Reddit just expanded the r/Place canvas, and there are already messages cursing the CEO

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 to the right. As I write this, there’s a massive land grab taking place, including a spot already 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.

You can see the progression of the 2023 canvas for yourself in the below gallery, which we have been updating while r/Place has been live.

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. Communities 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.”