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April 3, 2022 9:46 AM   Subscribe

For April Fool's Day 2017, Reddit launched an intriguing experiment: Place. Given a blank digital canvas, any user could add a single colored pixel at 5-minute intervals. Thanks to cooperation between myriad subreddit communities, Place quickly blossomed into a complex sprawl of jokes, memes, and digital art -- a Million Dollar Homepage for the modern era [final image; timelapse]. Five years later, Place has returned -- with the added twist of a canvas that sometimes doubles in size, with another expansion expected soon. Watch the timelapse so far, or if you have a Reddit account, leave a pixel yourself. posted by Rhaomi (42 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Worth noting Place (and the Button) were both designed by Josh Wardle, now famous for Wordle. He's been working for years on simple, playful Internet things that allow people to interact.
posted by Nelson at 9:55 AM on April 3, 2022 [23 favorites]


Of course, because it's Reddit, it's not without drama.

It's funny to see people accused of "cheating" on a collaborative art piece, but it seems like there are a lot of Redditors out there who are taking this Very Seriously and see themselves as "defending"/"fighting" for space to throw down their flags/brand icons.
posted by fight or flight at 9:58 AM on April 3, 2022


I was going to mention that drama as well.

How the hell do you even moderate something like this to keep bad/illegal stuff from happening?
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:00 AM on April 3, 2022


How the hell do you even moderate something like this to keep bad/illegal stuff from happening?

I suspect that's exactly why the mods can place pixels without cooldowns.

At least it's a useful demonstration of how if you leave anything on the internet alone long enough, it turns into advertising.
posted by fight or flight at 10:08 AM on April 3, 2022 [3 favorites]




Of course, because it's Reddit, it's not without drama.

Oh please, if it were Metafilter you'd have users demanding a Pixel Oversight Committee, members questioning how mods will prevent offensive images from being created, accusations that Metafilter has created a place for violence to happen, a long article about how the inventor of the term pixel, Frederic Billingsley, oppressing various communities at JPL and finally a Metatalk thread where 10 users button and decide to leave.

<3 Metafilter.
posted by geoff. at 10:18 AM on April 3, 2022 [38 favorites]


It was interesting to see how the first one started out very random, and took a while for the really organized bit to start up; while the second one immediately went straight to the end point of the first one.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:47 AM on April 3, 2022 [2 favorites]


I find the nationalism really disheartening, there really are that many people dedicated to making sure their favorite country's flag is there? Not sure if that or the "osu" are more annoying. People are weird.
posted by maxwelton at 11:10 AM on April 3, 2022 [4 favorites]


Note that the nationalism is largely about flags with big broad fields of color, not intricate designs like the Mexican flag. Easy to recognize, easy to maintain. There's some more complex flags now (Wales, Brasil) but there's a clear graphic design imperative. This carries over into non-national flags; various LGBT flags have been well represented at times.

The evolution of the Ukraine flag is very interesting to me. For the first few hours there was a large blue and yellow field across a whole top part of the canvas. A bit of it still lives on in the upper left but is more complex now. Also some surprisingly subtle discussion in /r/placeukraine about what it should be and how to maintain it. For awhile there was a funny error in a separate pro-Ukraine section in lower left where the colors didn't match the text. It was a local optimum though, so not clear how it'd get fixed one pixel at a time. That whole area got repurposed eventually.

As one of the links here notes the last time /r/place happened it eventually got dominated by folks who had automated tools for maintaining images in specific areas; participants just had to click a webapp and the right pixels would be placed. Or straight up bot accounts, in some places. I think that's happening this time too but not so much at large scale.
posted by Nelson at 11:27 AM on April 3, 2022


I accidentally ended up in that sub this morning and momentarily thought that all of Reddit had been subsumed by r/place, and my gut response was “well, never looking at Reddit again.” Not sure why *that* was the straw that broke the camel’s back exactly.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:33 AM on April 3, 2022 [2 favorites]


Is this something I'd need to have a TV have the new Reddit to understand?

Seriously though I've just decided to take a Reddit break until after the 5th when /r/Place is over. Lower traffic subreddits are basically wall-to-wall /r/place spam thanks to well-meaning Redditors with poor impulse control rallying the troops to defend their pixel art. It'd be like if we had the img tag back for a couple days and used it to get into pissing contests instead of posting pictures of cats wedged into scanners.
posted by nathan_teske at 12:00 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


PSA: the canvas has expanded if you want to take a gander at the land rush in real time
posted by Rhaomi at 12:10 PM on April 3, 2022


Nobody can decide what a maple leaf should look like.
posted by sixswitch at 12:58 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


Reddit is one reason why we can’t have nice things.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 2:20 PM on April 3, 2022


r/phish has been fighting to hold together a Fishman donut pattern down in the lower left. We've been forming alliances with some other groups to hold our territory and coordinated with the Grateful Dead subreddit to get a couple bears in there. This may be the weirdest sentence I've ever written. As I type this we've got some good territory but every time I come back a couple hours later somebody has taken over.

