Reddit relaunches its r/place April Fools artwork that anyone can add to

Users can add a pixel to the collaborative artwork, the brainchild of Wordle creator Josh Wardle

(AFP via Getty Images)

Reddit is bringing back r/place, its collaborative artwork, for April Fools day.

The board, which was first launched in 2017, is a large grid where one million redditors placed approximately 16 million tiles on a blank communal canvas. Eventually, this created a collective collective digital art piece.

The original version was created by a team including Josh Wardle, who would go on to found the even more viral Wordle online game. Mr Wardle also created the infamous Button, which was a social experiment to see if a huge user base could wait for one minute without clicking a meaningless button. 

To participate in the work, redditors can tap or click on the new widget icon with the letter “P” at the top of the home feed, or open their community drawer in their app and tap on it.

This will fill the 1000-by-1000-pixel square, which users can add to every five minutes by taping anywhere on the canvas. Those not logged into Reddit can see it developing, but cannot add to it.

“We learned from the original experiment that people online are naturally collaborative, that redditors are more creative than we are, and that Reddit is a place where great things blossom,” said Alex Le, executive vice president of strategy and special projects at Reddit.

“April Fools’ Day on Reddit has a history of inspiring how we build new features on the platform. From Robin inspiring our real-time chat product to Circle of Trust inspiring real-time comment and upvote counts, April Fools’ Day provides Reddit a period to test infrastructure at a grand scale and try things that are new and off the wall. We look forward to seeing what collaboration happens on r/place this year and learning how we can better our platform.”

This new April Fool will be available on Reddit’s website and apps for 87 hours, ending on 4 April at 5:00pm GMT.