You wouldn’t believe it till you see it.
We’ve seen how entertaining the April Fools Pranks conducted by big brands like Amazon and Emirates were, but social network aggregation Reddit tops the charts with its 72-hour social experiment that saw blood, sweat and tears all on one canvas.
On March 31, 2017, the team behind Reddit introduced a giant canvas called r/place with the following instructions:
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.
The empty canvas measured 1,000 x 1,000 pixels, and any member of the Reddit community could fill one pixel every 5 minutes, from a selection of 16 colours.
What followed in the next 72 hours is definitely one of the most interesting social experiments in internet history.
Initially, puzzled Reddit users experimented with their power, creating what senior product manager at Reddit, Josh Wardle, describes as “the kind of graffiti you would see in a bathroom stall”.
As more users joined in, communities came together and split apart, with strangers strategizing on how to best create their work of art and protect it. In the course of the 3 days, factions were created based on colour, as users identified with the blue, red or green factions and attempted to take control of the whole canvas.
The whole experiment was pretty dramatic, fuelled by the growth and spread of a nihilistic group who identified as “The Black Void”. As you might have guessed, this subreddit community emerged from the heart of the canvas, threatening to conquer and destroy the artwork of other groups.
At the same time, flags and hearts began to appear on the canvas, with the r/Singapore community fighting for their spot on the canvas.
Other ambitious and incredibly successful projects include a Starwars meme, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. These masterpieces required not only great skill and perseverance in protecting their art from invaders but more importantly, collaboration among strangers to bring their visions to reality.
The final product of this 72-hour struggle involving the Creators and the Protectors, among other groups, was nothing short of impressive.
While r/place has since been closed, you can still have a go at placing your own pixel here, to understand the excitement and anxiety experienced by active Redditors throughout the 3-day experiment.
“My hope is that the success and collaborative nature of projects like Place will encourage other internet companies to take some more risks when exploring ways that their users can interact,” says Place’s creator Wardle.
What a Reddit user described as “a massive multiplayer version of Microsoft Paint” has showed us the power of online collaboration. While we are in awe of the giant collaborative drawing, it’s a good time to consider what we can do with the opportunities brought about by today’s technologies.