Reddit’s r/Place is going about as well as expected

Reddit officially launched the 2023 edition of its r/Place collaborative art project on Thursday morning, and it’s littered with messages protesting Reddit and Reddit’s CEO. You can see the current iteration of the canvas on the r/Place subreddit or by following the prompt at the top of the app. (Note that you can’t access r/Place on Old Reddit; you’ll need to be on New Reddit or one of the company’s mobile apps.)

In r/Place, individual users can drop a single pixel of color every five minutes on a huge canvas, including overriding other pixel placements if you want to try and claim some turf. In the utopian version of this idea, r/Place becomes an ever-changing piece of art where users work together to draw all sorts of pixelated images in one giant collage.

In that video, you can see some of what I reported on in the first iteration of this article:

The r/Place canvas has since changed quite a bit since I first wrote about it, and if you want a slower look at the evolution of the project, I’ve also been updating the below gallery with screenshots throughout the day. (If you want to zoom in on an image, click on the image itself.)

When I asked this morning if Reddit will remove the protesting messages, spokesperson Courtney Geesey-Dorr pointed to the r/Place canvas rules. One of those rules says that “targeted hate or harassment of private individuals (including mods and admin) and protected groups are violations of our

Reddit officially launched the 2023 edition of its r/Place collaborative art project on Thursday morning, and it’s littered with messages protesting Reddit and Reddit’s CEO. You can see the current iteration of the canvas on the r/Place subreddit or by following the prompt at the top of the app. (Note that you can’t access r/Place on Old Reddit; you’ll need to be on New Reddit or one of the company’s mobile apps.)

In r/Place, individual users can drop a single pixel of color every five minutes on a huge canvas, including overriding other pixel placements if you want to try and claim some turf. In the utopian version of this idea, r/Place becomes an ever-changing piece of art where users work together to draw all sorts of pixelated images…

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policy (Rule 1) and will be removed. In addition, posts, comments, and imagery that are hateful, graphic, sexually-explicit, and / or offensive are violations of our policy (Rule 6) and will be removed.”

Geesey-Dorr declined to specify when the r/Place canvas will close.

There is a lot of art that’s not protesting Reddit. When I first wrote this, a lot of the drawings were flags. There was a giant logo for the rhythm game osu!, and another section featured the word “DICKS” spelled out in a rainbow of colors.

Update July 20th, 7:05PM ET: Added a video to Reddit’s time lapse and a photo to the gallery.