2022 sees the return of /r/Place, an April Fool’s experiment on Reddit and a community art project that first happened in 2017. This year it’s back, as is the strong South African effort to make a mark.
Before we talk about what South Africans are doing on /r/Place, the entire concept needs a quick explanation. This subreddit, which you can visit right here, is essentially a giant canvas.
Reddit users can place a single pixel on the canvas, choosing its colour and position, but the kicker is that this can only be done once every five minutes.
Adding to this time limit restriction is the sheer size of the canvas which makes any progress a drop in the ocean. It seems that the canvas is 1 999 X 1 999 pixels, which is 3 996 001 pixels in total.
Back in 2017 the residents of the South African subreddit, /r/SouthAfrica, banded together to draw our flag on the canvas. Many countries and their respective subreddits did the same to leave a flag on the picture and a permanent mark on /r/Place.
This was successful and the flag as well as the text “S. Africa” was successfully left on /r/Place five years ago.
Back in the present and the /r/SouthAfrica is not only aiming for a repeat success with a flag, but also extras including a portrait of Nelson Mandela, the name of the local subreddit and some other iconography such as a small Springbok and a Protea.
At the time of writing this project is going rather well and you can see the current state of the images on this page. They’re not perfect as any user can waltz onto the SA part of the canvas and deface it. In fact, while capturing the images for this story, these projects were rather badly affected by some digital graffiti artists.
Thankfully, after a few minutes, things were fixed up, but it remains to be seen what the final look will be when time is called.
As for when that is, no one in the public knows. /r/Place 2022 will end today, 4th April, but no exact time has been provided.
If you’d like to help with this final push to make a local park on the front page of the internet, a coordination thread is available here.
