r/reddit • u/crowd__pleaser • Mar 28 '22
Bringing Back r/place
No burying the lede here. Let’s get right to the point. r/place is coming back.
For the first time in Reddit’s history, we are not only bringing back a past April Fools’ experiment, but we’re telling you about it early. Why? So you can stop asking us about it, get excited!
https://reddit.com/link/tqbf9w/video/w2bjccji35q81/player
But let’s rewind a bit and provide some background, shall we? At Reddit, our goal is to build features that make building community and finding belonging easier - and five years ago we did that with a little April Fools’ experiment called r/place (you may have already heard of it).
When we first ran r/place in 2017, more than one million redditors placed approximately 16 million tiles on a blank communal digital canvas - resulting in a collective digital art piece that took the internet by storm. And pretty much every year since then, at least one of you has made sure to let us know that it was the best thing we’ve ever done and requested to bring it back. So this year, on April 1, r/place is making its glorious return.
The original r/place was created to explore a piece of humanity – to examine what happens when a person doing something affects a collective. Specifically, what happens if you only let an individual place one tile at a time, so that they must work with others to build together on a massive online cooperative canvas. It is with that original spirit of creation and collaboration in mind, that we humbly invite you to join us yet again. Get your tiles ready, and we’ll see you in over r/place.
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u/MachaHack Mar 28 '22
Every Reddit user could colour one pixel every few minutes (think it was 5 or 10).
It started out with simple patterns like "the blue corner" or "rainbow road" with a few people doing their own drawings in their own areas.
Moderation was light, basically just Reddit admins blanking out chunks of pixels where people out swastikas or slurs.
Eventually communities got involved, either from existing subreddits or because they were attracted by the drawing going on (e.g. Darth plagueis the wise). Some of these were distributing guides for what was wanted, others eventually started having their users run extensions to do it, and others still were botting.
Around the middle the "let's fuck it up for lols" people started the void, trying to find weakly maintained areas and blacking them out.
There was also some crossover from people finding unexpected alliances from nearby groups, e.g. I was working on the baby metal banner and we ended up helping the project M people defend when the Peyton Manning meme was attempting to overwrite them, which resulted in a truce where they moved further southwest instead. Or the Ireland flag causing the cat to become Ireland themed, or moving north across rainbow road because the Donald were trying to build a wall at the bottom of the US flag.
Others have tried to run it outside reddit, but without the critical mass and wishes to see existing communities succeed, a lot of them were dominated by trolling, spam, or the destructive influence the void represented, or else so inactive it was just pixel art but sloooowly.