The r/place subreddit is open again, and users began filling up the canvas within minutes. The massive social art experiment that first appeared over five years ago is finally back.
In 2017, Reddit opened a massive social art experiment called r/place with an unprecedented form of user collaboration. Ever since then, no news has surfaced, but now it has finally reopened.
The r/place subreddit is a community on Reddit where anyone registered with the site is given access to a massive shared canvas and allowed to place a single tiny square on it every five minutes. In its original incarnation, r/place was a massive success, attracting a massive number of participants who created their own subreddits to coordinate collaborations on art pieces. Just like the first time, the reopening is causing communities to be opened for countries, streamers, fans of specific games, and more. All are trying to represent themselves on the canvas before submissions close again.
The reopening of r/place will only last until April 4, 2022, at which point it will shut down at an unspecified time of day. Even with uncertainty in its future, r/place participants are still creating impressive collaborative art, representing their favorite communities in ephemeral pixels on a collaborative canvas. Since the project is open to anyone, it has also been quickly been filling up with meme references. Every small section of the canvas represents a few hundred or more people working together to keep their spot.
Unfortunately, with immense popularity comes trolls; a single streamer with a large fan following can weaponize their fans and wipe out an entire area in seconds. There are complaints on the subreddit about this behavior, but the inherent nature of the project means such tactics are not disallowed. While there could be protections in place in future iterations, the imminent end of this one means there probably will not be a change this time. Fortunately, despite this problem, much of the canvas remains intact and there are still communities fighting to preserve their sections of it.
The r/place subreddit is an interesting combination of elements; it works as a mass-collaboration art project, a snapshot of the internet during the time it exists, and a surprisingly tactical real-time fight to keep spaces intact, almost like a real-time strategy game. Once a community's claim is staked, it becomes a challenge to keep everyone there and overwrite malicious actors looking to erase hard work. Regardless, r/place is not open often, so deciding to ruin someone else's work instead of creating something memorable is a frustrating choice.