Looking Back at r/Place (2024)

Josh Wardle & Justin Bassett
(u/powerlanguage & u/Drunken_Economist)

In just 72 hours, over a million redditors placed 16.5 million tiles to transform a simple, white, 1000×1000-pixel canvas into a surprisingly beautiful clash of communities, nations, ideologies, and fandoms. Because each user could only place one tile every five minutes, any single individual would have struggled to create a meaningful image on their own. However, through community collaboration, users quickly produced complex creations, surpassing all of our expectations about how this project would turn out once the 72 hours were up.

As with our previous April Fools’ projects The Button and Robin, Place was created to explore human interaction at scale. Because of their experiential (and temporal) nature, adequately summarizing these projects is always a challenge (though the fact that Place has a visual artifact does make this a little easier). Last week, we shared the technical story behind r/Place, so today we wanted to share a (very incomplete) collection of some of the amazing creativity that emerged from Place. We encourage you all to share your favorite moments in the comments. We have also released a complete dataset of Place data and are looking forward to seeing what emerges on r/dataisbeautiful.

What Is This Place?

If you have no idea what you’re reading right now, don’t worry, redditors have got you covered with a variety of summaries for you to dive into.

If you are wondering what all the images and iconography plastered across Place are, you may want to visit u/draemmli’s Place Atlas. The community-sourced, interactive map provides information and metadata about the different images that make up the final version of Place.

Surely This Will Not End Well…

Providing an empty canvas to millions of anonymous internet users? What could possibly go wrong? We knew there was an inherent risk to Place, but our previous projects have taught us to assume the best of the Reddit community. Fun outweighs fear. Part of the success of Place was due to the expectation that it would be largely self-policed. We thought that for every one person that wanted to do something negative, there would be thousands that wanted to overwrite that with something positive—and we were right. It turns out collaborating to make something bad is far harder than collaborating to make something good.

Factions, Alliances, & Destruction

Soon after it launched, redditors within and across different communities were working together (and sometimes against one another) to create upon the canvas. Collaboration was compelling.

Comment
byu/powerlanguage from discussion
inannouncements

Countries staked their claim in Place, with geographical rivalries emerging. The European contingent had its share of scuffles but eventually arrived at a harmonious equilibrium.

Redditors’ national pride was evident throughout. Dutch users were more likely to place orange tiles, Australians loved green and yellow, and Germans efficiently stuck to black, yellow, and red. The color preferences of each of the top 100 countries in Place can be found in the Place dataset.

With so many factions and alliances, it’s hardly surprising to see hotspots wax and wane. Despite a number of tiles remaining untouched throughout, many tiles more closely resembled battlegrounds. The bottom-right corner, for example, switched colors 37,214 times by 23,798 unique users, as r/TheBlueCorner valiantly held on (including the final blue tile by u/NotZaphodBeeblebrox).

Meanwhile, factions like r/theblackvoid sought to remind everyone why destruction is a necessary part of creation. u/theivoryserf shares their thoughts on the matter.

However, not all groups pursued destruction. r/ainbowroad spread around the canvas quickly, working with other factions to create something more:

Data

Reddit is at its best when ideas and insights are being shared and remixed. We deliberately build these projects to be accessible to curious developers.

Redditors like u/mncke captured Place data in realtime and provided it for use by communities like r/placedevs. A popular usage was displaying the placement data in a heatmap that highlighted the most active areas of the Place canvas. u/Lucas7yoshi shared details of a Minecraft server that was tracking these changes in 3D. u/jampekka created an awesome timelapse heatmap of place. u/FLYING_HOOHAW took a similar idea and created a fictitious show’s opening credits:

u/d416 created a series of 3D tilt-shift images from the data. u/Physics_Dude went one step further and printed a topographical heatmap on their 3D printer.

If you’d like to explore the data, you can find the full dataset here.

Aftermath

After 72 hours Place ended but the creativity continued.

u/sudoscript penned the much-shared blog post When Pixels Collide, that retells the story of Place:

… at its core, the story of Place is an eternal story, about the three forces that humanity needs to make art, creation, and technology possible.

u/scharkfin also wrote a memorable comment, reflecting on Place’s short life. Some alliances have even gone as far as to write the history of place from their perspective., as in u/jojo6311’s “Tale of the Great Green Lattice.”

Beyond written histories, redditors have been creating physical objects to remember Place by. u/onji had the best idea ever and u/awkwardatbest made it a reality:

Even now, two weeks after Place has ended, redditors are remembering Place in different ways. The community at r/thefinalclean has erased any ‘errant’ pixels from the final Place canvas. r/placenostalgia is gathering their favorite Place moments. And we’re still waiting for u/bro_just404it to honor their bamboozle-free promise.

And Finally

The depth of projects like Place is only achievable because of the creativity and collaborative nature of the Reddit community. We created a canvas for you to draw anything on and you did not disappoint. From everyone at Reddit HQ, thank you.

Share your favorite moments from Place in the comments.

