Reddit expanded the r/Place canvas, and users immediately wrote messages cursing the CEO

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Reddit added more space to the r/Place collaborative canvas on Friday, giving users additional room to collaboratively draw pixelated art. Almost immediately after the space was added, users started to write in their protests against the site and CEO Steve Huffman.

The expanded canvas now stretches further in both directions. When I first wrote this, there was a massive land grab taking place, including a spot memorializing the YouTuber Technoblade, the continuation of the German flag at the top of the canvas, a vertical French flag on the right side, and many iterations of the phrase “fuck spez,” a reference to Huffman’s username.

More than three hours later, those “fuck spez” messages were covered up. Outside of a a message from a community organizing UK-themed art on r/place that says “spez = twat,” there weren’t any other protest messages or art.

After an expansion on Saturday morning, however, protest messages made their way back in, with new “fuck spez” messages incorporated in a few places, along with other protest messages.

r/Place launched on Thursday, and some of the earliest art was also cursing the CEO. Reddit users have been unhappy about changes like the company’s API pricing that forced third-party apps to shut down, its removal of years of chat history, and its decision to get rid of the current Gold awards system, and they’ve used r/Place as a billboard for their protests.

You can see some of progression of the 2023 canvas for yourself in the below gallery.

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r/Place works by letting users drop a pixel of one of eight colors wherever they want on the canvas, but they have to wait a few minutes to be able to drop another. Many groups work together to collectively make art or write messages, whether for fun in their own subreddits or in more protest-oriented communities. Reddit added to the canvas two times during the 2022 iteration of r/Place, so it’s not a huge surprise that it did so again this year.

Currently, protest imagery and language are generally harder to spot now that more art is packed into the canvas. But users have kept things like the phrase “u/spez ist ein hurensohn” on the German flag, which Google Translate says translates to “u/spez is a son of a bitch,” and a sign promoting the Save3rdPartyApps community that reads “never forget what was stolen from you!” According to r/Place’s canvas rules, “targeted hate or harassment of private individuals” will be removed, as will “posts, comments, and imagery that are hateful, graphic, sexually-explicit, and / or offensive are violations of our policy.”

Despite the very visible protests on the r/Place canvas, on Thursday, Reddit did actually share a time-lapse video of some of day one. We’ll have to wait and see if it shares a video of day two as well. According to a leaderboard shared by the company, users in the United States have dropped the most pixels, followed by Germany and France.

Update Friday July 22nd, 10:50AM ET: Added another screenshot to the gallery, showing a newly-expanded canvas from sometime Friday morning. Also added that protest messages appear to have made a comeback.

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