Reddit's Wardle Uses Collaborative Architecture to Curb Online Abuse

Josh Wardle

Platform designers can eliminate online toxicity by restricting individual actions and requiring group cooperation, making collective creation significantly easier than vandalism.

AI-assisted summary of Why April Fools' Day sucks and what we did about it at Reddit - Talk at SF Tech Poetics 01/18/18 — original source. Check the original for full context.

Source published: 2018-01-23

Key ideas

Josh Wardle argues that corporate April Fools' pranks have devolved into sterile, self-serving marketing stunts, urging tech companies instead to leverage the day as an opportunity to test creative solutions to difficult online social problems. (1:49)
Reddit's 2015 social experiment 'The Button' sustained a single 60-second countdown for over two months as more than one million unique users made deliberate, coordinated choices to reset the clock. (9:37)
The collaborative canvas r/place engaged over one million participants over 72 hours, demonstrating that architectural constraints like individual cooldown timers can naturally insulate online spaces against abuse by prioritizing collective action over solo sabotage. (20:38)
Post-mortems of Reddit's interactive events yielded core product design lessons: never disrupt the core platform utility, enforce mechanical simplicity, and recognize that users will always out-innovate the original designers. (6:48)

Detailed notes

## Background Published on YouTube by Josh Wardle on January 23, 2018, this video captures his talk delivered at GitHub for SF Tech Poetics. According to the description, Wardle shares his critical perspectives on corporate April Fools' Day traditions in Silicon Valley and outlines the core design lessons learned while creating The Button and Place at Reddit.

## TL;DR Josh Wardle argues that corporate April Fools' pranks have devolved into sterile, self-serving marketing stunts that waste the massive interactive potential of modern tech platforms. Drawing from his fine arts background and his tenure as a Reddit product manager, he details the progression of Reddit's April Fools' experiments—from the chaotic infrastructure collapse of 2013's 'Orangered vs. Periwinkle' to the massive social countdown of 'The Button' in 2015. The evolution culminated in 2017's 'Place,' an ambitious collaborative canvas engineered with strict mechanical constraints, such as individual five-minute cooldowns, to naturally disarm bad actors and incentivize collective creation over solo vandalism. Ultimately, Wardle challenges tech workers to transform the annual holiday into a creative sandbox for piloting novel architectural solutions to severe platform challenges like polarization and toxicity.

## Atmosphere & style The presentation carries a candid, witty, and grounded Silicon Valley insider vibe, blending self-effacing humor with sharp critique of corporate marketing culture. Wardle speaks in a reflective and engaging conversational tone, drawing laughs as he recounts operational disasters like server meltdowns and unexpected pixelated genitalia, before pivoting into thoughtful design philosophy. Watching the talk feels like an honest behind-the-scenes post-mortem that steadily builds from frustration with tech industry superficiality toward an earnest, optimistic belief in the latent prosocial power of online communities when supported by thoughtful platform architecture.

## Bulletin - [01:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=109s) Josh Wardle argues that corporate April Fools' pranks have devolved into sterile, self-serving marketing stunts, urging tech companies instead to leverage the day as an opportunity to test creative solutions to difficult online social problems. - [09:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=577s) Reddit's 2015 social experiment 'The Button' sustained a single 60-second countdown for over two months as more than one million unique users made deliberate, coordinated choices to reset the clock. - [20:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=1238s) The collaborative canvas r/place engaged over one million participants over 72 hours, demonstrating that architectural constraints like individual cooldown timers can naturally insulate online spaces against abuse by prioritizing collective action over solo sabotage. - [06:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=408s) Post-mortems of Reddit's interactive events yielded core product design lessons: never disrupt the core platform utility, enforce mechanical simplicity, and recognize that users will always out-innovate the original designers.

