How Reddit's /r/Place Brought The Internet Together For Four Glorious Days Of War-On-Canvas

The second iteration of Reddit’s massive pixel art experiment /r/Place came to an end last night, and this time around, the internet feels a lot quieter without it. The massive, open canvas was around for just four days, but it created a massive splash not just on Reddit but communities internet-wide from Twitter to Twitch, bringing the most chronically online users together in a truly special way.

Compared to its 2017 counterpart, /r/Place 2022 was bigger, better and more frantic in every conceivable way as participants took what they learned from the first iteration and used it to wage all-out war on the canvas in a fight for artistic supremacy — resulting in alliances, memes and a sense of comradery that's sometimes hard to find online. To understand what made /r/Place so special this year, first we need to dive into what made 2017's so special to begin with.

The original /r/Place began in 2017 as an April Fools' Day event. It was helmed by Reddit’s then product-manager Josh Wardle, who was also responsible for Reddit’s 2015 social experiment “The Button” and most recently the hit-game Wordle.

The idea behind /r/Place is simple: Every five minutes, any registered Reddit user can place a colored pixel in any space on the canvas they choose. In 2017 that canvas was 1000×1000 pixels, offering users a million pixels worth of free real estate to create whatever came to their minds. Upon its announcement, Redditors were given four sentences to drive their creativity: “There is an empty canvas. You may place a tile upon it, but you must wait to place another. Individually you can create something. Together you can create something more.” And Redditors did exactly that.

The first /r/Place experiment was a success, bringing together people from every corner of the web to coordinate and create the most impressive pieces of pixel art they could. By the time it ended on April 3rd, over a million Redditors had contributed to the canvas, placing over 16 million total pixels. A cursory glance at the final product shows a collage of memes, flags and iconic imagery including a recreation of the Mona Lisa, The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis copypasta and plenty of subreddit handles made to give credit where credit’s due.

The beginning hours of /r/Place 2017 were chaos, resulting in lots of randomly placed pixels, collages of color and simple pieces of pixel art. Some of the first few additions to the canvas were the Blue Corner – a pool of blue emitting from the bottom-right corner of the canvas – the Darth Pagueis copypasta, a drawing of Dick Butt and, of course, flags. So many flags. Some of the most prominent flags in the /r/Place 2017 drawing include the U.S., Canada, India and a long trans pride flag spanning the entire horizon of the canvas. Of course, none of this was created without a little bit of fighting.

Over the course of its 72 hours online, the drawings on /r/Place were repeatedly destroyed and repaired by the communities that created them. The trans pride flag infamously came under a coordinated attack by 4chan, who managed to cover up a decent swathe of its real estate. The American flag was completely destroyed by a black void for a while before being restored. The OSU! logo managed to send the flag of the Philippines packing thanks to the powerful community at /r/OSU, who proved their power once more in 2022 with one of the most persistent and hard-to-topple pieces on the canvas.

To combat such massively powerful communities, Redditors were forced to cooperate and communicate as a team like never before to mark their spot in /r/Place history and be seen on the final canvas. They used apps like Discord to defend their images, pinging members when their pieces came under attack to send an army of users in all at once, pixels at the ready. Some used a script that automatically counteracted revisions to their art pieces, placing a pixel in the changed space the moment it happened. Others wanted nothing but to spread chaos to the canvas, like the group responsible for the Black Void, a collection of users who started spreading as many black pixels around the canvas as possible in an effort to wipe out all the art they could. With so much change happening so fast, it was hard to imagine what the final results of the canvas would show.

After 2017’s /r/place closed, /r/thefinalclean was set up to fill in some out-of-place pixels and slightly alter the canvas to give us a monumental, community-driven piece of art that stands as a testament to the power of the Internet and a perfect time-capsule of Reddit and the web at large of 2017.

