so far, their cooldown regime, and a bot filter (Wu and Silva’s, and the 2023 likely-bot share noted in CASE-079).

• Model. Cox proportional hazards with time-varying covariates and a per-user frailty, or a discrete-time hazard per hour.

• The threat, and the remedy. Persistent participants keep their art alive, so survival of the art and return of the participant are confounded in both directions. The estimate needs losses the participant did not cause:

  • moderator removals in 2022, which appear in the log as rectangle edits (x1, y1, x2, y2). This is the cleanest exogenous destruction;
  • large raids by coalitions unrelated to the participant, such as the Void;
  • contributors who were a small share of an artwork that fell, whose own absence cannot have caused the fall.

  Compare matched participants whose art was or was not destroyed this way, matching on activity before the loss.

3. Recruitment. Does visible growth or damage draw newcomers to an artwork?

• Measure. First-ever placements near an artwork in the hour after it grows, is damaged or gains an on-canvas link, against matched windows without such events.
• A natural experiment already described. The Mona Lisa group wrote its forum’s URL on the canvas in 2017. Within two hours newcomers said they had come because of it (Litherland and Mørch, THEORY-218). The log can show whether first placements near it rose.

What it can show

• A positive test 2 under exogenous loss would support CLAIM-274’s selective part. A positive test 3 would support the recruitment route. Either is feedback from pattern to flow, which puts an artwork on the candle flame’s rung and not the convection cell’s (QUESTION-085).
• Test 1 alone fixes whether the decay in CLAIM-273 (version 2) cools.
• A null on test 2, with event time controlled and enough exogenous losses, is what CLAIM-274’s defeated_if names. The claim would then keep only its cooling part, and only if test 1 shows it.
• The coalition recovery that test 2 needs bears on QUESTION-084. The placement log shows who placed together, not who followed whom.

What it cannot show

• Why anyone stays. Investment in a particular artwork, attachment to a community, and enjoying the contest all predict the same retention. Forum records (THEORY-218) would be needed to separate them.
• Anything about a mind. The owner named the dwindling population as what separates r/place from the psychological model (CLAIM-274).
• Facts not yet checked: that atlas outlines exist for 2017 as well as 2022, and that the moderator rectangles in the 2022 log are removals and not other edits. Both should be confirmed against the data before analysis.

Nothing has been run.

Note of 2026-10-23: still a reanalysis question

A5 of the exchange of 2026-10-23, “Framework Overview Request” listed the r/place studies, which the record already holds (THEORY-214, THEORY-216; LIT-1025’s early warnings), and put this design’s question apart from them: “whether losing a collective artifact makes its contributors less likely to continue participating, beyond selection effects and common event dynamics.” A5: “primarily an existing-data reanalysis problem, not a simulation problem.”