Reddit gave its users something to fight over besides anime and cucks

By Clayton Purdom | April 3, 2017 | 5:25pm

Aux Features Aux

April Fools’ Day is the goddamn worst, and (deep breath) it’s over. But Reddit is pretty good at it, all things considered. Rather than use the day as a reason to announce some giggly new fake feature, the massive forum chose instead to play with their immense base of users. Last year they produced a massive button and asked people to kindly not click it. (They did. They all did.) This year, they produced a massive canvas called r/place (“our place,” perhaps) and allowed each user to modify one pixel every five minutes.

It’s easy to think of Reddit as a hive of bad memes and obscure porn fandoms, and while it is that, it is also a meeting place for seemingly infinite other groups of people, all categorized by common interest. So what would they come together to paint, then? A dick? A pointless cacophony of randomly colored nodes? A portrait of Gabe Newell?

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No, instead they swiftly created a luminous, orderly mosaic that at least aesthetically reflects the makeup of Reddit itself. Check out this time-lapse GIF of its creation, which, fair warning, may take a second or two to load:

As Mashable points out, individual subreddits banded together to corral certain sections, even negotiating peace treaties with neighboring kingdoms in order to plot out their own land. Yes, it was a faithful facsimile of the colonization of any new vast wilderness, only without the environmental devastation and displacement of indigenous peoples that so often accompanies it in the real world. R/place itself is now rife with reflections on the experiment, including this time-lapse image of Skeletor smoking a blunt:

Self-mythologizing of the sort Reddit is uniquely good at:

There were also feverish threads about the amount of automatic scripting that allowed the most devoted artists to succeed. In all, though, it’s a benign, colorful way for Redditors to do what they do best: argue among each other about the things that they love. There are still some 80,000 people working on the image, showing how well Reddit knows its audience. It’s only a matter of time before Reddit’s innocent “social experiments” work instead to corral these users into a real-world army intent on annexing a portion of Canada for themselves, where they will elect, like, Alan Tudyk or something as emperor. Until then, though, just enjoy their colorful handiwork.