r/place was a collaborative social experiment hosted by Reddit on April Fools' Day 2017 and repeated again on April Fools' Day 2022.
This project so far has used python to process the ~160 million rows of reddit provided data (to large to fit in RAM) and format it into a RAM usable a parquet file. I have also created heat maps of the placed pixel data such that the density of placed pixels per time in an area can be observed by hieght values see how it was done here
- Next I would like to use this data to create a 3D render of the canvas and use a framework such as WebGl to create a website that allows users to view the data in 3D space over time.
The 2017 experiment involved an online canvas of 1000x1000 pixels located at the subreddit known as r/place. Registered users could edit the canvas by changing the color of a single pixel with a replacement from a 16-color palette. After each pixel was placed, a timer prevented the user from placing any more pixels for a period of time varying from 5 to 20 minutes. Much of the user enjoyment came out of the limited power any individual user possessed. Due to the time limit, users were forced to colloborate as groups to create large artworks and defend them from other users placing pixels over their art. The experiment was ended by Reddit administrators about 72 hours after its creation, on 3 April 2017. Over 1 million users edited the canvas, placing a total of approximately 16 million pixels, and, at the time the experiment was ended, over 90,000 users were actively viewing or editing the canvas. Final 2017 canvas below
On 1 April 2022, Reddit began a reboot of the experiment that lasted for four days. It included two expansions of the canvas to allow for more space alongside two color palette expan on the second and third days. Unlike in 2017, individual subreddits immediately began to coordinate in designing pixel art, and large communities were formed on Discord and Twitch in attempts to expand existing art, replace defaced pixels, and superimpose new images over existing ones. By 3 April, nearly 72 million pixels were placed by over 6 million users, at a pace of more than 2.5 million pixels placed per hour. On the final day, a few hours before the 2022 Place event ended, users became restricted to placing only white pixels. The entire canvas was gradually filled with white space, returning it to its original blank state. Final 2022 canvas before the white pixels were enforced:
