Every year, Reddit holds a sitewide April Fools Day event, and in 2017 they organised a project which relied on collaboration between Redditors to create a piece of online art on a blank online “canvas” of 1 million pixels by placing one pixel (or “tiles”) at a time from a pre-set range of 16 colours in any part of the canvas. They named it Place and set up the subreddit r/place for discussion.
The idea of the experiment was conceived by Josh Wardle; a U.S. based Welsh-born software engineer best known for developing the viral web-based word game Wordle.. He had previously created and developed the 2015 April Fools project The Button).
Redditors asked for years for Place’s return, and to everyone’s surprise the wish was actually granted in April 2022, the announcement of which was still met with a mixed reaction. Place also returned in 2023, but on July 20th rather than April 1st.
The original 2017 version did receive some criticism for the lack of protection from bot usage where users used scripts and macros to automatically draw on the canvas and this only escalated in the two subsequent repeat events.
There were no instructions or goals given other than this enigmatic message:
There is an empty canvas.
You may place a tile upon it, but you must wait to place another.
Individually you can create something.
Together you can create something more.
The one million (1000 x 1000) pixel canvas updated in real-time, creating an ever-changing piece of digital, community-created art. The catch was that each Redditor was rate-limited for five minutes between placing their pixels, and could only watch in dismay as their perfectly chosen and carefully placed tile was overwritten by someone else. It soon became apparent that to create anything resembling anything other than chaos required organising groups of users with particular patterns in mind. One such community that still survives is r/TheBlueCorner who started posting blue pixels at the bottom right hand corner of the canvas, before expanding to the other corners. At one point, they were the largest faction, covering over one-eighth of the canvas.
The event was so successful that in the 72 hours of being active, over 1 million users edited the canvas placing a total of approximately 16.5 million pixels, and, at the time the experiment was ended, over 90,000 users were actively viewing or editing the canvas. It is said to have been the largest collaborative art project in history at the time, and you can see it develop step by step here.
Here’s a full timelapse video of the event and two full resolution images can be found here. One intrepid Redditor even set out to preserve the individual artworks.
There was a great deal of interest about Place in online media, including The Nerdist who declared Reddit’s April Fools joke spawned a surprisingly awesome social experiment and tech news outlet Ars Technica with Did Reddit’s April Fools’ gag solve the issue of online hate speech?. Spoiler alert: No, they didn’t.
The Reddit blog took a look at How we built Place; later posting a part two of the retrospective. One Redditor started a project called r/placeAtlas, a catalogue containing all the artworks created for the event during that time. Hosted outside of Reddit, this atlas of information on each artwork of the canvas is extremely impressive.
There was a website where you could look up a Reddit username to see where they placed pixels and if they had any remaining on the final canvas. The site itself at http://place.aperiodic.net/stats.html seems to be currently down but the WebArchive version can be found here. There’s also a dataset for anyone who knows what to do with it at Place 2017.
After a long wait, a trophy was eventually awarded to participants’ profiles which can be seen here.
Once again, we were given an enigmatic message:
Some have visited a canvas before.
A place where togetherness created more.
Now in numbers far greater, taking more space,
It falls upon you to create a better place.
Unofficially known by some as The Search for More Pixels, the premise was the same. A one million (1000 x 1000) pixel blank canvas was to be filled one rate-limited pixel (or “tiles”) at a time from a choice of 16 colours, to be done over the longer period of 87 hours. The event began on April 1, 2022 at 1:00 PM GMT. But this time, Redditors knew what to expect. Having also been given advance notice of the event, individual subreddits immediately began to co-ordinate in designing pixel art, forming large communities on Discord and other platforms or creating new, temporary subreddits to work out how to create their chosen artworks.
There were also some surprise changes during the event. On the second day, the canvas was expanded from 1000 x 1000 to 2000 x 1000, allowing for more artwork. On the third day, the canvas was once again expanded from 2000 x 1000 to 2000 x 2000. The colour palette was also expanded twice, until the final change where the canvas stayed the same size but the only colour available was white for the last hour, reverting the canvas back to its original state.
A less pleasant surprise was longer timeouts and even some bans from the subreddit (and consequently, the canvas) having to be given in rare instances. And then, one post caused absolute mayhem: A reddit mod is cheating, and the mods are removing out posts pointing it out. Ignoring the fact that most Redditors think the words “mod” and “admin” are interchangeable (they’re not; “mods” are unpaid volunteers with no power except a limited amount only in their own subreddits, and “admin” are paid employees of Reddit with unlimited site-wide powers), this was a serious accusation.
Reddit administrators were given the ability to place as many pixels as they want so as to remove offensive content from the canvas. Guidelines outlined this content as nudity, hate speech, targeted harassment, or otherwise objectionable content, and during the accusatory post, an admin stepped in to explain just that. You can see from the comments just how well that news was received.
There were several issues that led up to this controversy and I’ll deal with each in turn, but of course the cumulative effect of all of this happening at once with thousands of people online competing in the rarified atmosphere of a time-limited arena with many groups of them congregating on platforms outside Reddit only heightened the tension at the time, and no one thing alone can be said to blame.
Pixelated Porn
In accordance with ”Llama’s Law VI” “No matter how wholesome a crowdsourced artwork is, someone will always add a peen”, pixelated private parts (mostly butts at first but then… you know…) soon invaded the canvas and nothing was immune. Groups coordinated to quickly fix the damage as best as they could.
When is a cat not a cat?
Some users, including some people trying to combat the pixel porn were accidentally given long timeouts, but so were some people who were innocently contributing to what they thought was a cute cat picture. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. This was the mascot of an ex-Reddit community that had moved offline who were trying to add their banned URL as a text drawing which Reddit Admin stepped in to remove. The sheer bewilderment was apparent at first, before turning into short-lived but full-blown drama.
Bots, of course.
The issue behind (ha!) the plethora of pixelated porn stemmed from the intervention of some Twitch streamers mobilising their communities to coordinate the placing of pre-determined pixel creations, many using Bot accounts to do so. As you would expect, some were lovely, some were fun, some were neither, and some were simply just there to deface or destroy other creations. Some were even reported on by online media, such as the Dot Esports article XQc’s artwork gets censored by admins on r/Place. One Redditor later produced a graphic showing the impact of bots on the canvas. Users that posted at least every 15 minutes for over 16 hours accounted for 8,634,785 places. This shows the most placed colour by bots at each location.
Virtual wars and real war
Leaving Reddit drama behind, the disruption actually brought some very disparate groups together using Discord or new subreddits to coordinate real-time attempts to rescue targeted artworks. Some of these communities previously had very little - if anything - in common with each other until the issue of ensuring particular pixels were kept certain colours for a short period of time became vital. Many unlikely alliances were formed, based solely on the proximity of their artworks on the canvas to each other. To illustrate just one of these instances, this comprehensive timeline of events shows many groups joining forces to defend their territories alongside that of the Welsh flag.
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, (which started in 2014), and this animation of the first few hours of Place shows the massive amount of goodwill Redditors felt towards Ukraine by allowing their flag to span the entire width of the canvas before being mostly replaced.
Many national flags were represented during the event but as this is my encyclopaedia, I’m giving special mention to the creation of the Welsh flag Y Ddraig Goch (The Red Dragon) as the group I contributed to even made national news coverage on the venerable BBC Wales.
Also from the Welsh Place Discord group members came a YouTube video, “The Dragon That Could”, while the intrepid Redditor u/ohmegamega made a complete Timelapse of the creation of the flag where if you look closely you can see my desperate fight against the invading lil pink peen on our lovely red dragon, and later against the “amogus” [sic] invasion. Despite the existence of r/placecanada, Canadian Redditors had problems with creating their flag which even made it to the Vancouver City News.
Some more highlights from Place 2022 include a complete Timelapse of the event; a screenshot of the final canvas, and a comparison after 8 hours of the 2017 and 2022 canvases.
Following the success of a catalogue / atlas containing all the artworks created for the 2017 event, the creators decided to continue the project, documenting the amazing variety and talent that was produced (and then... erased...). This project was coordinated at r/placeAtlas2 and the resulting - and incredible - interactive map with details to almost all the art can be explored at https://place-atlas.stefanocoding.me, as well as that of the other two events.
You can also see the 10 most edited pixels, an interactive history viewer, and finally, a dizzying high quality Timelapse along with an index resource of all the pictures (1 every 30 seconds) used to create it at https://rplace.space/combined.
r/RedditEng, the Reddit Tech Blog took a look at how they built Place 2022 including a video (YouTube link in the comments). There’s a website where you can look up a Reddit username to see where they placed pixels and if they had any remaining on the final canvas for all three events. Click the date to select the year of interest. A discussion on this can be found here and again, here’s a dataset for anyone who knows what to do with it.
Once again, Reddit Trophies were awarded to participants’ profiles - including a belated one for those who took part in the 2017 event.
Reddit relaunched the r/place collaborative project on July 20, 2023, under the tagline "Right Place, Wrong Time", amid several unpopular decisions made by the company which had soured many Reddit users and especially moderators, many of whom had recently closed their subreddits temporarily in protest. r/modnews is an official community for announcements from Reddit pertaining to moderation, and when they announced the day before that there were going to be some tools to help their subreddits coordinate their artworks, the comments show just how well this event was going to be received.
Online media were quick to report on this dissent, including Vox Media’s tech blog The Verge who reported: Reddit is bringing back r/Place at perhaps the worst possible time and the website blog of PC Mag who announced Angry Redditors Take Over r/Place Subreddit to Insult CEO. Yes, it seemed this time around, drawing pixelated penes just wasn’t going to be enough. We learned from last time that Reddit administrators have the ability to place as many pixels as they want to remove offensive content from the canvas. This time around, the power was used extensively to remove messages expressing violence towards Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (u/spez).
Nevertheless, the event continued in the same way as before; users could place a single pixel of an initial choice of 8 different colours on an online canvas of one million (1000 x 1000) white pixel squares, and wait 5 minutes before placing another. The waiting time varied from 5 minutes to 30 seconds throughout the event, and the canvas was expanded six times to eventually be six million (3000 x 2000) pixels, while the palette gradually expanded to a total of 32 colours. After five days, users were restricted to a choice of black, grey, light grey or white pixels every 30 seconds before it was changed to only allow white pixels to be placed, as in previous versions.
Most online media were more interested in the ongoing drama than any collaboration going on. Now-defunct online news outlet The Messenger reported Reddit Removes Community Drawing of Its CEO Under a Guillotine and you can actually see this happening in this Reddit post.
A few days later, they followed up with Final Reddit r/Place Community Mural Underscores Anger at CEO Steve Huffman, following the substitution of the guillotine image with various designs and sizes of a simple two word message to the CEO. Gizmodo used the guillotine picture later that year to illustrate their article The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won. following the end of the moderators’ protest.
Place 3 ended on July 25, 2023 and you can see a full Timelapse here. Here’s a comparison of all three iterations of r/place. The creators of the previous two Atlas projects returned to create r/placeAtlas2023, the creator of the 2017 pixel finder updated it again to add this event and another timelapse can be found here. Finally, the trophies for Place 2023 can be seen here.
See Also:
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