During our last class, we started talking about our upcoming intervention project, and in my breakout room, one thing our group talked about was Reddit’s own “intervention”. Coincidentally, it was exactly four years ago today, on April Fool’s day in 2017. On that day, they opened a new subreddit called r/place.
On this new subreddit, users were presented with a large online canvas. Registered users then had the option of changing the color of a single pixel from a 16-color palette. If they did, a 5-20 minute timer prevented them from placing any additional pixels for a given time.
Ultimately, Reddit gave its users the chance to create their own mural/intervention, and over the 72 hours it was open, over 1 million users had edited it. People have said that the final image, shown below, is so interesting because it represents the culture of Reddit’s niche online communities, but what I find most interesting is how each user seems to have to decide whether to build off of adjacent pixels, or digress and go their own way.
Let me know what you think in the comments below!
