r/Place: A Digital Art Experiment
On April Fools’ Day 2017, Reddit first introduced the world to r/Place: a five-day activation involving a collaborative digital canvas on which users can place a single tile every five minutes. More than 1M redditors placed approximately 16M tiles, working together to create art, flags, logos, and so much more. The final result, a collective digital art piece, acted as a time capsule of culture during that time and took the Internet by storm.
In 2022, we revived the beloved experiment to much fanfare. r/Place (the sequel) lasted just 83 hours, slightly longer than 2017’s 72. During that time, 10.4M people placed 160M tiles. Countries, streamers, fandoms, and communities all staked claim in r/Place’s revival, leaving their virtual mark for all of eternity. Similar to 2017, the final canvas quickly become something Internet legends are made of.
The timelapse - I worked with our engineering org to create the official place timelapses to post across all social platforms.
The community
Our social strategy for r/place is what won us a Webby, here are some of the posts we made in addition to the timelapses.
There was so much planning that went into r/place, like designing the experience, the branding, and the marketing assets.
Shitposting is love.
