r/place A fruit fly for organization science

out/form_pass-C1.md

Saved at C1.C1a-11: pass. This reading copy substitutes participant identifiers in saved text; it is not a new interview response. Reading Markdown.

Participant handles in these reading copies use the pixel stream's identifiers: base64(SHA1(username)), case preserved, without a salt. These are linkable pseudonyms. Profile links are removed; missing-author markers remain. Original research files are unchanged. Quote offsets refer to original text. Source and reading-copy hashes are listed separately.

Source commit: 315e68161b66, 2026-10-14T02:56:24+02:00. Saved-state date: 2026-10-14T00:56:11Z. Catalogue close receipt Commit date and saved-state date are distinct.

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Form pass, stage C1 (leg C1a-09)

This file is the form pass of stage C1, section 7. It holds the form-pass findings FP-01 to FP-08, and they exist here and nowhere else: no schema, no line in any JSONL. Stage C2 reads them from this file, by id. Their unit is the turn, not the topic.

These findings were never counted and never clustered. None has a line in assignments_final.jsonl. None has the three counts, a share in the chunk-share tree at stage D4, or a branch contrast at stage D5. They travel on exemplars under rule 5's carve-out. The figures below say how many communities and concept lines each finding covers. They describe the search; no placement arithmetic uses them. No gate was written or amended to make any of them look promotable.

What I searched, and at what limits

Sweep 1: form

I swept for turn shape, position in a sequence, length and timing. The stage file asks: what is the cheapest act in this corpus, and how would I know?

The next table gives every concept in the store by its length in words.

words concepts share
1 2,999 2.6%
2 3,173 2.7%
3 4,992 4.3%
4 to 5 12,490 10.8%
6 to 10 33,188 28.8%
11 to 20 38,651 33.5%
21 to 50 18,596 16.1%
over 50 1,299 1.1%

Concepts of three words or fewer number 11,164 (9.7%), in 659 rooms. 4,045 of them are submissions, mostly titles such as "r/place", "April Fools" and "We did it!". A concept of three words or fewer draws a coded reply by another author in 20.9% of cases. The share is 28.8% for 4 to 10 words and 35.0% for 11 words or more.

The next table lists each form pattern. It gives the concepts and rooms whose quoted words match, the number of line themes those concepts sit on, and the largest line theme's share.

pattern concepts rooms line themes largest line theme
one-line commitment ("I'm in", "On it") 140 114 29 T3-002, 26.4%
one-line done report ("Done.") 31 30 20 T3-041, 12.9%
one-word assent or refusal ("Yes", "Agreed", "Nope") 179 121 51 T3-010, 10.6%
one-line thanks 238 181 57 T3-010, 17.2%
the four above and a bare salute, as one pattern 590 337 88 T3-010, 11.2%
salute ("o7"), any length 64 43 26 T3-009, 17.2%
"we did it" 800 367 65 T3-009, 64.1%
where is it, as a question 414 260 73 T3-070, 7.5%
a loss marked ("RIP", "it's over") 491 255 74 T3-009, 21.2%
an edited post ("EDIT:", "UPDATE:") 1,124 418 101 T3-010, 10.7%
sleep, waking and time zones 362 219 64 T3-005, 13.5%
the canvas clock (cooldown, five minutes) 877 335 81 T3-016, 28.1%
the end in sight ("hours left") 121 103 40 T3-009, 24.0%

The cheapest act is the one-line reply that joins, assents, reports a part done or thanks. I know it by three signs in the record.

A fourth sign is in the placements. 33.9% of these replies are cited as a placed theme's support, against 41.7% for all concepts. The scheme places them by the call they answer, and no theme names the act of joining. This is FP-01.

The record undercounts this act. The coders dropped items that carried no code and had no coded descendant. NieR's forest, for one, has 282 items: 121 coded, 12 bridges and 149 dropped. The pass cannot tell how many one-word replies are among the dropped items, so 590 is a floor.

Two more turn forms sit on many themes and are owned by none: the edited post (FP-02) and the talk of sleep and time zones (FP-03). The other patterns are owned or near it. "We did it" is T3-009's: it holds 64.1%. The canvas clock leans on T3-016 (28.1%). A marked loss spreads over the end and loss themes T3-009, T3-029 and T3-117.

Sweep 2: register

I swept for vocabulary that cuts across subjects. The stage file's rule is that a register that appears widely and is owned by no theme is a tier, not a residue.

The next table lists each register pattern with its concepts, rooms, line themes and largest line theme.

register concepts rooms line themes largest line theme
military, first pattern 1,058 296 102 T3-005, 12.1%
military, core words only 670 260 90 T3-005, 12.1%
territory and empire 1,345 378 106 T3-010, 18.4%
diplomacy 1,102 356 82 T3-010, 43.1% (T3-149 15.4%)
attackers named as wrongdoers 1,637 442 110 T3-005, 15.6%
state and war, one pattern 4,759 571 145 T3-010, 14.9% (T3-005 13.0%)
kinship 634 253 90 T3-010, 9.8%
faith and ritual 591 225 80 T3-023, 17.8%
game and sport, links dropped 291 181 59 T3-009, 12.4%
internet slang 1,666 408 118 T3-023, 11.9%
pride and affect 1,349 418 110 T3-009, 25.8%
trade 752 325 90 T3-010, 26.7%
the craft of the canvas 5,790 611 137 T3-010, 8.9%
profanity 4,061 505 146 T3-023, 11.2%
first person plural 33,472 694 178 T3-010, 15.6%
first person singular 30,890 684 179 T3-010, 9.2%

