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Frame from Reddit Place (/r/place) - FULL 72h (90fps) TIMELAPSE Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Reddit Place (/r/place) - FULL 72h (90fps) TIMELAPSE

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1 HN user recommended this video1 month2017–2024 score 1.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters link it as the full record of r/place whenever the experiment, or collaborative canvases in general, comes up.

A 72-hour timelapse of Reddit's 2017 April Fools' experiment r/place, a collaborative pixel canvas where each user could place one pixel every few minutes. The frames come from an image archive and the Reddit API.

“I found this whole thing to be incredibly fascinating.” (HN, 2017)

1 strong recommendations · 4 citations · 1 critical · Other

6 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@Ajedi32 Apr 2017 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment
Read more
Here's a timelapse of the entire event: [this video] I found this whole thing to be incredibly fascinating. It's pretty amazing to see how everyone just sort of spontaneously banded together to create little works of art on the board which they could never have made on their own. Everytime I watch the timelapse I notice something new. It's also interesting to note that because the impact of any individual user on the board was pretty limited (you could only place one pixel every 5 minutes, and even then there was no guarantee the first pixel you placed wouldn't be overwritten by someone else before you were even allowed to place another), every significant piece of artwork on there had tens or even hundreds of people involved in creating and maintaining it. In addition to the various artworks on the board, there were also several major factions scattered throughout the board with their own goals. /r/TheBlueCorner dedicated themselves to filling the empty space in the bottom right corner of the board with blue pixels, while /r/theblackvoid formed to erase various artworks by replacing them with black tiles. If you pay attention you may also notice several other factions in the timelapse (the Rainbow Road, Draw Hearts, Erase the Place, and The Green Lattice were a few other notable ones). Other interesting events to note include [the German invasion of France]( [link] ) (and resulting peaceful resolution), [The Void's (unsuccessful) attack on the OSU logo]( [link] ), and [several fa
Full timelapse of the 72-hour /r/place event.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@icc97 Apr 2017 Cites it
on HN thread Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment
Did anyone note the similarity to playing Go / Weiqi? Watching [0] the blue corner expanded masssively and then getting eaten from within somehow reminds me of all of the complexities of playing go when someone can place stones anywhere in your territory. [0]: [this video]
@Ajedi32 Apr 2017 Cites it
on HN thread How We Built r/Place
Read more
Here you go: [link] . And for those interested, here's some additional stats: - The original announcement about /r/place: [link] - Full timelapse of the canvas over the course all 72 hours : [this video] - Heatmap of all activity on the canvas over the full 72 hours : [link] by /u/mustafaihssan - Timelapse heatmap of activity on the canvas : [link] by /u/jampekka - Entropy map of the canvas over the full 72 hours : [link] by /u/howaboot (explanation: [link] ) - Map of all white pixels that were never touched throughout the event: [link] by /u/alternateme - Most common color of each pixel over the last... - 72 hours**: [link] by /u/howaboot - 24 Hours: [link] by /u/phil_g - 12 Hours: [link] by /u/phil_g - 6 Hours: [link] by /u/phil_g - 2 Hours: [link] by /u/phil_g - Average color of each pixel over the course of the experiment : [link] - Atlas of the Final Image: [link] by /r/placeAtlas/ (source code: [link] ) - Torrents of various canvas snapshots and image data: [link] - The post announcing the end of /r/place: [link] It took a while for members of the community to realize what was happening and start recording snapshots of the canvas, so there are a few time periods early on that got skipped
Full 72-hour canvas timelapse listed among stats.
@jasode Mar 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Vitalik Buterin is worried about crypto's future
Read more
>Ethereum is a single core global virtual computer with much less power than a typical Raspberry Pi that is available to anyone with access to an internet All analogies are incomplete and imperfect but I'd say a more accurate mental model would be something like this: Ethereum is like a global database _with_ stored procedures . With this analogy, the database component would map to the blockchain : [link] The stored procedure language would map to the Ethereum programming language Solidity . Computers worldwide run stored procedures to decide how to write the next block(s) in the database. (Consensus.) Embedded in the above is the collective psychology and incentives that attract humans to do the above activity. (aka Proof-of-Work). To see how simple explanations of Ethereum can leave out the mass psychology aspect, consider another example of an incomplete analogy: The Reddit Place experiment of 2017 ( [link] ) video of the pixels evolution: [this video] We could say that Reddit Place 1000x1000 art canvas is a worldwide "Adobe Photoshop" that runs slower than a 1990s 486 computer ... which is sort of true... but doesn't really explain the whole phenomenon.
@autoexec Apr 2024 Pushes back
on HN thread Reddit is taking over Google
I remember when "place" happened. It was a collaborative art project where for 72 hours users could place a single colored "pixel" on a blank canvas then had to wait 5 minutes before they could place another. Communities formed plans, and battles for space on the canvas were fought. Given the freedom to create something unique and beautiful together what did reddit ultimately come up with? Mostly a collection of corporate logos and copyrighted characters along with memes and flags. (see [this video] ) "Hordes of fanboyism" seems fair.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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