## Key takeaways - [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=0s) Fine art training offers critical value to Silicon Valley by providing frameworks to navigate the social, human, and behavioral complexities of large digital communities. - [01:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=109s) Mainstream tech industry April Fools' stunts such as Google Nose and Lyft Mono reduce massive interactive platforms to passive, smug marketing artifacts. - [03:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=216s) Rather than deploying one-way promotional jokes, platforms should treat April Fools' Day as an annual permission to take high-leverage architectural risks addressing systemic issues like harassment, echo chambers, and toxicity. - [05:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=308s) The 2013 'Orangered vs. Periwinkle' event descended into chaotic UI degradation and server crashes, highlighting the danger of disrupting the daily utility of a platform for regular users. - [06:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=408s) Complex top-down gameplay mechanics are unnecessary; community lore and engagement flourish autonomously when users are simply provided with basic frameworks. - [06:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=408s) Platform designers should function as playground architects because large-scale user communities will inevitably surpass developers in creativity and problem-solving. - [08:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=486s) 'The Button' relied on a single 60-second countdown and non-renewable user clicks to create high-stakes psychological tension, sustained continuously for more than two months by over a million participants. - [09:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=577s) Tribalism and division are trivial to spark online; uniting users across artificial boundaries requires minimal effort compared to engineering genuine, prosocial collaboration. - [11:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=709s) Historical experiments like Twitch Plays Pokémon, Boaty McBoatface, and Microsoft's Tay illustrate that digital user behavior is fundamentally constrained and shaped by platform architecture. - [14:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=895s) By enforcing a 5-minute cooldown per placed pixel on a 1,000,000-pixel canvas, r/place made individual vandalism ineffective and forced participants into coordinated group efforts. - [14:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=895s) A potential crisis of central canvas defacement was resolved purely through architectural adjustments, namely randomizing newcomer spawn coordinates instead of defaulting them to the center. - [17:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=1039s) Self-organizing groups deployed distributed blueprints ranging from low-barrier expansion like 'The Blue Corner' to highly coordinated pixel art reproductions of fine masterpieces like the Mona Lisa. - [19:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=1172s) Territorial border conflicts on r/place were resolved through emergent diplomacy rather than destructive griefing, such as r/goodboy integrating Dutch clogs into their artwork to negotiate shared borders. - [20:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=1238s) Structuring interactive systems around group coordination rather than individual dominance acts as a natural structural defense against online toxicity and abuse.

## Detailed walkthrough ### [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=0s) Setting the Stage: Art Backgrounds in Silicon Valley

Josh Wardle opens his talk at GitHub for SF Tech Poetics by establishing the premise of his presentation: why he believes April Fools' Day is fundamentally flawed and how his team worked to rethink it during his time at Reddit. Before diving in, he lays out three baseline facts: 1. April Fools' Day occurs annually on April 1st, has indeterminate origins, revolves around practical jokes, and is generally terrible. 2. Reddit is the massive platform where these experiments were built—a site where millions gather across topic-based communities called subreddits to discuss passions or look at cat pictures. 3. Although he is the one speaking on stage, the projects reflect the collective efforts of a highly talented and creative team.

Wardle notes that he originally trained as an artist before becoming a product manager at Reddit. Entering Silicon Valley, he questioned whether fine art training had any place in tech, only to discover it was extraordinarily relevant. He reflects that the wider tech sector would benefit significantly from more people with artistic backgrounds, particularly when grappling with the social and human complexities of large digital spaces. Unexpectedly, April Fools' Day became the annual moment where his artistic training proved most useful—a realization that felt somewhat disappointing because he found the holiday itself so unenjoyable.

[01:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=109s) The Trouble with Corporate April Fools' Day

Wardle dissects why April Fools' Day feels so unpleasant, observing: “what is less fun than a day when you're told that you're meant to be having fun it's just like unspun taneous like man they did it's super it's kind of super lame I feel”. Within Silicon Valley, the day evolved into a sterile corporate ritual. Companies invest heavily in polished, well-produced projects, but these usually consist of non-interactive assets like spoof videos or fake press releases. Wardle argues these stunts feel deeply self-serving and smug—tech corporations showing off how clever, funny, or relatable they are in a safe, marketing-driven "fellow kids" manner.

To illustrate this trend, Wardle points to two recent examples: - **Google Nose:** Released around the launch of Google Now (voice detection), this joke claimed to offer scent detection. Google produced a slick, high-budget video, but it remained entirely non-interactive and purely self-parodying. - **Lyft Mono:** A wearable glove/mitt with an extended thumb that would hail a ride. Whether intended as pure satire or a conceptual design exercise, it was ultimately just a promotional gag.

Both Google and Lyft had built massive, unprecedented platforms where millions of users could interact. To Wardle, reducing that extraordinary creative surface area to tame, one-way marketing jokes represented a major missed opportunity.

[03:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=216s) Reframing April Fools' as a Design Opportunity

At Reddit, the team began asking what an April Fools' experiment could be instead. Modern tech platforms permit millions of people to connect at speeds and scales never before seen in human history. That scale naturally amplifies human nature: it brings out tremendous positive behavior, but it equally unleashes toxicity and structural dysfunctions.

Wardle rapidly lists off several severe issues plaguing the internet: - Trolls and targeted harassment - Polarized political discourse - Algorithmic filter bubbles - The attention economy - Fake news and disinformation

Faced with these persistent crises, Wardle proposed a different question: “what if April Fools' there could be an opportunity to explore creative solutions to real problems if you have this really tough problem why don't you use this one-day year where you're allowed to kind of take a risk to really try and do something a little different”. He acknowledges that turning an inherently silly prank holiday into a venue for serious social experimentation seems far-fetched. He did not formulate this thesis in the abstract; it developed over years of running live, chaotic experiments on Reddit's user base.

[05:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=308s) 2013: Orangered vs. Periwinkle

Wardle's first April Fools' project at Reddit was 2013's "Orangered vs. Periwinkle." The concept was a direct mashup of Reddit and Valve's popular team-based shooter *Team Fortress 2*. The system divided the entire Reddit user base into two competing factions named after Reddit's voting arrow colors: Team Orangered and Team Periwinkle.

