Reddit Place

What started out as a black canvas and an April Fools prank quickly became one of the Internet's most interesting social experiments.

"It started with a single red pixel on a blank canvas. It ended 72 hours later with a vast work of art created by more than a million people, capturing one of the most interesting social experiments of our time: Reddit Place."

This is how the creators introduced the website to users...

"There is an empty canvas.

You may place a tile upon it, but you must wait to place another.

Individually you can create something.

Together you can create something more."

"The canvas measured 1,000 x 1,000 pixels, and anyone with a Reddit account could contribute. It was described by one user as a massive multiplayer version of Microsoft Paint, in which each player can only fill one pixel every five minutes from a palette of 16 colors. But the simplicity of the concept masked the complexity of how it was played."

"With no guidance beyond these four lines, it was perhaps inevitable that the first forms to emerge on the canvas were swear words, swastikas and penises, but as communities came together and coordinated on projects, these scrawls were soon covered over with more intricate and thoughtful designs."

“Early on, Place definitely resembled the kind of graffiti you would see in a bathroom stall,” Josh Wardle, a senior product manager at Reddit who came up with the idea for Place, tells Newsweek. “What was really amazing was seeing how quickly the community organized and started to self-police the canvas to keep it positive.”

"Perhaps the most ambitious projects were the two artworks that feature prominently on the final canvas: Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Both masterpieces required not only skillful design and patient collaboration, but also the endurance to survive waves of attacks, most notably from a nihilistic group called The Black Void."

"The finished tableau is confusing and chaotic, and uniquely beautiful. Zooming in to any section reveals the plethora of vast and diverse communities that contributed to its creation. “We are at a point where the internet enables humans to communicate and collaborate in ways they have never been able to before,” Place’s creator Wardle says. “My hope is that the success and collaborative nature of projects like Place will encourage other internet companies to take some more risks when exploring ways that their users can interact.”

"Place is what happens when you give the internet a blank canvas, a hive mind spewing its collective conscience onto a pixelated piece of Reddit real estate. Studying the mesmerizing timelapse of its creation offers a lesson in diplomacy and democracy, in creation and destruction, in war and peace. And of course, no representation of web culture would be complete without a Rickroll: If you look closely you will find a QR code in the top-left corner, which leads to the video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up."

"It was, in its essence, nothing more than a coloring-in contest. But what Place captured was the internet in all its wonderful and horrific glory, for those 72 hours in April 2017."

I purposefully left out some of the stories and details from the Newsweek article, to encourage you to go read the entire piece. There is also a pretty epic time lapse you have got to check out! 

http://www.newsweek.com/reddit-place-internet-experiment-579049

What do you think about Reddit Place?

What observations do you have about social behavior on the web?

Are there any lessons Steemit and its users can learn from this experiment?

If there was a Steemit Place what types of things would we see, what community battles would there be?

Comment and let me know below!

Sources

http://www.newsweek.com/reddit-place-internet-experiment-579049

 BY ANTHONY CUTHBERTSON ON 4/11/17 AT 7:02 AM 

Video

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