Two first counts were polluted, and I recounted them. "gg" matched discord.gg links, which made T3-014 hold 36.9% of the game words; with links dropped the pattern falls from 919 concepts to 291. "Ranks" and "squads" are game words in rocketleague and Rainbow6, so the military row was recounted on its core words (troops, soldiers, army, reinforcements, front line, battalion, brigade, regiment, siege, retreat, commander, recruits, deploy, platoon, legion, warriors, veterans, fallen). The state-and-war pattern is the core military words, territory and empire, attackers named as wrongdoers, and war, wars, battle, enemy, enemies, ally and allies.

What each register became:

Sweep 3: what is not said

I swept for terms used without gloss, roles invoked without introduction and questions nobody answered.

The next table lists each pattern of this sweep with its concepts, rooms, line themes and largest line theme.

pattern concepts rooms line themes largest line theme
the void, named 2,057 302 102 T3-005, 25.0%
the void, in a question 128 57 39 T3-005, 14.1%
the void, asked what or who it is 0 0 - -
the canvas-wide collectives named (the void, the blue corner, the green lattice, the rainbow road, the purple) 3,605 453 118 T3-005, 17.4%
other platforms named (Discord, Twitch, 4chan ...) 3,372 523 126 T3-014, 43.7%
leaders and offices named, game titles dropped 86 61 28 T3-010, 27.9%
who leads, asked ("who is in charge", "who decides") 15 14 12 T3-014, 20.0%
mods and admins named 1,307 349 97 T3-023, 26.2%
the event named ("r/place", "the canvas") 11,203 684 151 T3-002, 10.4%
the event explained ("what is r/place", "how does it work") 154 115 32 T3-016, 49.4%
the cooldown explained ("one pixel every five minutes") 454 227 54 T3-016, 38.3%

A first pattern for a gloss on the void matched 43 concepts. All were statements such as "The void is approaching", not glosses, so the row above uses questions only. The leaders row first held "chief" and "commander": in halo "Chief" is Master Chief, and "cmdr" is a title in the space games. The recount dropped both, with "officers" and "generals".

The next table gives every concept whose quoted words hold a question mark, by position and by asking word, with the share that drew a coded reply by another author.

questions concepts rooms answered
all 13,354 674 45.5%
in a submission 5,072 559 37.7%
in a top-level comment 4,992 629 48.7%
in a reply 3,290 562 52.8%
"who" 426 246 47.2%
"what" or "wtf" 1,936 497 52.9%
"where", coordinates, location 1,005 405 54.2%
"why" 831 326 48.7%
"how" 842 339 47.5% (in submissions 26.8%)
"should we", "can we", "do we" ... 1,804 474 44.3% (in submissions 36.2%)

What each pattern became:

The findings

Each block below can be quoted whole. "Lines" are concept lines in the store, counted on quoted words; "communities" are rooms.

FP-01. The one-line reply is the cheapest act

FP-02. The edited post carries a running record

FP-03. Rooms time the work by who is awake

FP-04. The vocabulary of state and war is the common speech of canvas work

FP-05. The post speaks as "we"; the reply speaks as "I"

FP-06. The canvas's large collectives are named as known actors

FP-07. A room's question to itself, posted as a submission, is answered least

FP-08. Who leads is neither asked nor named

What the pass could not reach

The same list is in notes-C1.md, for stage E1 and the write-up's account of what the study cannot say.

  1. Stance. A register or a stance is a property of a whole utterance. String matching finds the words, and it cannot tell play from earnest. "Canadian reinforcements, reporting in sir!" [ripcity/c0192] may be a joke or a pledge. FP-04 counts the vocabulary of war, not the stance of war.
  2. Acts named by topic. No route through second-order themes reaches an act whose themes name what it was about rather than what it was. The one-line reply sits on the theme of the call it answers: FP-01's 88 line themes are topics, not the act of joining. The same holds for the edited post and the talk of sleep.
  3. Dropped items. The coders dropped items with no code and no coded descendant. Short replies and many answers are among them. FP-01 is a floor, and FP-07's unanswered share is an upper bound.
  4. Timing. The hour is the item's posting time, in hours since the canvas opened. The pass did not measure reply latency, the time of an edit, or each room's local time.
  5. Case. mem.py's grep ignores case, so shouting in capitals, itself a register, was not counted.
  6. Language. The patterns are English. Rooms that wrote in Portuguese, German, French, Czech and other languages are undercounted in every sweep, for example the barter in "Após negociações cedemos um espaço na esquerda da bandeira pra eles em troca de suporte para futuros projetos e paz com os raids" [brasil/c0333].
  7. Links and images. A turn that is a template link or a screenshot has a URL for its words, and its register is invisible.
  8. Who answers whom. The pass read the line theme of a coded parent item. It did not follow authors across turns, so it cannot say whether the caller answers the joiner.
  9. The week before. Profanity and internet slang are wide. The pass did not compare them with the rooms' pre-event week, so it cannot say whether the event changed the register.