Did Reddit’s April Fools’ gag solve the issue of online hate speech?

Data stored and shared on the Internet is almost universally cumulative. If the history of Internet information were a word-processor document, it would include an endless stream of new sentences, along with lots of “strikethrough” phrases (like this one), that reflect edits and updates without ever deleting the originals.

Reddit hosted an online experiment over April Fools’ weekend that was ultimately governed by the same rules. But on its face, “Place” was different. Archives and time-lapse videos will forever exist to show off how Place worked, but its special trick—that its contents, at any moment, would only contain a single here-and-now statement created by thousands of people—is not the kind of thing that an Internet archive or Google cache can easily recreate.

“Together, you can create something more”

On Friday, Reddit administrators uploaded a blank, 1,000×1,000 pixel canvas to the “reddit.com/r/place” subreddit. It included a message:

There is an empty canvas.
You may place a tile upon it, but you must wait to place another.
Individually you can create something.
Together you can create something more.

More specifically, any Reddit user with an account created before March 31 could click on the zoomed-out canvas, then pick any of the million pixels and cover it with any of the colors in a 16-bit palette. Mousing over a spot would reveal its exact coordinates. Clicking that spot would place your chosen color there, at which point a five-minute lockout timer would begin. Once the timer ran out, you could paint a single pixel again, and so on.

“Individually, you can create something. Together, you can create something more.” It didn’t take long for Reddit users to figure out what the subreddit’s creators were thinking.

The canvas quickly exploded with collaborative designs. Subreddit communities lit up with r/place rally posts urging their peers to stake a spot and fill it with a defined array of pixels and colors. The fact that so many popped up and remained legible, if not almost entirely preserved, is remarkable. For perspective: a reasonably perceptible Roman character requires no less than 24 pixels, so more than 24 Reddit users were needed to not only fill that single letter’s pixels, but also to stand guard for immediate follow-up vandalism. Multiply that by five for a single word. Go up an order of magnitude for a sentence.

And then cover your walls with plastic and tarp before considering how many people it must have taken to build and maintain this metric crap-ton of Star Wars prequel text:

Yeah, my brain exploded, too. I mean, really? A message about the prequels?!

When hate speech is a hassle to create

Visitors to r/place will talk about various trends that emerged for some time. Many nations’ flags flew over r/place, with the most interesting being a combined graphic of Greece and Turkey’s flags united by a heart. (Those nations’ ongoing battle over the island of Cyprus was clearly less important to reddit painters than this call for unity.) Cartoons, films, and video games were commemorated with pixelated characters and logos; as a result, the rhythm-tapping game Osu! probably got the most publicity it may ever receive with its massive, bottom-center logo constantly reappearing.

In some ways, the results looked like the world’s largest team-battle game of MS Paint. Countries invaded countries. Collective efforts to fill certain spaces with single colors eventually fell apart. The community at r/void launched a “disruption” of rippling, cracking black marks that started at a center point and grew like a sci-fi monster. Once the black center grew too big, other communities stepped up to stamp it down. As one time-lapse video creator pointed out, “they tried setting up multiple [black] cores, which crumbled their main core.” The comparisons to history’s most notorious empires are just too rich; I have to wonder if subscriptions to r/SunTzu will grow in the aftermath.

This 3D graph shows how often certain pixels were overwritten over the r/place 72-hour span.

This 3D graph shows how often certain pixels were overwritten over the r/place 72-hour span.

The white dots represent pixels that were never painted over during the 72 hours.

The white dots represent pixels that were never painted over during the 72 hours.

The crackling center of the r/void takeover, reclaimed by r/place’s “rainbow” commission.

The crackling center of the r/void takeover, reclaimed by r/place’s “rainbow” commission.

The white dots represent pixels that were never painted over during the 72 hours.

The crackling center of the r/void takeover, reclaimed by r/place’s “rainbow” commission.

USA! USA! USA!

RIP.

Germany and France battled over their spots on the canvas; they eventually united with an EU flag as their intersecting point.

Greece and Turkey’s flags comingle next to a tiny Zootopia mural.

In the same vein, this three-day coloring battle proved too insurmountable for individual users. Anybody with designs on singlehandedly disrupting r/place needed to have a stockpile of sockpuppet accounts handy (especially since newer accounts couldn’t access the page). Even then, you’re just one person with maybe a few dozen browser tabs versus a lot of dedicated reddit users ready to take up shifts and keep their own pre-assigned pixels in check.