Reddit Brought The World Together With A Collaborative Massive Art Project – Forbes

Reddit gets a bad rap. When covered in the press, the media focuses on members posting and pumping meme stocks or deriding those in the r/antiwork group accusing them of being lazy anti-capitalists.

There is something beautiful that happened over the weekend. Around 5 million members of the r/place 2022 subreddit united the world together and created an art project.

Beginning last Friday, Reddit users collectively made a massive collaborative piece of art that became a viral phenomenon. The open canvas allowed members to post a single, tiny, colored pixel every five minutes. More than 72 million tiles were placed by over 6 million users, at the rate of 2.5 million tiles placed per hour. Communities outside of Reddit, such as Discord and Twitch, helped with the project too.

The slogan from the group reads, “Some have visited a canvas before. / A place where togetherness created more. / Now in numbers far greater, taking more space, / It falls upon you to create a better place.”

The project was started by Josh Wardle, the guy who created the ubiquitous addicting world game Wordle, back in 2017 on April Fool’s Day. The initial experiment lasted 72 hours. More than 1 million users edited the canvas, placing a total of approximately 16 million tiles.

The way it works is that a person may place a tile every five minutes. The time limit is set to avoid any one person or group dominating the collective art installation. It’s a collaborative effort; although, there is competition between groups to get their own work noticed.

The result was a chaotic, yet stunning, and meaningful collective piece of artwork. With all of the hate, anger and violence permeating our world, it’s nice to see people around the world virtually coming together to make something special.

In light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the site welcomed r/PlaceUkraine to help organize and develop the Ukrainian presence on r/Place. Nomad, a moderator, along with others, helped to ensure that Ukraine was well represented. An alliance was formed to protect their work. Since r/Place is “extremely chaotic,” there were groups that devolved into tribalistic actions and tried to attack some countries’ contributions.

Nomad wrote, “In order to PROTECT the space we have, we need to work with other communities to help ensure that we have people protecting our space at all hours of the day. This comes down to negotiations very similar to real life, where we may offer something, and receive something in return. Trust me, it’s not fun.”

He added, “r/Place is a place of compromises and teamwork, those who do not work with others are attacked by communities like the Void, and simply put, we do not wish for any of the artwork created by our wonderful designers to be destroyed. Let us work together toward the common goal of representing Ukrainian Culture, as best as possible, and educating the world on what is going on.”

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