As users browsed the site, the system randomly dropped virtual items, weapons, and hats into their inventories, which could then be used against members of the opposing faction. Because Reddit's visual layout was already notoriously utilitarian, the addition of chaotic user-triggered effects turned the interface into complete disarray. One weapon turned a target user's comment text entirely into the words "Tom Cruise," while other users wound up with absurd stacks of hats plastered across their screens.

The experiment was sheer anarchy. Most visitors had no idea what was happening, visitors just wanting to look at cat pictures were bewildered, and the immense server load caused Reddit to crash repeatedly throughout the day. Although users who actively participated had an absolute blast fighting their arbitrary turf war, the team shut down the event after only six hours, feeling exhausted and determined never to repeat that specific operational disaster.

```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: Orangered vs Periwinkle Flow accDescr: Progression from user assignment to inventory drops and site degradation during the 2013 Reddit April Fools event.

subgraph Setup["Faction Split"] A["All Reddit Users"] --> B["Team Orangered"] A --> C["Team Periwinkle"] end

subgraph Mechanics["Gameplay Loop"] B & C --> D["Browse Subreddits"] D --> E["Random Drops (Hats & Items)"] E --> F["Deploy Items Against Opponents"] end

subgraph Outcome["System Breakdown"] F --> G["Visual UI Chaos (Tom Cruise text, stacked hats)"] G --> H["Mass Server Crashes Shut down after ~6 hours"] end ```

[06:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=408s) Three Post-Mortem Lessons

Reflecting on the Orangered vs. Periwinkle chaos led the team to crystallize three enduring product design rules: 1. **Don't affect your core product:** Many users rely on the platform as a daily utility or information source. Forcing a disruptive, zany prank onto users who just want normal functionality alienates the broader audience. 2. **Keep things simple:** Collaborator Max Goodman pointed out that building complex weapons, dynamic hats, and bespoke mechanics was unnecessary work. Simply dividing millions of people into two colored teams—red and blue—would have been sufficient; the community naturally generates its own deep lore, mythology, and competition without top-down mechanics. 3. **Users are far more creative than the creators:** Traditional corporate pranks operate under an outdated model where a clever company presents a joke for users to passively admire. In reality, with millions of minds on a network, the audience will always out-innovate the developers. Wardle realized product designers should simply construct the playground and let the community drive the creative output.

[08:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=486s) 2015: The Button and Emergent Behavior

Applying the principle of extreme simplicity, the team launched "The Button" for April Fools' Day 2015. The mechanic was stripped of all extraneous features: - A single subreddit containing a digital countdown timer set to 60 seconds and a button. - Every time someone clicked the button, the timer reset to 60 seconds and continued ticking down. - **The catch:** each Reddit account could only press the button once in total.

To introduce subtle social dynamics, the team tied the moment of interaction to user identity by awarding colored flair badges next to usernames based on the time remaining when clicked. Pressing with 50 seconds remaining yielded a purple flair, while waiting until the clock dropped to 1 second awarded an ultra-rare red flair.

This simple rule sparked intense psychological and social drama: - Deciding *when* to spend one's single, non-renewable click created immediate tension. - Early adopters who secured a new tier—such as being the first person in the community to obtain blue flair—became instant celebrities, only to lose their special status the moment someone let the timer drop lower to claim green, quickly turning into just another compulsive clicker. - Factions formed immediately along flair boundaries, resurrecting the tribalism of Orangered and Periwinkle as groups rallied around their respective colors.

[09:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=577s) The Phenomenon of The Button and Lessons on User Tribalism

The community embraced The Button wholeheartedly, inventing an entire culture around the countdown. Users crafted animations and illustrations celebrating or mourning the colored flair they received based on the remaining seconds on the timer. One video showed a gray user (someone who had not yet pressed) finally deciding to click, only to end up with purple flair—widely considered the worst color—leaving him completely distraught. The community rallied around identity cohorts, creating mock movie posters and even commemorating the first person to ever receive red flair (which occurred accidentally due to a technical glitch). Third-party developers built specialized tools and Chrome extensions that monitored the countdown in real time, notifying users with alerts like, “hey you should go and press the button,” when the timer dropped to a specific color tier they wanted to claim.

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: The Button Feedback Loop accDescr: Visual flow of how user actions and timer dynamics sustained The Button for over two months. subgraph Rules["Core Constraint"] A["60-Second Countdown"] --> B["Global Button Click"] B --> C["Timer Resets to 60s"] end subgraph Culture["Emergent Behavior"] C --> D["Tiered Color Flairs Awarded"] D --> E["Cohort Tribalism & Tool Building"] E --> B end ```

The experiment became an extraordinary hit: over a million people made the deliberate choice to press. Because of that volume, the timer kept ticking without ever hitting zero for over two full months, meaning that every 60 seconds around the clock, some human being somewhere in the world made the conscious choice to reset it. Josh Wardle distilled two core lessons from the project. First, users are far more creative than platform creators. Much like the earlier "Team Orangered vs. Team Periwinkle" experiment, Reddit simply established an underlying framework, stepped back, and watched users build a rich mythos. The second lesson, which heavily informed Wardle's subsequent work, was that “uniting people through difference is easy.” By merely partitioning users into opposing teams, humans naturally lean into tribal boundaries, flourishing creatively even within mock conflicts. Wardle then wondered whether this mechanic could be flipped: instead of setting up a pretend fight, could a platform build an experience engineered to encourage genuine collaboration?

- **Participation scale:** Over 1,000,000 users participated by clicking the button. - **Duration:** The 60-second timer was sustained continuously for over two months. - **Key insight:** “We decided to keep it simple by giving users a framework and let them be the creative ones and all this mythos and all these ideas that they created around it they really flourished.”

---

[11:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=709s) Mass Collaboration on the Internet: Precedents and Pitfalls

Wardle sought to address a fundamental pathology plaguing online platforms: mass collaboration vulnerable to bad actors, “where a small group of toxic people can disrupt the experience for the many basically.” He wanted to test whether an April Fools' Day experiment could be purposefully architected to withstand bad-faith abuse. The concept of online mass collaboration was not brand new, and Wardle evaluated several well-known precedents that ran the gamut from triumph to complete disaster:

* **Twitch Plays Pokémon (2014):** Over 100,000 simultaneous players attempted to control the Game Boy title *Pokémon Red* through Twitch chat commands. Entering directional inputs like "up" caused the on-screen character to spin erratically in place due to thousands of conflicting instructions. Yet despite the chaotic interface, the collective audience managed to complete the entire game within two weeks. * **Boaty McBoatface (2016):** An online public poll intended to name a serious Arctic research vessel was overrun by internet voters who selected a silly, absurd moniker. Wardle noted that while this wasn't what the poll creators intended, it represented an anarchic, chaotic, yet essentially benign and harmless form of collective trolling. * **Tay (Microsoft):** A Twitter chatbot designed to learn conversational speech by absorbing and repeating what users tweeted at her, with the goal of sounding increasingly human over time. Instead, bad actors rapidly exploited the machine learning loop, feeding it vile and hateful rhetoric. Microsoft had to abruptly shut Tay down after the bot began issuing horrendous tweets within hours.

These examples led Wardle to a central realization about system architecture: “our interactions are defined by the platforms we build.” The explicit technical constraints and design choices made by builders inherently dictate the types of human behavior that can occur within that space. With this principle in mind, the goal for the next April Fools' experiment was clear: could Reddit design an interactive canvas specifically structured to resist abuse and prevent single malicious individuals from sabotaging the collective experience?

---

[14:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=895s) Designing r/place and Surviving the First Crisis

To test whether architecture could foster prosocial cooperation, Wardle and his team conceived **Place** (r/place). The rules were stripped down to minimal mechanics: a blank canvas measuring 1,000,000 pixels (1,000 pixels wide by 1,000 pixels high). Any user could drop a single colored pixel anywhere on the grid, but doing so triggered a mandatory five-minute cooldown timer before that person could place another. Under this design constraint, solo creation was mathematically impractical; drawing any recognizable shape alone would require endless hours. Achieving anything substantial demanded finding an organized cohort to collaborate with. As Wardle framed it, “place essentially de-emphasized the individual in favor of the group,” encapsulating the guiding philosophy as: “individually you can create something together you can create something more.”

