With more than one million unique users laying over 16 million tiles, it may also be the largest artistic collaboration ever attempted-outdoing the One Million Masterpiece of 2007, which involved less than 27,000 collaborators.

'What was really amazing was seeing how quickly the community organized and started to self-police the canvas to keep it positive.'Īs the self-proclaimed 'front page of the internet', and with close to 250 million users, Reddit provided the perfect platform to explore social interaction on a huge scale. 'Early on, Place definitely resembled the kind of graffiti you would see in a bathroom stall,' Josh Wardle, a senior product manager at Reddit who came up with the idea for Place, tells Newsweek. With no guidance beyond these four lines, it was perhaps inevitable that the first forms to emerge on the canvas were swear words, swastikas and penises, but as communities came together and coordinated on projects, these scrawls were soon covered over with more intricate and thoughtful designs.

But the simplicity of the concept masked the complexity of how it was played. It was described by one user as a massive multiplayer version of Microsoft Paint, in which each player can only fill one pixel every five minutes from a palette of 16 colors. The canvas measured 1,000 x 1,000 pixels, and anyone with a Reddit account could contribute. You may place a tile upon it, but you must wait to place another.

This is how its creators introduced it to the website's users on March 31, 2017: It was ostensibly an April Fool's joke, the latest in a series of projects initiated by the social news site Reddit, but as the hours unfolded it became clear that Place was something much more remarkable. It ended 72 hours later with a vast work of art created by more than a million people, capturing one of the most interesting social experiments of our time: Reddit Place. It started with a single red pixel on a blank canvas.

Reddit the great war