The subreddit r/place got a relaunch a few weeks ago, which you already know if you regularly check Reddit. For those out of the loop, r/place is a digital communal mural where users can add to the project one pixel at a time. And while you might assume the result would be a chaotic nightmare (there’s always some chaos), the end product is pretty spectacular. The first launch of this subreddit was in 2017 founded by Josh Wardle, who is actually the creator of Wordle.
And on April 1, 2022, r/place was revived. Since then, the internet has been pushing the reboot of this social experiment hard. While most of Reddit fought small digital turf wars over whether some small, arbitrary section of the canvas would be the Star Wars logo, an anime meme, or a Canadian flag, Redditor NickG365 took a different approach. He brought the whole project into Minecraft by running a server that uses a plugin to connect to r/place. From there, two versions of the project were built. The first is a flat canvas that depicts the mural, meaning you can scroll at your leisure and find some of your favorite references. The second imports changes in real-time, turning those aforementioned digital turf wars into massive stacks of blocks. NickG365 accomplished something similar with the 2017 iteration of r/place, making this year’s a welcome sequel.