```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: Individual vs Group Dynamic on Place accDescr: Contrast between individual user limits and collective output on the r/place canvas. subgraph Individual["Solo User Action"] U1["Place 1 Pixel"] --> C1["5-Minute Cooldown"] C1 --> E1["Negligible Canvas Impact"] end subgraph Collective["Coordinated Group Action"] G1["Hundreds/Thousands of Users"] --> C2["Simultaneous 5-Min Cooldowns"] C2 --> E2["Complex Art & Robust Defense"] end ```

The experiment launched by giving millions of anonymous users open reign over a blank canvas, prompting the obvious question: "what could go wrong?" Just two hours after launch, the team faced what looked like an existential crisis: a large, unmistakably phallic illustration began forming directly in the center of the canvas. Fearing that Place was about to follow the self-destructive trajectory of Microsoft's Tay, the team debated shutting the project down entirely. However, they returned to their core thesis that platform design controls user outcomes. Analyzing their own setup, they realized they had programmed every newcomer to load into the exact center of the board by default, funneling all chaotic energy into that single spot.

- **Canvas dimensions:** 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels (1,000,000 total pixels). - **Core interaction limit:** 1 pixel per user every 5 minutes. - **The center fix:** By merely randomizing every new visitor's starting canvas coordinates, the central phallic drawing vanished almost instantly; new users who landed on untouched whitespace chose to build new art rather than deface existing clusters.

