Pixel war on Reddit: What is the r/Place?

Since April 1, the social network Reddit has offered millions of its members the opportunity to draw a fresco made of pixels. This initiative, which was a very innocent idea at the beginning, turned into a field war between countries.

The purpose of this “Pixel War” is to draw clearly identifiable artifacts and ensure they are not deleted. There is only one rule: A pixel is personal and Every person can place a pixel every 5 minutes.

The pixel story is from 2005

Million-dollar homepage: The name given to a web page consisting of one million pixels in 2005. Participants were still in their infancy and a British student had the idea to sell every pixel of this page for one dollar.

Mainly it was about attracting advertisers who could place their logo on this page for the purpose of staying online. At that time this page had become a real phenomenon, such that some pixels were sold at auction and the student’s income exceeded one million dollars.

Seventeen years later, the pixels became the center of a war, and the “zone to conquer” was made available by the social network Reddit on April 1 in the group r/Place. This is another huge blank page.

The goal is to create drawings every five minutes. A user can color a pixel for five minutes. It’s free, purely artistic and temporary.

The first 3 days of pixel warfare are in the video above.

Social media phenomena got involved in the war

The stars of other social networks like Twitch, Kameto and Zerator took their communities behind them to seize this four million pixel canvas after one million pages, and this “Pixel War” took place on an unprecedented scale.

The aim is to showcase objects or symbolic elements of their country or community, but also portraits, celebrities and even works of art.

Thus, while the Americans drew the logo of their university, the French managed to draw and preserve an Eiffel Tower, the Turks a Turkish flag, and a picture of Atatürk.