Double Map Special: wplace & the Instagram Update that Doxxes You

August 9, 2025

Table of Contents

If you're a fan of apps and services that you can use to accidentally dox yourself with online, August 7th was a magical day due to 2 things: wplace and Instagram maps.

wplace

Let's save the best of the two for the start.

wplace (terrible name by the way) is a take on Reddit's /r/place, putting the tiles on a map instead of a small grid. Additionally, because of the scale, you can place a tile every 30 seconds, and you can store tiles in reserve (the amount increasing as you level up, which is done by placing tiles). However, if you're impatient, you can always spend money to get more tiles instantly, or to greatly increase your reserve.

Now, with anybody being able to put things on a map, you would think local communities would come together to make masterpieces? Nope. Yes, there is still some of that, but most of the map is comprised of Undertale/Deltarune pixel art sprites. And they aren't even original or creative, it's like if someone imported a screenshot of Google Maps into Pixilart and used the stamp tool to add little characters. There are so many of these characters that it becomes annoying because you just want to see anything else.

However, the worst thing about wplace isn't the Deltarune sprites, but the terrible coding of it. You can tell the whole thing was vibe coded (coded almost entirely using AI). There are so many bugs that happen. 80% of the time when people try logging in they get a server error, and I've been having an issue where the CSS or map never loads and the server keeps trying to grab the script to make it load, however it fails so it keeps on loading new files until browser memory overflows and the page crashes. And this happens on every device, no matter what I do. There was an hour where all the map tiles suddenly went blank. This was because the owner violated the terms of service for the map tiles (you're supposed to host them yourself), so you got to see the map layer change to a cheaper set.

Additionally, you can have your Discord username and tag attached to every tile you place, so everyone knows where you live. Although you can just not paint near your house, you would be shocked how many people just put a single pixel or arrow pointing to their house. Have we learned nothing about internet security?

The Instagram Feature that Doxxes You

This one isn't as fun, but it caused a lot of panic for 5 minutes.

You know the Snap Map feature that Snapchat has? They added that to Instagram, so now you can see the location of all your mutual followers. Awesome!

This one isn't as big of a deal because not only do you have to opt in, but there are a good number of security features. For example, you can hide your location when you're within a radius of set locations (note that the center point of this radius isn't randomized), and you can choose to only share with specific people.

Still, why would you want to share your exact coordinates with your Instagram followers?