# Latent Structure in Collaboration: the Case of Reddit r/place

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05962 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05962/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Art and the science of generative AI: A deeper dive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04141/) (2023)
- [With Flying Colors: Predicting Community Success in Large-scale Collaborative Campaigns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09650/) (2023)
- [This Must Be the Place: Predicting Engagement of Online Communities in a Large-scale Distributed Campaign](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05334/) (2022)
- [Two Ways of Understanding Social Dynamics: Analyzing the Predictability of Emergence of Objects in Reddit r/place Dependent on Locality in Space and Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03563/) (2022)
- [Interpretable Early Warnings using Machine Learning in an Online Game-experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09880/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many Web platforms rely on user collaboration to generate high-quality content: Wiki, Q&A communities, etc. Understanding and modeling the different collaborative behaviors is therefore critical. However, collaboration patterns are difficult to capture when the relationships between users are not directly observable, since they need to be inferred from the user actions. In this work, we propose a solution to this problem by adopting a systemic view of collaboration. Rather than modeling the users as independent actors in the system, we capture their coordinated actions with embedding methods which can, in turn, identify shared objectives and predict future user actions. To validate our approach, we perform a study on a dataset comprising more than 16M user actions, recorded on the online collaborative sandbox Reddit r/place. Participants had access to a drawing canvas where they could change the color of one pixel at every fixed time interval. Users were not grouped in teams nor were given any specific goals, yet they organized themselves into a cohesive social fabric and collaborated to the creation of a multitude of artworks. Our contribution in this paper is multi-fold: i) we perform an in-depth analysis of the Reddit r/place collaborative sandbox, extracting insights about its evolution over time; ii) we propose a predictive method that captures the latent structure of the emergent collaborative efforts; and iii) we show that our method provides an interpretable representation of the social structure.