---

[17:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=1039s) Emergent Art, Self-Organizing Factions, and the Living Canvas

Once spawn locations were randomized, sophisticated and spontaneous forms of bottom-up coordination flourished across the board. One of the earliest organic movements was "The Blue Corner" in the bottom-right of the map. Its rule of engagement was ingeniously self-explanatory: users simply turned any non-blue pixel in that corner blue. As Wardle pointed out, it was brilliant because “they came up with a form of collaboration that described itself.” Soon, more intricate art emerged, including sprite characters like Mega Man, whose retro 8-bit grid map provided a natural blueprint for distributed placement.

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Typology of Canvas Collaborations accDescr: The progression of coordinated community projects from simple rules to intricate art. BC["The Blue Corner"] -->|"Low barrier: fill region blue"| Simple["Self-describing expansion"] MM["Pixel Art (Mega Man)"] -->|"Medium barrier: 8-bit sprite blueprint"| Structured["Coordinate-based plotting"] ML["Masterpieces (Mona Lisa)"] -->|"High barrier: multi-thousand user alignment"| Complex["Distributed fine art"] ```

The ambitions of the community rapidly accelerated beyond what the Reddit team thought possible. Thousands of independent users gathered on third-party channels to execute fine-art masterpieces, including an intricate, full-scale reproduction of the *Mona Lisa*, placed one pixel at a time through synchronized five-minute timers. Watching a compressed 10-second time-lapse of the full three-day event revealed an evolving ecosystem of flags, gaming icons, and memes. Wardle likened the visual density to a delightful, modern reincarnation of the early-2000s *Million Dollar Homepage*, demonstrating how millions of internet users, bound by simple mechanical guardrails, could self-organize without top-down moderation.

[19:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=1172s) Emergent Diplomacy: How r/goodboy and the Dutch Made Peace with Clogs

Josh Wardle explains how communities organized their territorial efforts on Place by signing their artwork with their subreddit name, such as r/goodboy. Including the subreddit name allowed anyone who appreciated the art to track down the community and learn how to participate in defending or building it. Wardle decided to join the r/goodboy effort himself, noting how much he loved the meme. Upon visiting their subreddit, he discovered that the community was orchestrating their pixel placements with meticulous precision using a shared Google Spreadsheet to tell each individual contributor exactly where to drop their next tile.

While reading through the community's discussion thread, Wardle stumbled upon an exchange that caught his attention. Someone in the comments asked why one of the dog's clogs was noticeably bigger than the other clogs, to which another participant casually replied that the Dutch had drawn it that way. Confused by why anyone was talking about clogs on a dog meme, Wardle returned to the canvas, zoomed in, and saw that the dog on the left was indeed wearing traditional wooden clogs. Zooming out further, he uncovered the reason: the r/goodboy territory directly bordered the canvas space occupied by the Dutch national contingent. Rather than engaging in an all-out turf war over the boundary line, the two completely unrelated communities had negotiated an unexpected diplomatic compromise by outfitting the dog in clogs. Wardle was astonished and delighted by the outcome, emphasizing how incredible it was to watch internet strangers organically broker peace through shared creative absurdities.

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Canvas Border Diplomacy accDescr: Diagram illustrating how two bordering communities on r/place negotiated a shared boundary through creative compromise.

subgraph Communities ["Neighboring Factions"] GB["r/goodboy Community (Drawing dog meme via Google Sheets)"] NL["The Dutch Contingent (Building national flag & iconography)"] end

subgraph Resolution ["Territorial Compromise"] Border["Contested Shared Border"] Compromise["Diplomatic Solution: Give the dog wooden clogs"] end

GB --> Border NL --> Border Border --> Compromise ```

- Communities used their subreddit names as signatures on the canvas so curious users could find the hub and coordinate tile drops. - Groups coordinated real-time pixel warfare and placement using external tools like Google Spreadsheets. - The Holland contingent and r/goodboy resolved their shared boundary dispute peacefully by adding Dutch wooden footwear to the cartoon dog.

---

[20:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=1238s) Collective Construction vs. Abuse: Redefining April Fools' Day

Over the course of its 72-hour lifespan, more than one million unique users participated by placing pixels on Place. Yet for Wardle, the most impressive achievement was not just the sheer scale or the final artwork, but what was conspicuously absent from the canvas: malicious vandalism and abuse. By requiring individuals to band together to make any meaningful visual impact, the mechanics made it significantly easier for collective groups to produce something positive than for bad actors to mount destructive attacks. As Wardle observed, “It was really hard for people to abuse Place because of the emphasis we placed on the group rather than their single individual; it was way easier for people to group together to do a good thing rather than it was for people to group together to do a negative thing.”