When it was announced that /r/Place would come back on April 1st, 2022, Redditors were both excited and skeptical. Some thought the announcement post must be an April Fools' joke, but sure enough, on April 1st, /r/Place was brought back with a glorious blank 1000×1000 pixel canvas and 16 colors to choose from. This time around, the canvas started to fill up with familiar logos and, of course, flags, much faster than in 2017. The OSU! logo was one of the first to arrive and was vehemently defended by the users of its subreddit, being destroyed and reclaimed a number of times throughout the event.

A massive Ukrainian flag was built spanning the entire horizon of the canvas in support of the country, right above a trans pride flag, an American flag and the Triforce from The Legend of Zelda series. Even the Blue Corner made a reappearance, taking their bottom-right corner proudly. At least, until the canvas was expanded the next day, doubling its size, then expanded again doubling that size.

The first iteration of the Blue Corner was overtaken by the Eureka Flag and forced to shift to the new bottom-right corner both times, which was then entirely overtaken by streamer xQc, whose followers created a massive version of his logo over the entirety of their space. The corner ended up blue in the end, but xQc's power over the canvas highlights a new force in /r/Place in 2022: Twitch streamers.

xQc, a Twitch streamer who frequently attracts around 100,000 viewers per stream, was just one of many streamers who banded together with their massive army of viewers to secure a spot on the /r/Place canvas, essentially acting as generals leading the charge. Twitch streamers and creators including Mizkif, Cr1tiKaL and Hasan Piker spent hours at a time streaming the /r/Place canvas, coordinating designs with their followers and making alliances with other streamers and subreddits to solidify their place in the new art piece.

xQc actually managed to break his viewership record during /r/Place with over 230,000 concurrent viewers at one time as he sent his viewers all over the canvas to cover up art and push others out of their place, including an attempted cover-up of /r/starwars_place’s logo. Unfortunately, one of his final contributions to the canvas ended up censored as his viewers decided it would be best to draw Overwatch character Widowmaker’s butt, one of a few butts helmed by the streamer and later censored.

"War" is perhaps the best word to describe what happened on /r/Place this year, and while it was, for the most part, a fun war, some took it incredibly seriously. They stayed posted on /r/Place with their pixel-fingers at the ready to defend their territory from enemies by any means necessary. The curators of France's flag were under constant attack and ended up sharing their space with the BTS Army in the end. Some took the opportunity to take personal vengeance out on the creators they despise the most, like the feud between streamers Destiny and Hasan Piker. Hasan’s community built a number of pieces onto the canvas, including a tribute to Hasan’s dead dog. That tribute was destroyed by Destiny, who had his followers replace the dog with an Italian flag, getting a rise out of Hasan. In the end, Fish was restored, ending up on the final canvas but showing how /r/Place was turned from a collaborative event into a competition by some.

There were also accusations of cheating being thrown around at some /r/Place moderators, including one Reddit admin who was purportedly captured covering pixels without a time buffer. Some admins and moderators of the board have the power to cover up inappropriate, TOS-breaking images from the canvas so things don’t get too dicey, but some saw this as a breach of /r/Place’s sanctity.

In the case, the admin covered up an image of a calico cat named Marsey, the mascot of subreddit /r/drama and never explained why. The admin's power to erase what they like from the board is a double-edged sword in this way. On one end it removes an aspect of freedom from the experiment, while on the other it keeps the canvas from being covered in lewd or offensive imagery, which anyone who's spent a significant amount of time online knows it could be. How Pedobear ever made it through to the final art piece is a bit perplexing however.

On the other end of the spectrum, some subreddits and communities made alliances to help each other keep their places on the board. These alliances are shown on the canvas with patterned hearts connecting the two pieces, each half designed with the most prominent colors from the other half’s design. Alliances, often coordinated through “embassy” Discord servers, were crucial in keeping some of the most contested pieces on the board. Reddit’s gaming communities formed numerous alliances. The Kingdom Hearts subreddit requested an alliance with the Nier subreddit, the Elden Ring and Hollow Knight subs teamed up for a collaborative piece showing characters from each game sitting on a bench together, a strange yet beautiful alliance was formed between Stardew Valley players, /r/anarchy users and fans of the band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Alliances like this are what /r/Place is all about at the end of the day, bringing together every corner of Internet fandom to create something original, unique and ultimately historical.

