/r/place — Section of Reddit r/place canvas with Ukrainian flag stripe and dense pixel art of flags and logos

/r/place

2017eventclassic

Published September 26, 2026

/r/place is an interactive Reddit canvas launched as an April Fools' Day event on April 1, 2017, where users could place one colored pixel at a time on a 1000x1000 white grid. What started as a quiet novelty grew into a massive collaborative art project involving flag wars, fandom takeovers, and script bots, then came back in 2022 as one of Reddit's defining online social experiments.

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Overview

The canvas ran on a strict rule set that made cooperation the only path to visible art. Each logged-in Redditor could drop a single tile from a 16-color palette, then had to wait before placing another, which meant meaningful images could only appear when subreddits, Discord servers, and off-site groups coordinated their placements1. The result was a chaotic mosaic where anime characters, national flags, video game logos, and abstract shapes like the Blue Corner and the black void fought for real estate in real time2.

Groups formed almost immediately around defense and offense. The Red Corner and Blue Corner turned into the earliest competitive drawing factions, with the Blue Corner eventually claiming the largest single contiguous color block on the board2. Flag wars between country subreddits, fandom raids from communities like OSU! and Overwatch, and the constant threat of the expanding black void gave the canvas its recognizable texture of alliances, treaties, and open pixel warfare2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Reddit
Key People
Josh Wardle
Date
2017

Reddit launched /r/place on April 1, 2017 at 00:54 UTC as an April Fools' Day experiment, announced by admin Josh Wardle (u/powerlanguage) in an r/announcements post that framed the blank 1000x1000 grid as a place where users could "draw" by placing one colored tile at a time3. Only accounts registered before March 31, 2017 were eligible to place tiles, a rule aimed at keeping fresh throwaways off the board2. By 3 p.m. that afternoon, the subreddit had close to 86,000 subscribers, and by the time the event closed it topped 220,0002.

Wardle shut the canvas to further edits on April 3, 2017 at 16:59 UTC, freezing the final image and ending the run2. Reddit later reported that more than one million users placed roughly 16 million tiles during the original event1. Reddit revived the project on April 1, 2022 for an 87-hour rerun that ended on April 4 at 9:00 p.m. PT, this time with a five-minute cooldown between placements and a widget baked into the home feed1.

How It Spread

The board took on a life of its own within hours as national subreddits raced to plant flags. The first documented flag war pitted r/sweden against Denmark in an operation nicknamed "Operation Lilla Bält," which succeeded in overwriting the Danish flag2. France and Germany fought a parallel campaign that Germany won with "Operation Annexion," and the two sides eventually made peace by turning the contested area into a European Union flag2. Fandoms did the same thing on a smaller scale, with OSU! players anchoring the bottom of the canvas after painting over a D.Va bunny, the Philippine flag, and Five Nights at Freddy's art2.

Bots became a defining subplot. Argentine Redditor Zequez released an open-source "placebot" on GitHub that automatically restored pixels of the Argentine flag whenever they were overwritten, and the script was quickly forked and repurposed for other projects4. Variations of that automation are widely credited as a reason the 2017 event ended when it did, since script-driven traffic strained Reddit's servers2. After the canvas froze, spinoff sites like Pxls.space and Plasteur launched with CAPTCHAs to keep bots out, and /r/thefinalclean formed to scrub stray pixels from the frozen image2.

The 2022 rerun pulled in an even larger user base and turned into a spectator sport on Twitter and Twitch, with big streamers directing viewers to overwrite entire regions. A widely shared April 3, 2022 tweet from @Shyguymask99 joked about "small indie communities when the big streamer opens r/place," capturing the imbalance between organized subreddits and Twitch-driven raids5. Reddit framed the comeback as a look at "what happens when a person doing something affects a collective," which is roughly what the canvas kept doing for 87 hours straight1.

Timeline

2017-04-01

Reddit launches /r/place at 00:54 UTC on April Fools' Day, opening a 1000x1000 pixel canvas to any account registered before March 31, 2017.

2017-04-02

Flag wars, the Blue Corner takeover, and the black void spread across the board as bots like Zequez's placebot begin defending national flags automatically.

2017-04-03

Admin Josh 'powerlanguage' Wardle freezes the canvas at 16:59 UTC; the subreddit ends with more than 220,000 subscribers and roughly 16 million tiles placed.

2022-04-01

Reddit relaunches /r/place for its fifth anniversary with a five-minute cooldown, a home-feed widget, and access for all logged-in users.

2022-04-04

The 2022 rerun ends after 87 hours at 9:00 p.m. PT, capping a canvas dominated by fandom raids and Twitch-driven overwrites.

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