it's almost done!!!

Reddit has twice in the past (2017 and 2022, I believe April 1 both times) made r/place - an open canvas where anyone with an account could place a single pixel in a color of their choice every 5 minutes. It's a fascinating social experiment, and was a lot of fun seeing images emerge, and communities spring up around coordinating efforts to make their mark. Doing it again at a somewhat random time only a year after last time is clearly an attempt to distract from the multiple reasons people are currently upset with Reddit, and it also clearly isn't working, judging by the general tenor of anti-spez (Reddit CEO's username) sentiment

Several years ago for April Fools Day, Reddit launched /r/place, which created a canvas where users could place individual pixels every few minutes. Communities would get together to carve out their own little corner of the canvas for a piece of art, and overall the whole thing was pretty well received.

Last year for April Fools Day, they did it again. Overall, once again pretty well received.

Now, since Reddit has pissed everyone off, they're doing it again again, likely in a desperate move to try and generate some positive community interactions. /r/place has always been pretty popular when they've done it before, so this is probably a 'push in case of emergency' attempt to placate users. Predictably, everyone's still mad so they've littered the whole canvas with 'fuck spez' posts.

Here’s a good article about it from The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/19/23800309/reddit-r-place-2023-protest

Newer article about how the crap has very much hit the fan with r/place: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23801716/reddits-r-place-protest-art