Reddit's Bizarre Social Experiment: 5 Weirdest Things Created On r/place

On the eve of April Fool’s day, Reddit unleashed its new social experiment on the world: r/ place. Each user can place one ROYGBIV colored dot on a massive canvas every ten minutes. Alone, you can only place random dots on a board, but together, you can make some truly odd pieces of art. Users and subreddits have been working together to make epic pictures, mostly of memes.

Since the project went live, a subculture has started to spring up around it. One of the corners has been deemed the “ blue corner ” with some users dedicating their time to keeping their land safe from every color. A black mess of dots in the middle has been deemed “ the void :” some players are helping the black grow while others are trying to fight the mess with rainbows and colors. It’s an insane social experiment that shows how reddit can work together, even when it’s just for the lulz.

Here’s a brief look at some of my favorite memes, pieces of art and just unexpected oddities created by the users of the world’s largest forum site.

Darth Plagueis- R/ Prequelmemes is a subreddit that loves to do exactly what their title suggest: share memes and pictures about the three Star Wars prequels. One of the most popular is the story of “Darth Plagueis” from Episode III . Emperor Palpatine tells Anakin the story of a sith lord who could bring people back from the dead and for some reason the community fell in love with it. Maybe it’s because the story is poorly written and makes little sense, but a bunch of redditors decided to spend hours creating the piece of literature and then covering it in the most badass color: red.

Mess Of Memes- R/ Place is beautiful in it’s complexity. There are millions of dots on this board, all colliding together to make something. This little corner of the map has the fox from Zootopia , Peridot from Steven Universe , 4chan’s symbol, a pokeball and Voltorb from Pokemon , some subreddit’s discord channel and a bunch of other stuff I couldn’t even categorize.

Down The Rabbit Hole- I like Rick Sanchez from Rick And Morty and I admire whoever spent the time to draw all of this. You’ll also notice a lot of country’s flags and sprites all over r/ place. It’s a lot harder to draw traditional art with 50 people than a flag with three colors or a picture with predetermined patterns.

The Blue Corner- For a while, the “Blue Corner” remained uncontrollable and looked to take over the entirety of the map. Redditors with memes in hand took to the empty azul void and pushed back the encroaching threat. Dat Boi, Bender, Dark Souls and Pokemon all take center stage in this beautiful scene.

I Don’t Know What This Is - but someone spent a lot of time making it.