Place was made possible by the hard work of u/madlee, u/daniel, u/bsimpson, u/spladug, u/gooeyblob, u/eggplanticarus, u/d3fect, u/schwers, u/egonkasper, u/thephilthe, u/chtorrr, u/liltrixxy, u/ocrasorm, u/redtaboo, u/goatfresh and u/sporkicide.

Looking Back at r/Place (2024)

FAQs

What's the deal with R place? ›

What is r/Place? In r/Place, users can add a single pixel of color every five minutes on a vast canvas, even overriding others' pixel placements to claim territory. The original idea aimed for a utopian collaborative art piece with various pixelated images forming a giant collage.

Why is R place back? ›

Reddit is bringing back r/Place — a collaborative project where individual users can edit pixels on a giant canvas — at a time when users are still furious over things like Reddit's API pricing that forced beloved third-party apps to shut down, the company's decision to remove chat history from before 2023 with hardly ...

Is there an R place right now? ›

Yes, Reddit's r/place digital art project is back again, with the latest version of the user-generated work launching this week.

How to use r place? ›

Then go to the r/place subreddit by clicking the link. Or if you're already on Reddit, click on the small orange and white “P” at the top of the screen. Next, click on the “Place Your Pixel” box. Now, use your mouse wheel to zoom in and drag with the left mouse button to move the piece around.

Can I still use R place? ›

Reddit announced the return of r/Place on Wednesday. The company launched previous versions in 2017 and again in 2022. Reddit explained that the 2023 version was originally planned for April, but various setbacks (and the blackout protests) pushed this year's r/Place to launch on Thursday, July 20.

Did R place shut down? ›

It was ended by Reddit administrators about 72 hours after its creation, on 3 April 2017. Over a million users edited the canvas, placing a total of approximately 16 million pixels, and, at the time the experiment was ended, over 90,000 users were actively viewing or editing the canvas.

How many times has R place happened? ›

There are two iterations of r/place, both starting on April 1st and ending on April 4th in their respective year. . 2017's finished canvas was also displayed in the sidebar of the subreddit during the 2022 revival. In 2022, r/place was revived.

What is Rplace? ›

In a nutshell, r/Place is a dedicated subreddit with a blank canvas made up of tiny white pixel grids. On the blank canvas, Reddit users can place colored pixels once every few minutes, forming a giant collaborative piece of art.

Who is the CEO of Reddit news? ›

May 3 (Reuters) - Reddit (RDDT. N) , opens new tab co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman beneficially owns 62.4 million Class A shares of the social media company, a regulatory filing showed on Friday.

What is a place atlas? ›

The 2023 r/place Atlas is an interactive map aiming to chart all the artworks created during the r/place April Fools event on Reddit in 2023.

Who is Spez and what did he do? ›

Steve Huffman
Other namesspez
EducationUniversity of Virginia (BS)
OccupationsCo-founder and CEO of Reddit Co-founder of Hipmunk
EmployerReddit
2 more rows

What is the Reddit pixel? ›

The Reddit Pixel is a snippet of JavaScript code, but it's a powerful little thing. Once you've placed it on your website, the pixel will allow you to track actions that visitors take after seeing or clicking your ad on Reddit.

How to place a tile in R place? ›

Once people navigate to r/place, they'll see a communal 1000x1000 tile canvas where (logged in) redditors can place a tile or pixel of their color choice (once every 5 minutes by tapping or clicking anywhere on the canvas).

How to put a pixel on R place? ›

All you have to do is click the pixel you want to replace and pick its color out of 32 available choices. The experiment lasted around 3 days with over 1 million Redditors placing around over 16 million pixels in 2017 and over 10 million Redditors placing over 160 million pixels in 2022.

How do I join a Reddit place? ›

To participate in Reddit Place 2023 you must have a registered profile on Reddit. It is very simple. You just have to fill in here a nickname, your email, and a password that the account you are creating will have. After accepting the link in the verification email, your journey through this social network will begin.

Does R place get bigger? ›

Reddit added more space to the r/Place collaborative canvas on Friday, giving users additional room to collaboratively draw pixelated art. Almost immediately after the space was added, users started to write in their protests against the site and CEO Steve Huffman.

How do people make pictures in R place? ›

In a nutshell, r/Place is a dedicated subreddit with a blank canvas made up of tiny white pixel grids. On the blank canvas, Reddit users can place colored pixels once every few minutes, forming a giant collaborative piece of art.

Who created the R place? ›

Its founder, Josh Wardle (founder of Wordle, ever heard of it?) called r/Place "a screenshot of the Internet at this moment in time." Five years later, on April 1, 2022, the subreddit made its massive and triumphant return. r/Place offers a giant, open canvas that allows anyone and everyone to place one colored pixel.

Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Delena Feil

Last Updated:

Views: 6639

Rating: 4.4 / 5 (65 voted)

Reviews: 80% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Delena Feil

Birthday: 1998-08-29

Address: 747 Lubowitz Run, Sidmouth, HI 90646-5543

Phone: +99513241752844

Job: Design Supervisor

Hobby: Digital arts, Lacemaking, Air sports, Running, Scouting, Shooting, Puzzles

Introduction: My name is Delena Feil, I am a clean, splendid, calm, fancy, jolly, bright, faithful person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.