Reddit added more space to the r/Place collaboration canvas on Friday, giving users additional space to draw pixelated art together. Almost immediately after the space was added, users began protesting the site and CEO Steve Huffman.
The expanded canvas is now stretched further to the right. As I write this, a massive land grab is taking place, including a spot that already commemorates the YouTuber Technoblade, the continuation of the German flag at the top of the canvas, a vertical French flag on the right, and many repetitions of the phrase “fuck spez”, a reference to Huffman’s username.
You can see the progress of the 2023 canvas for yourself in the gallery below, which we updated while r/Place was live.
r/Place works by letting users drop a pixel of one of eight colors wherever they want on the canvas, but they have to wait a few minutes before they can drop another one. Communities work together to collectively create art or write messages, whether it’s for fun in their own subreddits or inside more protest-oriented communities. Reddit was added to the canvas twice during the 2022 iteration of r/Placeso it’s no big surprise that this was the case again this year.
Currently, protest imagery and language is generally harder to spot now that more art is packed onto the canvas. But users have kept things like the phrase “u/spez ist einhuursohn” on the German flag, which according to Google Translate translates to “u/spez is an asshole”, and a sign promoting the Save3rdPartyApps community that reads “never forget what was stolen from you!” According to r/Place’s canvas rules“targeted hate or harassment of private individuals” will be removed, as well as “posts, comments, and images that are hateful, graphic, sexually explicit, and/or offensive are violations of our policies.”
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