Brian Simpson, Matt Lee, & Daniel Ellis
(u/bsimpson, u/madlee, & u/daniel)
Each year for April Fools’, rather than a prank, we like to create a project that explores the way that humans interact at large scales. This year we came up with Place, a collaborative canvas on which a single user could only place a single tile every five minutes. This limitation de-emphasized the importance of the individual and necessitated the collaboration of many users in order to achieve complex creations. Each tile placed was relayed to observers in real-time.
Multiple engineering teams (frontend, backend, mobile) worked on the project and most of it was built using existing technology at Reddit.