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Reddit is one of the largest discussion boards on the entire internet and forms much of its modern culture. On April 1st of this year, the company had decided to bring back one of its April Fools experiments from 2017:r/place. A collaborative art project in which anyone with a reddit account could participate in. Users could place a single pixel on a giant 1000 x 1000 virtual canvas every 5 or 20 minutes depending on if the account was verified or not.
Various small and large subreddits (forum communities) would come together and fight for space on the virtual canvas. The end goal for the participating communities would be to have their artwork immortalized on the canvas once the event concluded.
The event lasted 5 days and subreddits continued to battle over space on the canvas. r/place displayed both human collaboration and opposition. Smaller communities came together to protect each other from larger communities while larger communities destroyed smaller communities to create larger art. Watching the mural change from hour to hour was certainly entertaining as communities began to grief each other.
Larger communities such as Genshin Impact had their logo griefed into ‘Genshrek Impact’. Canada seemed to get griefed particularly hard as reddit users found it funny to turn the flag’s maple leaf into as deformed of a shape as possible. Eventually the flag turned into a banana as more and more users found out and wanted to grief it further.
When asked about what he thought of r/place Ethan Y., a Canadian and junior at AISG said, “I thought it was cooler in 2017 but that was probably because I was younger as well. I think it’s pretty funny they turned Canada into banana.”
Hamilton C., a freshman in AISG said,” It’s pretty cool they brought it back this year but I’m pretty sure it’s a stunt to get more accounts signed up to the website before the company goes public.”
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