Reddit has made the exciting announcement that the r/Place event, a cherished April Fools’ Day tradition, will once again become available for a limited four-day engagement starting on April 1st. Alex Le, Reddit’s EVP for Strategy and Special Projects, expressed that r/Place epitomizes the enchantment of online interaction and collective creativity.
Rediscovering r/Place: A Digital Experiment in Unity
Conceived by Josh Wardle, famed for creating the viral word game Wordle, r/Place made its initial debut on April Fools’ Day in 2017. It presented users with a sprawling blank canvas and allowed any Reddit member to place a single colored pixel on it every five minutes, simply by clicking a spot on the grid.
The initiative quickly became an iconic April Fool’s Day endeavor by Reddit, engaging participants for a full 72 hours. The r/Place board operates under a simple yet profound set of rules:
- Start with a blank slate.
- Place one tile at a time and wait a bit before adding another.
- Individually, you can create small wonders.
- Together, you can achieve much more.
Over 1.2 million Redditors joined forces on the r/Place board, leading to the birth of an art piece of unprecedented scale, with a canvas of one million pixels painted over 16.5 million times in a palette of 16 distinct colors. The canvas, once stark white, transformed into a tapestry of pixel art:
This year, to plunge into the latest iteration of r/Place, Reddit users can simply log on and navigate to r/Place from the home feed’s P-icon widget or through the app’s community drawer, starting April 1st at 9 AM ET. Participants will be free to place their pixel of choice. While non-users can still spectate the evolving masterpiece, they won’t have the ability to contribute their own tiles. The digital canvas will remain active until midnight on April 5th, Eastern Time.
Reflecting on the original event, Le noted in a blog post that it revealed the inherent collaborative spirit of online communities and the exceptional creativity belonging to the Reddit community. He emphasized that past April Fools’ Day events on Reddit have sparked innovation, influencing the platform’s development of new features. He cited the likes of Robin, which connected strangers in chat rooms and paved the way for Reddit’s real-time chat, and Circle of Trust, the 2018 joke that led to live comment and upvote counts. Le is excited about the upcoming synergy at this year’s r/Place and eager to see the insights it will offer for enhancing the platform.
“We are eager to witness the unfolding collaborations at r/place and to use these insights as a springboard for further innovation on our platform,” concluded Le.
