Reddit's new 'Place' is forcing millions of users to work together to make something great
Reddit is continuing its annual streak of using April Fools' Day to run social experiments with "Place," which challenges the site's millions of users to work together and be creative.
Basically, Reddit Place is a huge, collaborative canvas accessible on Reddit for desktop, iOS, and Android. It's almost like a massively multiplayer Microsoft Paint. Every Reddit user gets to paint one pixel, every five minutes. At the time of writing, over 58,400 people were painting on the same canvas at the same time.
That time limit means that users are forced to work together to do anything more meaningful than a random scribble. And Reddit users have largely risen to the challenge, managing to team up and make creations like this pretty on-model Mega Man:
Of course, Reddit being Reddit, the trolls are organizing, too: You may notice a somewhat rude word taking shape towards the upper-left hand corner of this canvas. And there's nothing stopping people from painting over something that's already in place.
Still, the Reddit comment threads below the canvas see people suggesting creations, gathering teams to coordinate on building, say, their favorite memes, like this reference to the classic "Twitch Plays Pokemon:"
And one corner of the canvas is currently staked out by a squad of blue enthusiasts:
It's weird, but it's also super creative. And it's way less stressful than The Button or Robin, Reddit's previous two April Fools' Day experiments, which pit users against each other in a fascinating show of human engineering.
It's not clear how long Reddit Place will be around, but historically, these games don't tend to last much past April 1st.