How Reddit Wrote Internet History r/place - One Canvas, 3.3 Million Artists
“Place. 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.”
These are the infamous words you will find on the massive, internet-cult-favorite subreddit r/place. Boasting over 3.3 million members, the project was originally created on April Fools Day of 2017, and turned out to be one of the largest collective-art pieces/social experiments ever. 5 years later on April Fools Day of 2022, the iconic project was revived, and is open to users for its final hours.
In Place, users are allowed to edit the color of one single pixel on a 2000 x 2000 canvas. The twist is, you can only edit one pixel every 5+ minutes. And with 3 million+ users, this might sound like complete utter chaos. Sometimes, it is. But in most cases, your faith in humanity gets restored; hundreds and thousands of users work together to create masterpieces in certain parts of the canvas, resulting in beautiful & intricate digital internet memorabilia. Members of different subreddits, discord groups, fans of streamers, all types of groups would put their minds together.
The thing is, with any user being able to edit any pixel, it can become a battle between many people. Many memes were created through this project due to this factor. Each country created their own flag somewhere on the canvas, but everyone stopped Canada's from being completed. One French flag kept getting a giant ass drawn over it, only to have it censored over and over.
The Genshin logo kept getting edited to say things like "Genshit". Among Us fans came together and hit characters everywhere. And some communities fought back. The game "OSU" had their own logo which kept getting destroyed, but they would instantly regenerate it.
The short term project has created so many memes, communities, emotions, and just the overall feeling of connection between reddit users, all through the ability to edit one pixel. If this isn't the epitome of internet culture, we don't know what is. Go check the subreddit out before it's too late.
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