SAN FRANCISCO, March 31 ― Reddit is planning for a special April Fool's Day event, or rather planning for a redux of a past April Fool's Day event. The social network has decided to relaunch an experiment that was a fan favourite back in 2017: a huge collaborative work of art to create online. Here's what we know.

On Reddit, the forum or subreddit r/Place generated significant buzz in 2017. The reason? It launched the idea of a huge collaborative work of art on a completely blank digital canvas. This idea, widely acclaimed by Reddit users, will be back starting April 1 for 87 hours, until April 4, at 9pm Pacific time: “When we first ran r/place in 2017, more than one million redditors placed approximately 16 million tiles on a blank communal digital canvas - resulting in a collective digital art piece. Every year since then, users have asked us to bring it back. It was hands down one of our most popular April Fools' Day experiences,” the Reddit blog post reads. In fact, Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle, was behind the initiative.

This April Fool's joke from the community platform will allow users ― only those logged into their account ― to place one colored pixel at a time. They will have to wait five minutes to place another one. A true collaborative work that, according to Reddit, forces users to organise among themselves to create a digital image. First launched in 2017, the project saw various users of different subreddits compete to make their drawing the most visible.

This project is far from insignificant for the social network, which relies on this kind of event to test their platform: “We learned from the original experiment that people online are naturally collaborative, that redditors are more creative than we are, and that Reddit is a place where great things blossom,” said Alex Le, EVP Strategy and Special Projects at Reddit.

“April Fools' Day on Reddit has a history of inspiring how we build new features on the platform. From Robin inspiring our real-time chat product to Circle of Trust inspiring real-time comment and upvote counts, April Fools' Day provides Reddit a period to test infrastructure at a grand scale and try things that are new and off the wall. We look forward to seeing what collaboration happens on r/place this year and learning how we can better our platform,” he explained. ― ETX Studio