r/Place, the five-day collaborative digital artwork project on Reddit, ended Tuesday, and the result is a compelling tapestry of human experience.
The project, which began in 2017 as an April Fools’ Day experiment, allows each Reddit user to post a single colored pixel to a shared blank canvas every five minutes. A mosaic is gradually formed over five days – and it is inherently a product of countless people, places and perspectives, with the five-minute wait making the image impossible for a user to hijack.
In 2017 over a million people took part, but this year – the second ever for the project – over 6 million people placed nearly 72 million tiles at a speed of over 2.5 million tiles per hour by day four.
See the last picture:
We present you… [drum roll, please!] the last r/place 2022 canvas. pic.twitter.com/NCOzmSHa98
— Reddit (@Reddit) April 5, 2022
In recent days there have been fan-led campaigns from subreddits – like r/StarWars, which illustrated an entire movie poster, or r/EldenRing, which illustrated a character from the video game – and a turf war for screen space. At one point, tribes banded together to fight a challenge from the “Void,” an amorphous blob of black.
Though intrigue and sabotage were at play, the project’s overwhelming mood was one of unity and togetherness – and offered Reddit a much-needed victory en route to a potential $15 billion IPO. Some media outlets called the site “healthy” for perhaps the first time ever, and the ultimate image felt representative of how awesome it can be when the world fuses over shared ideas, hobbies, beloved icons and activism.
Reddit, the 19th largest website worldwide and once dubbed the “Home Page of the Internet,” is still huge but has faced stiffer competition in the digital age from social communities like Discord and Twitch, which have grown their own cult followings.
However, r/place proved to be a viral phenomenon, catapulting Reddit’s mobile app usage to an all-time high. According to data analytics firm Sensor Tower, daily active users grew 25% year over year — beating even the meme-stock hype of 2021 and hitting an all-time high on day two of r/place. It also became the most downloaded app in France, Belgium and Turkey.
It will likely be a strong selling point for Reddit at its eventual IPO roadshow. (The site filed filings in December but didn’t provide a timeline.) However, it has yet to allay skepticism about whether its bursts of engagement are sustainable, as well as its limited appeal to advertisers — partly because of its users’ disdain for it and partly because of it Reddit’s relaxed moderation policy. “It feels like a pretty scary place for a lot of small to medium sized and larger brands that are cautious about where they position themselves,” a media consultant told Reuters.
In recent years, Reddit has tinkered with its features to better compete with competitors, including developing short-form video and audio in the style of TikTok and Clubhouse.
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