Internet communities are battling over pixels

Since Friday, millions of Reddit users have banded together to collectively generate a massive, collaborative piece of artwork that has become a viral phenomenon.

Reddit’s r/Place is a subreddit that functions as an open canvas, where each user can post a single, tiny, colored pixel every five minutes. The project began as an April Fools’ Day experiment in 2017, and in its first year more than a million Reddit users placed about 16 million tiles on the blank communal digital canvas. Five years later it’s back, and those numbers have skyrocketed. As of Sunday night, nearly 72 million tiles were placed by over 6 million users, at a pace of more than 2.5 million tiles placed per hour.