> I believe what is happening is that those images are being drawn by some script-kiddies. If I understand correctly, the website limited everyone to 1 pixel per 30 seconds, so I guess everyone was just scripting Puppeteer/Chromium to start a new browser, click a pixel, and close the browser, possibly with IP address rotation, but maybe that wasn't even needed.
I think you perhaps underestimate just how big of a thing this became basically overnight. I mentioned a drawing over my house to a few people and literally everyone instantly knew what I meant without even saying the website. People love /r/place style things every few years, and this having such a big canvas and being on a world map means that there is a lot of space for everyone to draw literally where they live.
It's also way more than 1px/30s -- Its like 20px/30s and you have a "tank" of them, which you can expand to however big you want.
Placing pixels gives you points, which you can turn into more pixels or a bigger bag of pixels over time. I've seen people who have done enough pixel pushing that they get 3-4K pixels at a time.
> I think you perhaps underestimate just how big of a thing this became basically overnight. I mentioned a drawing over my house to a few people and literally everyone instantly knew what I meant without even saying the website.
On the other hand, this is the first I've heard of this thing.
Why not? This is tile requests right, not login requests or something, so shouldn't a single user be expected to consume a few thousand zipping around the map while looking at drawings overlaid?
I'm sure there is some botting, it's basically guaranteed, but I wouldn't be surprised if nearly half the traffic was "legitimate". The bots don't normally need to reload (or even load) the map tiles anyways.
I think you perhaps underestimate just how big of a thing this became basically overnight. I mentioned a drawing over my house to a few people and literally everyone instantly knew what I meant without even saying the website. People love /r/place style things every few years, and this having such a big canvas and being on a world map means that there is a lot of space for everyone to draw literally where they live.