Reddit’s r/Place project is back this April Fools Day, five years after the original experiment in 2017, in which “more than one million redditors placed approximately 16 million tiles on a blank communal digital canvas.” Like other Reddit projects, like ___, the original was created by Josh Wardle of Wordle fame, who wrote in the original Place announcement, that “individually you can create something. Together you can create something more.”
This morning, when the project began, all pixels in the project were white and until midnight ET on April 5, redditors can add a single pixel to the 1000 x 1000 grid. Each account can alter just one pixel every five minutes so that no single person could dominate. Right off the bat, alliances formed. For some reason, r/Place activates a certain tribalism in people that makes them scramble for any symbol that gives them a source of identity and plaster it onto a big, meaningless map. It’s stupid, it’s beautiful, it’s the internet in all its glory.
