Since its creation in 2017, we have heard repeatedly from our community to bring back r/place - a collaborative online canvas on which a single user can only place a single tile every five minutes. This year, we did just that. We brought back the most successful and collaborative digital art piece the internet has ever seen.
We added some improvements this year such as putting in more colors to the color palette and expanding the canvas each day to see how communities would interact and collaborate on it, which led to one of the most engaging moments we’ve ever seen on the platform.
Five years ago, when we first ran r/place we had more than one million redditors place approximately 16 million tiles on the blank communal digital canvas.
This year, the Reddit community blew those numbers out of the water, making r/place one of the top visited subreddits in Reddit’s history.
r/place by the Numbers
Total tiles placed: 160+ million
Total users who placed a tile 10.4+ million
We saw at the height of r/place activity 5.9+ million tiles placed per hour
We saw at the height of r/place activity 1.7+ million users setting tiles per hour
r/place subreddit views - at height we saw 26+ million r/place views in one hour
r/place subreddit users - at height we saw 2.8+ million r/place subreddit users in one hour
r/place total subreddit views - 943+ million screenviews to r/place over the 4 days, 1.0 billion minutes spent on sub/day, 4.0 billion minutes spent in r/place over 4 days
r/place total subreddit users - 10.4+ million average daily active users
Place total canvas views - 157+ million
Place total canvas users - 16.3+ million
Global Participation
This year we had 236 countries and territories participate with the top 10 most active (determined by the number of users submitting pixels) being:
U.S.
Turkey
France
UK
Canada
Germany
Spain
Mexico
Australia
India
Chitter Chatter
Some of the communities that talked about r/place the most included (most mentions of “r/Place” w/in a sub):
r/placenl
r/placefrance
r/placecanada
r/osuplace
r/ainbowroad
r/placede
r/americanflaginplace
r/place
r/u_cod_mobile_official
r/placestart
r/u_microsoft_surface
r/thebluecorner
r/cavestory
r/greenlattice
r/theblackvoid
Check out our timelapse of the canvas:
Community Creativity
From Rembrandt replicas and BTS creations to iconic French monuments and streamer wars, r/place’s reemergence had many memorable moments where communities, nations, and fandoms gathered together over the course of four days to create, cooperate, alter, and meme on the world’s largest collaborative online digital canvas.
Popular content creators said r/place was some of the most fun they’ve ever had on the internet.
For those curious about what was created over the course of r/place, we developed a feature that enables people to see the canvas at any given point in time in high definition. Additionally, the community created an Atlas of r/place, which describes each and every artwork and meme.
Memes on Memes on Memes
Here are just a handful of art, memes, and works that captured r/place’s attention and made this year’s experience so great.
The Italy and Mexico Alliance
Star Wars Poster Coming Back
Timelapse of the Star Wars poster coming back from the dead after XQC's raid
by u/Ethereal_sandwich in place
French Flag with Monuments and More
Shout out to the French community for all the Art they built and helped other communites build. (OnePiece, Quebec, Switzerland, among others...)
by u/npjprods in place
Canada Trying to Draw a Maple Leaf
One Piece
Out of all the art on the entire canvas, this is my favorite piece by a very large margin. Thank you, fellow One Piece fans!
by u/ajsawesomeanimals in place
The Void
Amongi Blending In