In an online era of marketing stunts, April Fools’ Day has become one of the worst days on the internet. This weekend Reddit is looking to change that by bringing back a nostalgic experience that delighted millions of redditors.
From Saturday 2nd of April at 12am AEDT, Reddit is bringing back the highly requested, r/place, a communal 1000×1000 pixel canvas that was one of Reddit’s most popular April Fools’ Day experiences that was a beautiful result of online collaboration and what online communities are all about. With an improved platform, international expansion, and a user base of more than 50 million daily active uniques and over 100,000 communities, r/place is back.
When the site first ran r/place in 2017, more than one million redditors placed approximately 16 million tiles on a blank communal digital canvas – resulting in a collective digital art piece.
The Ending Art Piece of r/Place from 2017
“We learned from the original experiment that people online are naturally collaborative, that redditors are more creative than we are, and that Reddit is a place where great things blossom,” said Alex Le, EVP strategy and special projects at Reddit.
“April Fools’ Day on Reddit has a history of inspiring how we build new features on the platform. From Robin inspiring our real-time chat product to Circle of Trust inspiring real-time comment and upvote counts, April Fools’ Day provides Reddit a period to test infrastructure at a grand scale and try things that are new and off the wall. We look forward to seeing what collaboration happens on r/place this year and learning how we can better our platform.”
To participate, redditors can tap or click on the new widget icon with the letter “P” at the top of the home feed, or open their community drawer in their app and tap on it.
Once people navigate to r/place, they’ll see a communal 1000×1000 tile canvas where (logged in) redditors can place a tile or pixel of their color choice (once every 5 minutes by tapping or clicking anywhere on the canvas). People who are logged out of Reddit can view the canvas unfolding in real-time, but can’t place a tile.
r/place will be available across Reddit and via apps for 87 hours, ending on April 4 at 9:00 pm PT.