Reddit’s 2023 r/Place turned into a battleground for dunking on the CEO
On Tuesday, Reddit wrapped up the 2023 edition of r/Place — the internet canvas where Redditors can place a pixel every five minutes, collaboratively creating art. But the internet collage had a different vibe this year, defined by the way some Redditors used the canvas to protest Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.
This year’s r/Place kicked off on July 20, and users quickly began collaborating in creating fan art — and in dunking on the company’s CEO by writing “fuck spez” all over the canvas. (Spez is Huffman’s Reddit username.) These protests are a response to the Reddit CEO announcing a change to API pricing, increasing the fees that developers pay to access parts of Reddit’s code. As a result, a number of third-party app founders said they would be forced to shut down.
As of Wednesday morning, the r/Place subreddit is flooded with screenshots showing segments from the full final artwork. One of the crops focuses on the text “Fuck Spez,” written in enormous white letters on one part of the project. Others hone in on a different instance of the same words, written in large, colorful letters. On some of the most upvoted posts, Redditors have called for other commenters to respond with a list of common search-engine optimization terms — for example “reddit CEO” and “reddit CEO picture” — to attempt to boost the image’s placement in Google search results. At the time of writing, Googling “reddit CEO picture” on incognito mode pulled up this link in the top result spot:
These protests started on the first day r/Place went live. The timelapse video of 2023 r/Place’s first day, posted in the subreddit, shows the canvas getting covered with numerous instances of “fuck spez,” before being partially tiled over. At the top of the image,
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