On April 26, 2017, Reddit’s r/place community coordinated a protest agaiinst Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. What began as a seemingly innocuous online art project quickly turned into an act of protest, and a video timelapse of the event has been created for all to witness.
The r/place project began on April 1, 2017 as a playful online game. Reddit users were asked to draw on a giant blank canvas in the shape of a square -there were 16 million pixels available to be colored in to create digital images. Reddit users went above and beyond clever artistic renditions, however, and used the canvas to create a protest against Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s controversial editing of posts dating back to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Members of the Reddit community wrote a post to r/place asking users to “memorialize this moment” by creating a mosaic that reads “F*ck Huffman 2016” in response to Huffman’s actions. As the post went viral, users began to rally to the cause and created the mosaic.
The timelapse video, created by user inged, shows the mosaic slowly taking shape over the course of 12 hours. It was created from an original capture of the image, then broken down into 32 separate photos. Each hour, a new frame was added to the video. As it progresses, users can see the mosaic changing from a white canvas, to simple shapes made up of single color pixels, to the complete image of “F*ck Huffman 2016”.
The r/place protest against Steve Huffman quickly made its way onto the overall Reddit community, sparking a debate on the CEO’s editing of user posts. Redditors voiced their opinions, and it quickly spread from Reddit to mainstream media outlets like The Daily Dot. The timelapse video has been made publicly available to provide a visual representation of the protest, and to further emphasize the impact of the message.
In the end, while a few pixels were modified later on, Reddit users made their statement clear -one that can still be seen in the timelapse video. From this moment and into the future, Reddit users have shown that they will stand up for their community and its values.
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