r/place

r/place is a recurring collaborative pixel-art experiment that Reddit runs as an April Fools' event, in which users place individual coloured tiles, one at a time and subject to a cooldown, onto a single shared canvas that the whole community can see and edit. Created by Reddit engineer Josh Wardle (later known for Wordle), the original ran from 1 April 2017 on a 1,000-by-1,000 grid with a sixteen-colour palette and drew more than a million participants who placed roughly sixteen million tiles before the canvas was frozen.

Reddit revived the project on 1 April 2022, expanding the canvas to 2,000-by-2,000 pixels and the palette to thirty-two colours; over ten million users made about 160 million tile changes. A third edition launched on 20 July 2023, during the API-pricing dispute, and was widely used to spell out anti-leadership messages aimed at chief executive Steve Huffman. The events are studied as large-scale natural experiments in online cooperation and conflict, with national flags, fandom logos and so-called faction wars, including streamer-led raids, emerging organically. r/place matters as a demonstration of how Reddit's scale and shared infrastructure can produce both remarkable collaboration and coordinated disruption.