Brandwatch Bulletin #114: There's No /r/Place Like Reddit

Picasso, eat your heart out.

8 April 2022

The idea of unleashing the internet onto a blank canvas may sound like a recipe for disaster, but what’s the truth? The Place experiment aims to find out, and in the process reveals a lot about our online world.

Let’s take a look.

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Reddit as the world’s canvas

On April 1, Place was revived after a five year absence. Based in the /r/Place subreddit, it’s a collaborative piece of art where users can place a single colored pixel onto a canvas of a million. Your pixel isn’t protected though, and can be replaced by another user. Meanwhile, you can only place one pixel every five minutes.

What followed was various organizations, streamers, and communities calling on their supporters to take over sections of the canvas for a specific piece of art. Flags, cartoons, and messages soon formed, leading to battles over space as groups vied for more and more pixels.

On April 4, after millions of users placed tens of millions of pixels, it all came to an end. The result was this technicolour canvas, a summation of the internet’s collective psyche.

You can explore a larger version here, but we also recommend watching this video to see how the canvas morphs and changes over time.

It’s not hard to see how much collaborative effort went into Place. The sheer number of individual images is impressive, but more so is the fact they had to be coordinated and defended for days on end to ensure their survival.

It’s proof of just how good the concept is. What genius thought of this singular idea? A project that gains this much traction surely only comes along once in a lifetime! Well, it was Josh Wardle during his tenure at Reddit. Yes, the same guy who created Wordle. We’re terrified of what he’ll come up with next.

Which Place made first place?

Compared to 2017, this year’s Place dwarfed it both in participants and spawning conversations beyond the subreddit.

That’s a 1483% increase in total. With the game exactly the same as before, why was interest so much higher?

For one, while the original Place didn’t get as much attention, it’s fondly remembered by many and is often mentioned as a big internet moment. In other words, awareness of Place was much higher this time around, especially due to media coverage before it kicked off again.

But a more interesting driver is the idea that the internet is more ‘communalized’ in 2022. According to Taylor Lorenz in the Washington Post:

Taylor Lorenz

Washington Post technology columnist

"Though Place is a Reddit phenomenon…the success of this year’s project has been driven heavily by the rise of other community-oriented platforms like Discord and Twitch."

Along with noting alliances built between different online communities, she also talks about the influence of Twitch streamers. Some of the most popular people on the platform, including xQc and Pokimane, streamed the canvas and encouraged their viewers to get involved. We recommend reading the full article for an interesting look at how communities have changed the online world.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise many more people flocked to Place this year.

A big win for Reddit

While Place itself was a huge success, we can bet Reddit were happy with the results too. Mentions of the platform on other parts of the internet skyrocketed as Place went back into action.

On April 4, as the game came to a close, mentions of Reddit were up 219% compared to a week before. In fact this Reddit event was one of the most mentioned in years, only coming behind the WallStreetBets saga and the banning of the pro-Donald Trump subreddit /r/The_Donald. That’s amazing promotion for the platform, and likely a nice bump in sign ups too.

It’ll be interesting to see if Reddit brings Place back again next year, although the charm might be lost if it becomes just another annual event. Maybe they should call up Josh Wardle to see if he’s got anything else up his golden sleeves.

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Stay safe,

The Brandwatch Bulletin team

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