r/place: one tile per user every five minutes — 1M people paint a 16M-tile canvas in 72h

For April Fools' 2017 Reddit opened a 1,000×1,000 canvas; one tile per account every five minutes turned communities into the internet's biggest shared artwork.

创意是什么A shared 1,000×1,000 canvas where each account places one colored tile every five minutes — too slow to draw alone, so collaboration and turf wars become the content.伤筋动骨

当时的题目

Reddit engineers wanted an April Fools' project with a fixed April 1 launch date, a team of only three or four engineers, and rules simple enough that the community itself would generate the fun. Earlier years had shipped one-day experiments; r/place was given 72 hours on a completely blank canvas.

它是怎么成立的

On 31 March 2017, Reddit replaced its front page with a blank 1,000×1,000 pixel canvas and told logged-in users they could place one colored tile from a 16-color palette every five minutes. The April Fools' project had a hard launch date, a team of three or four engineers, and a simple motto: "Individually you can create something, together you can create something more."

The five-minute per-account cooldown made drawing anything alone nearly impossible, so the game was really about coordination: subreddit communities formed alliances, drew borders, defended their art against vandalism, and fought territorial wars over 72 hours. The final canvas was a dense patchwork of country flags, memes, game characters and a Mona Lisa — plus an independent "atlas" documenting every piece that survived.

The numbers: 1.1 million unique users placed 16.5 million tiles before the experiment ended, enough to cover the board more than sixteen times over. In 2022 Reddit repeated it with more colors and daily canvas expansions: 10.4 million users placed 160+ million tiles from 236 countries and territories, with 943 million screenviews over four days.

妙在哪

One tile every five minutes makes solo drawing useless, so the only way to create anything is to coordinate — the rule manufactures cooperation.
A blank canvas plus a deadline creates a zero-sum game of territory, so communities compete and negotiate with drama that outsiders can watch.
The output is a time-stamped artifact of the community itself, and the timelapse turns the whole conflict into a watchable story.
Entry costs almost nothing — a logged-in account — and the result is legible to anyone, so participation scales from individuals to nation-sized factions.

做出来什么

1.1 million unique users placed 16.5 million tiles in 72 hours, per Reddit's own engineering write-up (the company's summary rounds this to over 1 million users and about 16 million tiles). In 2022 Reddit repeated it with more colors and daily canvas expansion: 10.4 million users placed 160+ million tiles from 236 countries, with 943 million screenviews over four days.

可以借走的

One tile every five minutes makes solo drawing impossible, so alliances and turf wars — not the art — become the content; the constraint itself is the creative act.

后来

r/place became a recurring platform ritual: Reddit brought it back in 2022 with more colors and daily canvas expansion, and the community kept building tools around it — an independent Atlas of every artwork and timelapses of the canvas's evolution. The one-pixel-per-five-minutes format has been borrowed by other communities and brands as a template for mass collaboration.

资料来源

发现哪里写错了？告诉我们。

轮到你了

你刚读完一个点子。把你手上的题目说出来，看看谁接过同样的题。

免费账号 · 3 次免费提问 · 不用绑卡