Reflecting on the broader impact, Wardle maintained realistic expectations about the experiment, recognizing that Place would not fundamentally rewrite Reddit's core functionality or turn the platform into a permanent canvas. Instead, its value lay in offering a blueprint for product design, proving that structuring online interactions around collective identity rather than hyper-individualism fosters healthier digital environments. Wrapping up his talk, Wardle issued a challenge to engineers and designers working in tech companies who might be dreading the annual corporate prank cycle. Rather than shipping an irritating joke for April Fools' Day, he urged them to treat the holiday as a creative sandbox: “If any of you happen to work for tech companies, and as April Fools' Day approaches this year, I would encourage you to think about what is a real problem your company is facing, and is there a creative solution that you could use April Fools' Day as an opportunity to explore?”

- **Scale:** Over 1,000,000 people placed pixels on the canvas during the 72 hours Place was live. - **Architectural Lesson:** Designing platform mechanics around collective cooperation rather than individual dominance acts as a natural defense against abuse and toxicity. - **A Call to Action:** April Fools' Day projects in Silicon Valley should be repurposed from low-effort pranks into high-leverage experiments that test novel solutions to genuine organizational and social problems.

## Notable quotes > [11:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=709s) our interactions are defined by the platforms we build. — Josh Wardle

> [09:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo&t=577s) uniting people through difference is easy. — Josh Wardle

## Mentioned Josh Wardle, Reddit, GitHub, SF Tech Poetics, Google, Google Nose, Google Now, Lyft, Lyft Mono, Valve, Team Fortress 2, Orangered vs. Periwinkle, Max Goodman, The Button, Twitch Plays Pokémon, Boaty McBoatface, Microsoft, Tay, Place (r/place), Mega Man, Mona Lisa, Million Dollar Homepage, Google Sheets

## Video description My thoughts on April Fools' day in Silicon Valley and some of the lessons I learned creating The Button and Place at Reddit.

This talk was given at GitHub as part of SF Tech Poetics. Learn more about the group here: https://www.facebook.com/SF-Tech-Poetics-1234662803267437/

[Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo)

中文简报

Reddit前产品经理沃德尔：利用协作架构遏制网络恶习平台设计者可以通过限制个人行为并要求群体合作来消除网络恶习，从而让集体创作的难度远低于恶意破坏。乔什·沃德尔（Josh Wardle）认为，企业的愚人节恶作剧已经退化为毫无生气的自私营销噱头，浪费了现代科技平台巨大的互动潜力。依托其纯艺术背景以及在Reddit担任产品经理的经历，他详细讲述了Reddit愚人节实验的演进历程——从2013年“红橙大战长春花”（Orangered vs. Periwinkle）引发的混乱基础设施崩溃，到2015年“按钮”（The Button）所引发的大规模社交倒计时。这一演变在2017年的“画板”（Place）中达到顶峰，这是一个宏大的协作画布，通过严格的机制限制（如个人5分钟冷却时间）进行设计，从而自然化解恶意行为者的破坏力，并鼓励集体创作而非个人肆意破坏。最终，沃德尔呼吁科技从业人员将这一年度节日转变为创意沙盒，用于试行新颖的架构方案，以应对极化和网络不良风气等严重的平台挑战。乔什·沃德尔认为，企业的愚人节恶作剧已退化为毫无生气的自私营销噱头，并敦促科技公司借此机会测试解决复杂网络社交问题的创意方案。 (1:49) Reddit在2015年推出的社交实验“按钮”将一个60秒的倒计时维持了两个多月，期间超过100万名独立用户做出了深思熟虑且协调一致的重置时钟选择。 (9:37) 协作画布r/place在72小时内吸引了超过100万名参与者，表明个人冷却计时器等架构限制可以通过优先考虑集体行动而非单独破坏，自然地保护网络空间免受不良行为侵害。 (20:38) 对Reddit互动事件的事后复盘得出了核心产品设计经验：绝不破坏平台的核心实用功能、坚持机制的简明性，并认识到用户的创新能力总是会超越最初的设计者。 (6:48)

Source quotes

[11:49] Josh Wardle: our interactions are defined by the platforms we build. [9:37] Josh Wardle: uniting people through difference is easy.

