On July 20th, 2023 Reddit, the social media platform whose slogan once claimed they were the “front page of the internet”, has reintroduced their public canvas for the platform’s users on the site’s Subreddit titled r/place. For those that do not know, a Subreddit is a self-enclosed section of Reddit that is dedicated to a single topic that a user can engage with. There are a great number of Subreddits on the platform, some with millions of members, while others only have tens of members. The topic of these Subreddits can be almost anything, for instance, the Subreddit r/worldnews concerns itself with news topics that users submit from all around the world.
What is r/place?
The central idea of r/place is its canvas, comprised of a grid of pixels that users of Reddit can interact with, the grid size started at 1000 x 1000 pixels big but ended up being expanded to 3000 x 2000 pixels, or 6 million total pixels. This canvas is only temporary, when it is available it is only open for a small-time frame, this year that time span was six days. In past years the canvas was accessible on the first of April, as the canvas was originally created as an April Fools’ Day joke but was loved by the Reddit community that it returned last year on the same date. This year r/place started on July 20th, this change of date will be talked about more in the next section. During this year’s window, every Reddit account can change the colour of one pixel on the canvas every six minutes. On the surface, having the availability to change the colour of 10 pixels every hour is just a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of pixels on the canvas.
While r/place was its own Subreddit, that did not stop Reddit users from talking about the canvas outside of r/place, and this is what many users did. Many different Subreddit’s members organized to create images on r/place’s canvas. One of the most prominent images were countries flags, most notable of these were Ukraine, France and Turkey, all countries of which have Subreddits with member counts around one million, give or take a little bit. As time went forward, the amount of space on the canvas increased along with the amount of colours available to be used, this meant that there could be more intricate designs and less fighting over space to use.
What is being shown?
Due to the size of the canvas being quite large, not every single image can be mentioned, but here are some images that stood out of the canvas,
- The flags of countries were present from the start, but after they were established they expanded to include icons of that country. The Ukraine flag also featured references to the currently ongoing war, their allies in that war and national unity.
- There was a wide range of games being featured, logos of popular games like CS:GO and Dungeons and Dragons. References to games were also included, such as the player character of the game Among Us and a sizeable area dedicated to a former popular Minecraft player, Technoblade, who lost his battle with cancer approximately 13 months before the 2023 r/place canvas opened up.
- Non-video game related entertainment, like sports teams logos, characters of TV and amine shows along with figures and logos of live streamers.
- Traditional art created its own space to recreate art pieces, one of these was Edvard Munch’s The Scream, but the area also showcased the more contemporary Balloon Girl by Banksy.
What is being said?
The canvas is very busy, with every one of the six million pixels being used in some way. The immediate impression of the canvas is that it is very fractured, with sharp lines dominating the final image of the canvas, creating boarders between different images. But during the day’s long creation period, unity between different groups was reached, the amount of groups drawing over each other decreased as images became more defined. One of these battles I witnessed was over the Canadian flag’s maple leaf, but the maple leaf eventually won its location and the opposing group created their desired image elsewhere. But in some places there was a connection of two different images, like the creation of the red skull beside an image of a dog. When the red skull was starting to form, it was taking up space from smaller images around itself, but this consumption morphed into creation. Rather than occupying the space of its neighbour, a hand and arm was extended to pet the dog and created a connection between the two image; this turned meet that two images could work alongside each other to produce a single image.
The more apparent an image is, the greater presents it would have on Reddit, meaning that what people believe at the time is reflective on the canvas. While Reddit is not a true representative of the entire internet, it is a website that many people turn to with the hope of a contacting a community for a given topic. The single image that stands out the most on the canvas are the words “F*ck Spez”, this message is localized to Reddit, but the visual availability of it demonstrates how widespread the idea is. The word Spez is referring to the The message stems from recent policy changes that Reddit made, which greatly increased the cost for external sources to use Reddit content though their API. This meant that some services Reddit users were using, like Apollo, to view content on Reddit were forced to close down. This made users angry, as some feature’s people were used to were no longer available; while the services affected ended up having to close down practically overnight.
