r/place: A Canvas of Community
In the modern-day, the internet has become a major factor in society’s daily lives. More and more users join the ever vast web of the internet every day, with 59.5% of the world's population reported being active internet users as of January 2021 (Johnson 2021). As the digital age continues to ever grow and change, the communities formed within the online world impact the direction in which this change occurs. In a previous paper, “The Online Culture of Reddit”, I discussed the social media site Reddit, an online platform that allows users to engage with others regarding a specific topic, niche, activity, etc. categorized by forums called subreddits (Young 2014). Reddit has had a huge impact on online culture, and how communities interact and engage based on their own decided norms. The site thrives because of the variety of online communities it houses, and a specific subreddit on their site, r/place, visually demonstrates the power that online communities, specifically Reddit communities, have in the internet age.
The origins of r/place begin in 2017 with a man by the name of Josh Wardle, a senior product manager of Reddit (CBC Radio 2017). The subreddit was launched for April Fools Day of that year with the intention of being a social experiment for the users and communities of Reddit, or as Wardle states, “a screenshot of the Internet at this moment in time.” (CBC Radio 2017, Sherrill 2022). At the time of launch, r/place opened a canvas for users to edit, but contained many restrictions in order to foster collaboration and creativity. The canvas was only open for 72 hours, and could only be edited pixel by pixel. The pixels could only be designed from a specific color palette consisting of 16 colors (Slater 2022), and “each pixel had its own timer, meaning no individual or group can endlessly spam their shapes, which forces either coordination between users (if you want beauty), or absolute chaos if that's what you're into.” (Sherrill 2022). Users could also eventually draw over others’ artwork, fostering competition against communities, and progressing the piece in a sporadic way (CBC Radio). In the end, millions of users came together in a short period of time to create a piece that captured the essence of the 2017 internet scape.
In 2022, r/place saw a comeback for another April Fools Day and generated more traffic to the canvas than ever before. This time, the restrictions were upped to allowing for five days to generate content (Childs 2022) and expanded the color palette to allow for more colors to be used (Redditpedia 2022). This time, however, the canvas gained support from entities off of Reddit as well. With platforms such as Twitch and Discord gaining in popularity throughout the pandemic (CB Insights 2021, The Western Front 2021), users flocked to their favorite communities as a guiding force, receiving direction to leave their community’s mark on the everchanging canvas. As Lorenz of The Washington Post discusses, “Users have built out dedicated Discord servers to plan their takeovers of certain corners of the canvas…Large Twitch streamers also contributed to Place’s growth, directing their thousands of fans to mark the canvas with the logos or symbols of their favorite streamers.” Over the span of the five days, the canvas quadrupled in size as more and more communities flocked to the chaos, showcasing artwork dedicated to communities such as Ukraine, r/wallstreetbets, and the passing of Mako, a voice actor from the popular show Avatar: The Last Airbender, as well as integrated some meme culture, such as using Among Us imposters as pixels to create the content and spreading various images of Pepe the Frog throughout (Reddit 2022). The canvas housed millions upon millions of communities and their pieces (Lorenz 2022) and came together as a timestamp of the internet in 2022.
The canvas and its time-lapsed creation continued to morph and change based on the community, and as stated previously, those who had the most backing and resources ultimately took over a portion of the canvas that once belonged to another group. As Gustave LeBon discusses on page 12 of his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, “In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.” The hype surrounding r/place created forces to be reckoned with, with “crowds” that would sacrifice their time to take over for the sake of their group and suppressed smaller communities that did not have the backing to remain on the canvas. As Childs’ piece reports, “Instead of being a democratic representation of online communities and their art, Twitch streamers are encouraging their fans, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, to capture hotly contested territory… Smaller communities are driven out at the expense of larger influencers with more bargaining power in this pixel warfare.” The anarchy of the project allowed for those with influence to drive out, one could argue, smaller communities that needed a voice, and in the end, those larger groups are the ones that remained.
Reddit, through r/place, has showcased one of its many ways of empowering large communities through online interaction, and in the end, allowed these groups to create an amorphous collage that commemorated the year (or years) of their existence. Whether or not everyone got to leave their mark, this experiment was a showcase of how powerful groups can be, and the lengths they will go to dominate and represent the public eye. Over the next few decades, if this experiment is repeated as it once was, it will further provide a basis for investigation of what makes its way into pop culture, and how we as an online society will represent our digital footprint for the generations to come.
References
CB Insights. (2021). How Community Chat Mega-Platform Discord Makes Money - Without Ad Revenue. CB Insights. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/how-discord-makes-money/
CBC Radio. (2017). How more than 1 million people came together and created Reddit's 'place' masterpiece | CBC radio. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.4069634/how-more-than-1-million-people-came-together-and-created-reddit-s-place-masterpiece-1.4069640
Childs, A. (2022). How R/place – a massive and chaotic collaborative art project on reddit – showcased the best and worst of online spaces. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/how-r-place-a-massive-and-chaotic-collaborative-art-project-on-reddit-showcased-the-best-and-worst-of-online-spaces-180662
Johnson, J. (2021). Internet users in the world 2021. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/
Le Bon, G. (1895) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. ISN ETH Zurich. https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125518/1414_LeBon.pdf
Lorenz, T. (2022). Internet communities are battling over pixels. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/04/reddit-place-internet-communities/
r/place. Reddit. (2022). https://www.reddit.com/r/place/?cx=632&cy=1205&px=199&ts=1649112460185
r/place. Redditpedia. (2022). https://reddit.fandom.com/wiki/Place
Schlesinger, R. (2022). The Online Culture of Reddit [Unpublished assignment submitted for STS 361]. New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Sherrill, C. (2022). The Life and Death of R/place, Home to the Internet's Greatest Art War. Esquire. https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a39636815/what-is-r-place-explained/
Slater, J. (2022). What is Reddit's R/place and when does it end? Metro. https://metro.co.uk/2022/04/04/what-is-r-place-on-reddit-how-to-get-involved-and-when-does-it-end-16396245/
The Western Front. (2021). Twitch use grows during COVID-19 pandemic. The Front. https://www.westernfrontonline.com/article/2021/02/twitch-use-grows-during-covid-19-pandemic/
Young, T. (2017). Reddit, subreddits and AMAs: a guide for arts, culture and heritage. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2014/jun/06/reddit-subreddits-ama-guide-arts-culture