Original transcript

[0:00] [Applause] [0:01] cool thank you and yeah thank you for [0:04] having me so yeah my name is Josh I'm [0:07] gonna talk to you about why I think [0:09] April's there kind of sucks and how we [0:12] tried to change that at reddit so before [0:15] we forget begin there like some things I [0:16] need to cover to make sure we're all on [0:18] the same page April Fool's Day happens [0:20] every year on April 1st there is like [0:23] indeterminant origin but the idea is [0:25] people play jokes and pranks on one [0:27] another [0:27] it sucks I'll get to that number two [0:30] reddit is where I did all these projects [0:32] I'm going to be talking about if you're [0:34] not familiar with reddit this huge [0:36] website millions of people come and get [0:38] together in communities that are [0:40] organized by topic [0:41] we call them subreddits and basically [0:43] people come to read it to discuss their [0:46] passions really in these communities and [0:48] look at cat pictures that's pretty [0:50] popular and then the last thing is even [0:53] though it's just me standing up here the [0:55] work that I'm going to show you actually [0:56] represents a bunch of people's work like [0:58] I've got to work with some very creative [0:59] and talented people on these things so I [1:01] just want to acknowledge that even [1:02] though it's me standing here talking [1:04] about them I don't get all the credit [1:05] for this stuff okay so I'm Josh my [1:09] background is in art I trained as an [1:12] artist [1:12] and I ended up as a product manager at [1:15] reddit and one big question for me was [1:18] was my art background gonna be relevant [1:21] in Silicon Valley and it turns out it's [1:26] amazingly relevant I kind of wish more [1:27] people who had backgrounds went into [1:29] tech I think a lot of the issues that [1:31] tech has people who have experience in [1:36] art and worked in art a kind of well [1:38] equipped to deal with some of these [1:39] issues and it also turned out that on [1:43] April Fool's Day was a day when my art [1:47] credentials really really came into play [1:49] which is kind of disappointing because [1:51] April's they sucks right um so it is [1:55] what is less fun than a day when you're [1:58] told that you're meant to be having fun [1:59] it's just like unspun taneous like man [2:03] they did it's super it's kind of super [2:05] lame I feel and the way it's kind of [2:07] gone in Silicon Valley it's kind of [2:09] taken hold like every year these [2:10] companies make these really kind of [2:12] creative and well produced [2:13] projects but they tend to be a [2:15] non-interactive firstly they'll often be [2:17] like a video or a press release and they [2:20] always feel kind of smug to me they're [2:22] like companies demonstrating to people [2:24] how clever they are or how funny and [2:25] smart they're very self-serving and and [2:28] so April's in Silicon Valley has kind of [2:29] taken on this kind of marketing fellow [2:31] kids vibe you know like it's a very safe [2:34] way to be you know kind of cool so here [2:37] are some examples of the ones recently [2:39] so this was Google knows this would [2:41] they've recently come out with Google [2:43] now which was their voice detection and [2:45] so this was like smell detection and [2:47] they made a really really well produced [2:49] video but it didn't it was just the [2:52] video right they never made this product [2:54] it's a it's a joke they're kind of [2:55] parroting themselves um this is a more [2:58] recent one from lift this is the lift [3:00] mono so the idea was you put this mitt [3:02] on your hand and then you extend your [3:04] thumb and it was hell you a lift and so [3:08] I don't actually know if this is a [3:10] parody or not or if this is a concept [3:12] for something they might want to do but [3:15] I just felt like these these things both [3:19] Google and lyft are creating these [3:22] really really unique spaces for people [3:24] in to interact and April Fool's Day is a [3:27] opportunity to potentially explore that [3:31] space and instead these companies are [3:33] kind of doing what I see is these fairly [3:34] tame tame things [3:36] so ready we were asking this question [3:40] well what could a proposed they be right [3:41] like so Damali these tech companies have [3:43] created these amazingly large platforms [3:46] in which millions of people it can [3:48] interact at a speed in a scale that they [3:50] could never do before [3:51] and part of what's kind of emerging from [3:55] that right is that that these platforms [3:57] allow the goods in people to emerge but [4:00] they also allow the bad in people to [4:02] emerge and we're seeing this more and [4:03] more right and there were there are some [4:05] real issues that have come up so you [4:08] know I just it took me like ten seconds [4:10] to list these down just so we had crawls [4:12] harassment issues with political [4:14] discourse filter bubbles attention [4:16] economy fake news right they were um [4:19] yeah there are a bunch of things that [4:21] need addressing and and I can kind of [4:23] came up with this idea well what if [4:25] April Fool's there could be an [4:26] opportunity [4:27] to explore creative solutions to real [4:30] problems if you have this really tough [4:33] problem why don't you use this one-day [4:35] year where you're allowed to kind of [4:36] take a risk to really try and do [4:38] something a little different so this may [4:41] seem a bit of a stretch right like it [4:44] fools day this dumb kind of joke day and [4:46] this thing down here feels kind of [4:48] worthy ends i didn't arrive at this [4:51] thought immediately it actually took [4:53] doing a bunch of April Fool's Day [4:54] projects or experiments to come to this [4:58] thought so I'm going to actually walk [5:00] you through some of the projects that I [5:01] worked at a retic that led me to this [5:03] idea of April Fool's they've been more [5:05] useful than I think it currently is so [5:08] in 2013 this was the first April Fool's [5:13] project I worked on a reddit it's called [5:15] orange red versus periwinkle so it was [5:18] kind of like the conceit was is we were [5:20] mashing up right at the website with [5:22] there's