Reddit’s popular April Fools Day community art project, r/place, is coming back after a five-year absence and a whole lot of user requests.
For April Fools Day, 2017, Reddit decided to do something a little different by giving users a shared digital canvas (roughly 16 million tiles) that they could add to. The project, r/place, has been the website’s most popular event for the usually prank-driven day—and after five years, it’s finally coming back.
The new r/place won’t simply be a rehash of the original experiment, however. Reddit states that it’s making a number of improvements across the board for the 2022 iteration, with a better platform and international availability. Once every five minutes, logged-in users will be able to tap anywhere on the 1000x1000 canvas to place a single tile. Those who aren’t logged in won’t be able to place tiles, but they will be able to view the canvas in real-time as it progresses.
Reddit users will be able to find r/place via a new widget (displaying the letter “P”) that will appear at the top of the home screen or through the community drawer in the app, once the event begins.
“April Fools’ Day on Reddit has a history of inspiring how we build new features on the platform,” said EVP Strategy and Special Projects, Alex Le, in the announcement, “We look forward to seeing what collaboration happens on r/place this year and learning how we can better our platform.”
r/place will kick off on April 1 and run for 87 hours until 9 pm PT on April 4.
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