Information technology started with a unmarried carmine pixel on a blank canvas. It ended 72 hours after with a vast work of art created by more than than a million people, capturing i of the virtually interesting social experiments of our time: Reddit Place.

It was ostensibly an Apr Fool'south joke, the latest in a series of projects initiated by the social news site Reddit, but equally the hours unfolded it became articulate that Identify was something much more remarkable. This is how its creators introduced it to the website'south users on March 31, 2017:

At that place is an empty sheet.

You may place a tile upon it, just you must await to identify another.

Individually you can create something.

Together you can create something more.

The sheet measured one,000 x i,000 pixels, and anyone with a Reddit account could contribute. It was described by 1 user as a massive multiplayer version of Microsoft Paint, in which each histrion can only fill up one pixel every five minutes from a palette of sixteen colors. Simply the simplicity of the concept masked the complexity of how it was played.

With no guidance beyond these four lines, it was perhaps inevitable that the first forms to emerge on the canvas were swear words, swastikas and penises, only as communities came together and coordinated on projects, these scrawls were soon covered over with more intricate and thoughtful designs.

"Early on, Identify definitely resembled the kind of graffiti you lot would see in a bath stall," Josh Wardle, a senior product managing director at Reddit who came up with the idea for Place, tells Newsweek. "What was really amazing was seeing how quickly the community organized and started to self-police the canvass to keep it positive."

As the self-proclaimed "front end page of the cyberspace", and with close to 250 million users, Reddit provided the perfect platform to explore social interaction on a huge scale. With more than one million unique users laying over 16 million tiles, information technology may as well exist the largest creative collaboration ever attempted—outdoing the One Million Masterpiece of 2007, which involved less than 27,000 collaborators.

Over the 3 days, communities came together and split apart, nations went to state of war, and strangers strategized on how best to create and defend the artistic representations of their passions—be that a sports team or the late socialist leader, Hugo Chavez. It was a war waged in five-minute intervals that showed the internet at its best and worst.

Hundreds of Reddit users answered a call for assist with a marriage proposal, with the plan to write "Lisa I honey yous will you ally me" on 153 pixels of the canvas. While this briefly worked, it was soon vandalized to read: "Fuck I detest yous Lisa you cunt bitch." This message was besides soon taken over past a community defended to painting beloved hearts.

Reddit place marriage proposal
Reddit Place showed the best and worst sides of the internet, equally this hijacked wedding proposal shows. reddit

It took less than a day for flags to starting time appearing on the canvas, as members of Reddit communities (known as subreddits) dedicated to private countries began to mobilize. One of the largest was the German language flag, created through the efficient collaboration of Germany'southward subreddit, and it soon began to grow toward a smaller French flag nearby.

Despite calls by some members to not invade their neighbor—i user wrote, "last fourth dimension we did… well let'south say it didn't work out that great in the end"—the black, red and gilt stripes had completely covered the French tricolor. To bring an finish to the boxing, one Reddit user came up with "Operation EU Honey," which saw hundreds of users paint the European union'southward flag on the disputed territory betwixt the historical enemies.

reddit place internet heat map
A heatmap of Reddit Place shows where some of the nigh intense battles for territory took place. Reddit/ Mustafaihssan

It wasn't the merely instance of borders being joined with symbols of peace, with territorial battles between communities frequently resolved with a love center that took the colors of each side.

Perchance the virtually aggressive projects were the two artworks that characteristic prominently on the final canvas: Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night and Leonardo da Vinci'south Mona Lisa. Both masterpieces required non only proficient design and patient collaboration, but too the endurance to survive waves of attacks, most notably from a nihilistic grouping chosen The Black Void.

reddit place starry night van gogh
A pixelated version of Vincent Van Gogh'south The Starry Nighttime was created and maintained past a 300-strong grouping of Reddit users. Reddit

The sole purpose of The Black Void, which grew to nearly four,000 members by the fourth dimension Place was over, was to destroy the work of other communities by filling the canvas with blackness pixels. Its greatest achievement came in the last hours of the experiment, when it coordinated an assail on the American flag in the center of the canvas.

What started as a modest crack at the bottom of the flag presently fractured and spread to a blackness emptiness where the stars and stripes used to be. With national pride at stake, Americans came together to restore their flag, to the indicate that when Identify finally finished, merely four black pixels remained.

reddit place black void flag
In the final hours of Reddit Place, The Black Void community attempted a takeover of the U.S. flag. Reddit

The finished tableau is confusing and chaotic, and uniquely beautiful. Zooming in to whatever department reveals the plethora of vast and diverse communities that contributed to its creation. "We are at a point where the cyberspace enables humans to communicate and collaborate in means they have never been able to before," Place'due south creator Wardle says. "My hope is that the success and collaborative nature of projects similar Place will encourage other internet companies to take some more than risks when exploring ways that their users tin interact."

Place is what happens when y'all requite the internet a blank canvas, a hive heed spewing its collective conscience onto a pixelated slice of Reddit real estate. Studying the mesmerizing timelapse of its creation offers a lesson in diplomacy and democracy, in creation and destruction, in state of war and peace. And of course, no representation of web civilisation would be complete without a Rickroll: If you lot look closely you volition find a QR code in the top-left corner, which leads to the video for Rick Astley'south 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Upward.

It was, in its essence, nada more than a coloring-in contest. But what Place captured was the internet in all its wonderful and horrific glory, for those 72 hours in April 2017.