Reddit is closing r/Place ‘until we meet again’

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 no longer allows posts or comments on the r/Place subreddit, according to a post from a Reddit admin (employee). The company hosted the third iteration of the collaborative art project, which let users place individual pixels on a giant canvas, over the course of a few days in July.

While you can’t post or comment in the subreddit, you can still view posts and comments. A pinned post at the top of the subreddit, for example, features images of the final canvas before users posted white pixels to essentially erase everything. That post also links to a time lapse where you can see users banding together to write a very large message protesting CEO Steve Huffman in the waning moments of the r/Place project.

Reddit first introduced r/Place in 2017 (it was created by Wordle-maker Josh Wardle) and brought it back in 2022. The timing for this year’s canvas definitely felt a little strange; it took place just weeks after sitewide protests pushing back on Reddit’s API pricing that ultimately caused some third-party apps to shut down, and protest messages became something of a theme across this year’s canvas. However, as the project went on, many of those messages became harder to see because more art filled the canvas and because Reddit expanded the canvas six times.

In their post, the Reddit admin said that the r/Place community would be closed “until we meet again,” which could indicate that the company plans to bring r/Place back in the future.

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