Trolling is another key factor at play in /r/Place, and this year there were some fantastic examples at hand. One group of creators added a QR code to the canvas that Rickrolls you when scanned. Another group dedicated their time to desecrating the Genshin Impact logo, changing the word “Genshin” to "Genshit," then "Gayshit" (with an Among Us crewmate acting as the “A”) followed by "GenShrek" and finally, "SexShrek." Tiny depictions of crewmates from Among Us were sprinkled liberally throughout the canvas, a constant reminder to everyone of the Amogus meme that won’t die and its massive impact on Reddit, totaling to a final count of over 1,800 crewmates on the canvas by the final day. In this way, /r/Place is one of few safe spaces on Reddit for trolls, where their efforts are praised for improving the piece rather than detested for destroying it. Trolling campaigns add fun nuances and pieces of lore to the creation of the canvas and finding your favorite memes on the final creation is a lot of fun.

Speaking of memes, the final /r/Place 2022 canvas features a lot of them. We dug into the piece the best we could to find them all and came up with a good pile. Featured below are all the most prominent memes we could find on the canvas, including: Froggy Chair, Sus Jerma, Spurdo Sparde, Xi Winnie The Pooh, Spronkus, a few Big Floppas, Shuba Duck, many Peepos and Pepes, Polar Bear GIF, Hide the Pain Harold, KEKW, Crab Rave, Doge and Dogecoin, ForsenE, LULW, Gigachad, Sans, Trollface, Derpy Hooves, the It Is Wednesday My Dudes toad, God Dammit Kris, Doomguy and Isabelle, lots of Among Us crewmates, Pibby, the Mug Moment logo, Pusheen, Peanut Butter Jelly Time, a Furry saying uwu, Zyzz, Praise the Sun, Gnome Child, Sneed's Feed and Seed, Nyan Cat, Feddy, the word 1337 and Ena. Even with all this, there are probably other memes hidden in plain sight of the /r/Place 2022 canvas, encouraging those who want to find them all to pour over it time and time again and highlighting another beautiful thing about Reddit's ultimate collage — every time you look it over you're sure to find something new and amusing. The question "are memes art?" has only one answer in the context of /r/Place: Yes.

In the final hour of /r/Place 2022, all colors were disabled except for white. Participants in the event panicked when they noticed this. Was it a glitch? Was it a way to sniff out and deter bots from contributing to the canvas? Every theory was explored, but in the end, it seems to have been a deliberate move by the moderators, essentially resulting in /r/Place participants "Thanos snapping" the piece of artwork out of existence with what little time they had left and reverting it back to a white canvas.

In a post pinned to /r/Place at the end of the event, a moderator thanked everyone for participating and wrote, “Maybe the real art was the friends we made along the way,” adding a warm sentiment to the already memorable finale that breaks the experiment down to its core as an event meant to bring the internet together rather than divide it or even produce something tangible out of it. Sure, we’re still left with the art, but we’re also left with a view of what the web can be at its greatest and most collaborative … and it’s something special.

This year’s iteration of /r/Place has solidified the event as one of the most interesting and unique social experiences in the history of the web. Even though it’s no longer online, the /r/Place subreddit and Reddit, in general, are still buzzing with excitement about the event. Users are pouring over the time lapses and sniffing out key moments in the war on canvas. They’re producing countless memes about the various factions and art pieces and how empty their lives feel without it. People are sharing heat maps showcasing the most active spots on the canvas (we're looking at you, France) and even recreating the artwork in Minecraft, putting it on T-shirts and petitioning for the event to be a yearly occurrence.

/r/Place has introduced web users to dozens of new properties and subreddits and helped the most unlikely of communities come together for a common goal in a mere four days. That’s no easy feat, and it's one that should be celebrated until the next time /r/Place is hopefully brought back online, giving the web a brand new blank canvas to desecrate with memes, flags and subreddit handles.