2017·The platform era·amazing
r/place
A blank canvas, one pixel every five minutes, and a million strangers negotiating a picture.
You might remember it as Reddit place canvas
A trend people joined in with
This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on Reddit.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
On April Fools' Day 2017 Reddit opened a shared canvas. Any registered user could change the colour of exactly one pixel, then wait five to twenty minutes before changing another. Nothing else. Over seventy-two hours more than a million people placed about sixteen million pixels, and the result was a dense map of every community on the site — flags, logos, in-jokes — held in place only by continuous collective effort.
It first appeared in 2017, during the platform era.
It is the best experiment anyone has run on how online groups actually behave. Alliances formed to defend territory, a self-organised faction spent the whole event painting everything black, and coherent images survived only where enough people kept repairing them. It was conceived by Josh Wardle, who would later make Wordle — two of the most successful shared internet rituals of the century by the same person.
Reddit reran it in 2022 and again in 2023, when users turned the canvas into a protest against the company's own leadership. The format has been copied constantly, and "a place-like canvas" is now a recognised genre of collective online event.
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The platform era
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- Kiki Challenge 2018The platform era
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Related
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Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on Reddit.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- On April Fools' Day 2017 Reddit opened a shared canvas. Any registered user could change the colour of exactly one pixel, then wait five to twenty minutes before changing another. Nothing else. Over seventy-two hours more than a million people placed about sixteen million pixels, and the result was a dense map of every community on the site — flags, logos, in-jokes — held in place only by continuous collective effort.