I'm not much of a Reddit person but I'm enjoying the collaboration and coordination within the sub and with other subs. Every now and then there will be a post from some member of another sub asking us to swap some territory or whatever. It really is a cool social experiment and I wonder how it would work as a constant thing, rather than being alive for only four days.

Edit: Well it WAS the lower left but it looks like they expanded the canvas again so now it's more center left. Next to the "To Be Continued" arrow.
posted by bondcliff at 2:58 PM on April 3, 2022 [2 favorites]


We've been forming alliances with some other groups to hold our territory and coordinated with the Grateful Dead subreddit to get a couple bears in there

You’re standing right now
with nine mods from 100 subreddits.
And there’s over 100 more.
That’s 20,000 hard-core redditors.
Forty thousand, counting affiliates,
and 20,000 more,
not organized but ready to Place.
Sixty thousand redditors.
Now, there ain’t but 20,000 mods
in the whole town. Can you dig it?
Can you dig it?
posted by geoff. at 3:16 PM on April 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


The Wa/r/riors
posted by bondcliff at 4:24 PM on April 3, 2022


r/phish has been fighting to hold together a Fishman donut pattern down in the lower left

Not that anyone is trying to win me over, but that definitely isn’t.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:17 PM on April 3, 2022


A more interesting and calm April Fool's event-slash-social-gathering has been xkcd #2601.

I had a bit more fun following that progress than watching a couple thousand internet noobs trying to draw a maple leaf.
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:30 PM on April 3, 2022 [2 favorites]


Not sure if that or the "osu" are more annoying.

I really enjoy that for all their effort, I don't know which of several possible OSU's they're referring to. Or, even assuming that they're referring to an American state university, which if any of Oregon/Oklahoma/Ohio State even go by OSU.

(please don't inform me. I'll just forget it Sherlock Holmes style.)

There's just enough of a tilting-at-windmills thing about it that tickles me.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:37 PM on April 3, 2022


Shout-out to my hunter x hunter homies in the upper right.
posted by subdee at 8:02 PM on April 3, 2022


Nobody can decide what a maple leaf should look like.

Apparently no one can decide if it should be a maple leaf or a pot leaf.

That's right; legalization has ruined Canada.
posted by bonehead at 7:45 AM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]


not intricate designs like the Mexican flag

No, something much more wonderful.

Shout out to the 150x100 rendition of The Night Watch, too. Now we know the answer of "what if the master of painting with shadow colors was limited to a bright video game palette?"

I'm watching in real time someone materialize a giant French flag of like 40,000 pixels. There's a lot of brand new accounts filling it in, I kind of wonder why Reddit invites so many bot accounts to be created. I don't think the cynical "boost user numbers!" explains it; fake users like this are more of a headache than an asset.
posted by Nelson at 8:44 AM on April 4, 2022


Oh please, if it were Metafilter you'd have users demanding

That each pixel get it's own 503(c) (runs)
posted by VTX at 11:30 AM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]


That this is not the place to relitigate the 2016 election.
posted by lovelyzoo at 1:29 PM on April 4, 2022


Update: Place is now ending... by allowing users to only place white pixels. Should be interesting to see what disappears first (I'm going for crypto bullshit).
posted by Rhaomi at 3:55 PM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]


Ok, I'm calling out the fade to white as fake or inorganic. It's way too random and dithered and there's way too many tile placements happening all over the map.

People would have carved a lot more stuff into it by now.
posted by loquacious at 4:27 PM on April 4, 2022


Internet communities are battling over pixels by Taylor Lorenz, a thoughtful writeup of what happened in /r/place this year and some of what it means about Internet culture.

The OSU logo was one of the first to go in the white-out, with a precise white hole punched in the canvas very early. I finally looked it up; this particular Osu is a rhythm game. I was sad to see the pro-Ukraine display also got whited out early although I think that was mostly because it was in the upper left, not a deliberate statement.
posted by Nelson at 4:27 PM on April 4, 2022


Sorry, let me clarify my last comment:

People are carving out spots as per Nelson's comment. By "faked" I mean the people running Place are probably enhancing it with a script or bots. Like there's areas on the canvas that are basically perfect Gaussian dithers.

And they did definitely censor and modify a lot of things during the event.
posted by loquacious at 4:31 PM on April 4, 2022


Goodness, we have a /r/place truther! Also I'd say "moderate" rather than "censor and modify". Good parties often have good hosts working behind the scenes to make sure everyone's having fun.

Given how many bots and bot-coordinated efforts were being run by ordinary community members, I wouldn't be too sure which modifications were admin-bots and which were user-bots. My impression is a lot of ordinary Redditors spent a lot of personal effort in this game.
posted by Nelson at 5:43 PM on April 4, 2022


My 17 year old was using bots to defend My Little Pony territory from coordinated attacks from streamers with 80 to 100K followers who absolutely hated all MLP stuff. They were apparently making fun of MLP fanfic during their streams to encourage their followers to wipe out MLP territory on /r/place. This is all some weird stuff if you ask me, but a community is a community *looks around*, and they were trying to do no harm while being targeted.
posted by mollweide at 5:54 PM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]


The final 2000x2000 Place canvas, from a few minutes before the whiteout began (mirror)
posted by Rhaomi at 6:08 PM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]


That was a whole lot of fun. It was interesting seeing territory get taken over with a coordinated attack from a streamer and then we'd go back and rebuild once things died down. We had an alliance with fans of something called JoJo's Bizarre Adventure where we'd let them work inside our donut field and they'd help defend our southern border. It was a lot more than just people making pixel art, it really was a social experiment and a war game all in one.

