I thought it was interesting that one of their requirements was to provide an API that was easy to use for both bots and visualization tools. I remember reading some speculation when this was running that r/place was intentionally easy to interface with bots, while there were also complaints that the whole thing had been taken over by bots near the end.
Without bots, I doubt that /r/place would have been very interesting. It's a nice thought that a million random strangers can be cohesive without automation, but for some reason I don't find that to be particularly realistic..
As a concrete example, as far as I can tell the entire Puella Magi Madoka Magica section, starting from Homura Did Nothing Wrong next to Darth Plagueis The Wise, was hand-crafted and hand-maintained. On their discord they were actively discouraging community members that wanted to use bots.
I remember taking part in a big drawing canvas exactly like this about twelve years ago between several Art/Photoshop communities, Worth1000.com, SomethingAwful, Fark.com etc. There wasn't bots at the time but it was still very socially interesting.
