Reddit said Monday that it’s bringing back its r/Place April Fools’ Day experience for four days beginning April 1st. Alex Le, Reddit executive vice president for strategy and special projects said in a blog post that the move was meant to showcase “the magic of online communities, conversation, and collaboration.”
The r/Place board, which launched on April 1st, 2017 featured a large, white pixel grid on which logged-in Reddit users could place colored pixels one at a time every five minutes just by tapping on it. It was wildly popular, attracting some 16 million tiles from more than 1 million users (but of course had its share of weird and crude images as well). And, r/Place was the brainchild of Josh Wardle, whose name you might recognize as the creator of the popular word puzzle Wordle.
For the latest iteration of r/Place, which begins April 1st at 9AM ET, log in to Reddit and navigate to r/Place by clicking on the widget icon with the letter P at the top of the home feed, or via the community drawer in the app. You’ll then be able to place a tile or pixel of your choice. If you visit the page but you’re not logged in to Reddit, you can still see the image evolve in real time, but won’t be able to place tiles of your own. The experience will be available until April 5th at midnight ET.
“We learned from the original experiment that people online are naturally collaborative, that redditors are more creative than we are, and that Reddit is a place where great things blossom,” Le said in the blog post. He added that April Fools’ Day on the platform has “a history of inspiring how we build new features,” such as Robin, a chat room-like feature that paired random users which led to Reddit’s real-time chat, and Circle of Trust, a 2018 April Fools’ Day prank that Le said inspired real-time comment and upvote counts.
“We look forward to seeing what collaboration happens on r/place this year and learning how we can better our platform,” Le said.
Update March 28th 12:26PM ET: Adds detail about r/Place creator Josh Wardle.