Reddit works as expected

Reddit officially launched the 2023 edition of its collaborative art project r/Place on Thursday morning, and it’s peppered with messages protesting Reddit and Reddit’s CEO. You can see the current iteration of the canvas r/Place subreddit or by following the prompt at the top of the app. (Note that you can’t access r/Place on Old Reddit; you’ll need to be on New Reddit or one of the company’s mobile apps.)

In r/Place, individual users can drop one pixel of color every five minutes onto a huge canvas, including overriding other pixel positions if you want to try and get some grass. In the perfect version of this idea, r/Place becomes an ever-changing piece of art as users work together to paint all kinds of pixelated images into one giant collage.

In this video you can see some of what I reported on the first iteration of this article:

If you want a slower look at the development of the project, I updated the gallery below with several screenshots on Thursday. If you want to enlarge an image, click on the image itself. (I’ll try to update this on Friday, but there are no guarantees!)

When I asked this morning if Reddit would remove protest messages, spokeswoman Courtney Geesey-Dorr pointed out: r / place canvas rules. One such rule states that “targeted hate or harassment of individuals (including mods and moderators) and protected groups are violations [content] Politics (Rule 1) And they will be removed. Additionally, posts, comments, and photos that are hateful, graphic, sexually explicit, and/or offensive are violations of our policy (Rule 6) and will be removed.”

Geesey-Dorr declined to say when Canvas r/Place would close.

There is a lot of art no protest on reddit. When I first wrote this, a lot of the graphics were flags. There was a giant rhythm game logo Oso!and another section featuring the word “DICKS” written in rainbow colors.

Updated July 20 at 8:51 PM ET: Pictures added to the gallery.