Soapbox articles give our team the opportunity to share some personal perspectives. Kate has been following an art project on Reddit for the past few days and has some warm fuzzy feelings she wants to share…
Disclaimer: The nature of r/place means there may be some nasty images, pixel nudity, and more NSFW stuff featured in the screenshots below. I did my best to crop and censor but I also recommend caution!
On April Fools’ Day 2017, the people behind the Reddit online forum community decided to invent what they call “r / place“- a giant blank canvas that allows users to place one pixel every five minutes. Experimentation quickly evolved from people placing random colors into different sub-strips that came together to create a logo, flags and other works of art.At that time canvas r/place closed, a million people joined and it became an internet legend.
The legend returns in 2022 on r/place’s fifth anniversary and without the user knowing it, the canvas is designed to slowly quadruple its size over four days, allowing millions of pixels to be placed and New works of art are made.
So listen up – this is Reddit. Even though the titles are all warm and fuzzy, I won’t pretend r/place isn’t also a total clusterfart. Amidst canvas-destroying bots with giant, hideous artworks and flags going on road too much room and huge streamers are inciting their fans to shame other people’s works, it’s a real mess.
Some of it was quite amusing: One of the jokes going on was Canadians can’t figure out how to draw a maple leafbecause their iconic flag has been transformed into everything from a red blob to a banana, and Between us crew members have been hidden in every work of artif you look closely enough – and there is a a lot of nude photo. It’s basically Reddit’s very own bathroom stall.
But amid all the chaos and memes, there is a touching story of communities rallying together to represent their countries, interests, and favorite things. Unsurprisingly for a site that is completely online, so many shared interests it’s video games and among the flags, masterpieces and references to things I don’t understand, you can find them all.
There are small pixel Kirbies, Minecraft blocks, Pokémon, and even the Froggy Chair, all created and maintained by small, ferocious groups of humans who keep an eye on their artwork, protecting it from “these” grieving people” – people who just want to screw things up. But it’s lovely to see smaller communities also claim their space: Rain World has stood out, as it were Downwell, Baba is youand Enter Gungeonand even older games like Earthbound and 999: Nine people, nine o’clock, nine doors.
The feeling I had during my early days of playing Pokémon on Twitch Plays was rekindled by r/place: A nostalgic and nostalgic mix of “aw, that’s lovely” and “why even so” “, plus a dash of “ai We these guys with all this spare time”. I’ve had very little to contribute to myself, so I’m largely satisfied with just helping maintain the integrity of the existing works against Sc Tai It looks like a Single Black Pixel, but it’s enough to make me feel like I’m part of the whole thing.
Just like the internet, there are scammers and bad guys who just want to see the world burn up everywhere, but focusing on them – like focusing on the big picture of r/place – means losing sight of what’s going on. Grassroots efforts are taking place in smaller communities. The fact that the Hollow Knight and Ori communities and the Blind Forest community come together to create adorable artwork is as moving as seeing the flags of bordering countries declaring boxes with little hearts between them.
Not r/place is not landgrab. Epic wars take place in contested spaces, as the four corners of the picture and the giant German flag stretch almost the entire way, but amidst all the brawls exists a kind of peaceful peace static.
Honestly, having spent almost three decades of my life surfing information on the freeway, I hope you’ll understand why I’m so skeptical. The loudest and most frequent voices are the most negative and the hardest to hear, and Reddit is one of the best known for its communities of both. But a huge community project like this helps me remember that most people are statistically not bad guys, and some of them are even better: Ads.
I don’t think there is much in this world that is better for society than the force of collaboration and creativity. Reddit isn’t great at many things, but bringing people together is one of its strengths – and I’m happy to see people using this creative collaboration tool for good. If only we could somehow harness this unity, perhaps we could end the war for good.
At least the console wars.
