What happened
On April Fools' Day 2017, Reddit launched r/Place, a collaborative social experiment in the form of a shared blank canvas. Conceived by Reddit employee Josh Wardle (later the creator of Wordle), the project let any registered user change the color of a single pixel from a 16-color palette, then imposed a cooldown timer of several minutes before that user could place another. The only way to create anything large — flags, logos, artwork, memes — was for communities to coordinate, negotiate, and defend territory together.
The experiment became a cultural phenomenon. Over a million users participated, placing roughly 16 million pixels, and at the moment Reddit ended it more than 90,000 people were actively viewing or editing the canvas. r/Place crystallized Reddit's identity as a place where self-organizing communities could produce something collectively impossible to make alone, and it generated enormous goodwill and press. Its success made it a recurring event, with major reprises in 2022 and 2023 that drove record engagement on the platform.