It was cool having our small little piece of the canvas to build and defend, and every now and then we'd work together to build a logo or write something.
posted by bondcliff at 6:19 PM on April 4, 2022 [2 favorites]


The most fun was the diplomacy between individual small communities to band together for protection against streamer vandalism. I spent my weekend glued to a K-pop fan x Czech university x British prog rock band alliance.

Everyone learned early on to stay the hell away from the path of the Germans.
posted by Hollywood Upstairs Medical College at 6:31 PM on April 4, 2022 [1 favorite]


People are carving out spots as per Nelson's comment. By "faked" I mean the people running Place are probably enhancing it with a script or bots. Like there's areas on the canvas that are basically perfect Gaussian dithers.


There were a number of spreadsheet templates distributed within communities ... they really could be done by hand.
posted by Hollywood Upstairs Medical College at 6:35 PM on April 4, 2022


I guess what I'm saying is that if it happens again, Metafilter can stake and defend the minimum space for a green M and white F on a blue background, and defend it from, I dunno, the Plastic.com people. My kid can provide strategic advice.
posted by mollweide at 7:23 PM on April 4, 2022


This was fun but I think the r/thebutton event was better. It was interesting how a simple button and a countdown timer spawned so many subcultures and lore...
posted by Pendragon at 4:16 AM on April 5, 2022


Being in a very strange timezone I was happy to be there when the first Canada - Banana takeover was completed. Sadly it quickly reverted.

I also saw in real time some last minute picture of boobs get block censored by mods. It weasn't pornographic, just some cartoon boobs, seemed a little heavy handed but hey whatevs. I am used to "let's all play in this sandbox, but like this" on the Internet.
posted by Meatbomb at 4:30 AM on April 5, 2022


Some technical discussions of bots and the white-out. Apparently the server change for white-only also changed enough to break most of the user bots.
posted by Nelson at 7:32 AM on April 5, 2022


Some technical discussions of bots and the white-out.

That tracks.

My particular hunch and nerdy hair splitting is that when the admins involved with /r/place flipped the switch to make white the only color they had a backup plan that also had their own bots or server-side *waves hands* whatever is that they added some pseudorandom help with accelerating the whiteout just in case most or all of the users opted to do nothing at all.

IE, all of the users and bots could have ceased activity immediately and it still would have faded to white but with much less or no hot spots at all, like a simple pixel by pixel dissolve fade or effect.

But I'm not saying the fade to white wasn't mostly user-driven.

Throwing some noise in there would also make it a lot harder to get people organized enough to use white space for words or symbols. There definitely was a lot of this going on and you can see some words form briefly at the beginning of the whiteout but then get blown out into illegibility as random clicks happened or people tried to change the words into something else. Like "Done" appeared and then faded into "Doner" and then "Boner".

And I've seen plenty of real world examples of this with negative-space graffiti like when people carve into colored paint or soft sandstone and someone comes along and tries to alter it, and since you can't add negative space back to do corrections this real world heat map of activity ends up blowing out the original graffiti.

There's been some heatmaps posted to /r/place showing highly contested areas like the trans flag, the OSU logo, the French flag and others and the tell for me is how the low-contested areas of the heat map roughly line up with how those areas faded to white in a remarkably uniform way that didn't appear to be entirely organic or direct human action, which doesn't tend to follow that kind of uniformity over most of the history of /r/Place.

Like it would make total sense to me if the admins did this to ensure that the fade to white took place no matter what the users collectively or independently tried to do so they could wrap it up in a relatively known amount of time.

I spent a lot of time watching this during the run and there was just something off about parts of the fade to white.


On the moderation or censorship side of things, yeah, this was remarkably little of that but reddit being reddit it was very unevenly applied. There was a ton of stuff that was straight up gross - like the huge amogus figure with a giant cock ejaculating over a major fraction of the canvas - that did not get blanked or censored while other stuff that was much less graphic did get blanked and censored.


Also at the very end right before the white out there was some group trying to place a Russian flag with a Z on it, and it was either a bot or a well organized group because it managed to make it to a fully formed state several times even though there was a ton of activity and pushback trying to wipe it out. Like people were all over that trying to keep it from forming and it still got through a few times, and they were relentless. Like for a few moments they were even more active at placing pixels and defense than either the OSU crew or French flag crews.

This being the internet and reddit I wouldn't say it was actual Russians that did it but was likely trolls who knew it was ending and they had a plan tto try to get it to stick right before the final end of the event, but I don't think they were planning on the whiteout ending.


The whole thing is fascinating.
posted by loquacious at 11:28 AM on April 5, 2022 [1 favorite]


Reddit has now posted a viewer with a time slider.
posted by Nelson at 3:15 PM on April 6, 2022 [2 favorites]




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