a video game called team [5:24] fortress 2's made by valve it's very [5:26] very popular at the time and and the [5:29] basic concept was we took everyone on [5:31] reddit reddit is represented by this [5:33] little alien character we took everyone [5:35] and reddit and we split them up into one [5:37] of two teams who either put them on [5:39] orange red or periwinkle and then we [5:42] created all these elaborate items and [5:44] weapons and thing and as you browse [5:45] reddit like randomly items would draw up [5:48] and you would get hats and stuff like [5:49] that and then you can use the items on [5:50] other people and so reddit not famous [5:55] for being the best-looking website in [5:57] the world this is how it looked on that [5:58] day so as you were using items so here's [6:02] someone like there was a there was a [6:03] item that transformed someone else's [6:05] text to just say Tom Cruise and stuff [6:07] like that it was like pretty chaotic [6:09] in actual fact no one knew what was [6:11] going on we broke the site people came [6:13] to the site like I just want to see cat [6:16] pictures what is this and actually the [6:19] site went down multiple times because of [6:21] the strain we were putting on it this is [6:23] someone who got a bunch of hats that's [6:25] how that looked that was pretty wild and [6:27] so overall people in the community who [6:30] participated had a really good time like [6:32] they enjoyed just like this kind of fake [6:34] fight that they have between one another [6:36] and and so at the end of [6:40] we were kind of like we only ran out for [6:43] about six hours and at the end of it [6:44] we're like wow let's never do that again [6:46] but what what are the key lessons that [6:48] we learned and the way I looked at this [6:49] and it's taken a long time for me to [6:52] arrive at these lessons the first one is [6:55] don't affect your core product this one [6:56] seems like a no-brainer but there are [6:58] people that use reddit as a tool and [7:00] they want to come and they want to have [7:02] their experience we shouldn't subject [7:03] them to our like zany idea the other one [7:07] is keep things simple so this was an [7:09] observation by max Goodman who's here [7:10] back there who worked on this project [7:12] with me and he said at the end of it we [7:14] didn't need to create all those items [7:15] and hats and all this elaborate [7:17] interaction we could have just put [7:19] people on two teams orange from red or [7:21] orange from blue and let them figure it [7:23] out and they would have created all this [7:25] like mythos and you know really [7:27] imaginative ways that they couldn't [7:28] interact and that kind of feeds into [7:32] this last one that we've kind of [7:33] realized that users were way more [7:35] creative than us so this actually goes [7:37] against right how April Fool's Day [7:40] projects were thought of up until now I [7:42] think or how we have been thinking of [7:45] them like the idea that you would create [7:46] something you know you you the company [7:49] would sit down be very clever come up [7:50] with something and present it to the [7:51] users and the users would be like oh [7:53] that's very clever [7:53] what we actually realized was hey the [7:55] users are the ones there millions of [7:57] them like just by simple numbers they're [7:58] going to be able to be way more creative [8:00] than us and we should embrace that with [8:02] these projects so that led into in 2015 [8:06] we launched this project called the [8:08] button so the button was pretty simple [8:11] in concepts factoring into that keep it [8:14] simple idea so there is a timer and a [8:16] button the time will count down from 60 [8:20] seconds if the button is pressed the [8:22] timer will reset to 60 seconds and [8:24] continue counting down and this was the [8:27] crucial fact you may only press the [8:29] button once so this is what it looked [8:32] like you would go to a subreddit that we [8:34] had dedicated to this there was a button [8:35] and a timer once you pressed it the time [8:38] it did reset and then you couldn't press [8:40] the button again another thing that we [8:43] did was based on when you pressed the [8:46] button we gave you a little color blob [8:49] next your name we call this Flair and so [8:52] for instance if you pray [8:53] the button when there were 50 seconds [8:55] left you would get purple flare whereas [8:57] if you press the button where there was [8:58] only 1 second left on the timer you got [9:00] red flare and so what kind of a merge [9:03] with the button was like some immediate [9:05] tension around the fact it was you could [9:07] only press the button once right so when [9:08] you were going to press it kind of [9:10] became important there was also this [9:12] moment of hey if you press the button [9:14] and you're the first person to get blue [9:16] flare in the community you're going to [9:18] be a celebrity but you're only going to [9:20] be a celebrity for up as long until [9:21] someone gets green flare and then you're [9:23] just like another random person who was [9:25] compulsive and had to press the button [9:26] and then what we also serve emerging was [9:30] kind of like orange red and periwinkle [9:31] there's like this tribalism right like [9:33] people if they press then they got green [9:37] green was great everybody else everybody [9:39] else sucked and the community absolutely [9:42] loved this they went crazy with it they [9:44] created a bunch of stuff so this was a [9:45] pretty cool video this was about the [9:47] experience of pressing the button so [9:49] someone he's gray decides the press he [9:52] gets purple which was commonly thought [9:53] of to be the worst color and he's just [9:56] distraught so yeah people did a ton of [9:59] illustrations like building up these [10:01] identities around the different cohorts [10:04] people made a movie poster this was an [10:07] illustration of the first person ever to [10:09] get red flare which they got [10:10] accidentally through a glitch it was [10:12] kind of a big deal people created all [10:14] these tools and plugins so this was a [10:16] Chrome extension that you could use to [10:19] monitor when the button was counting [10:21] down and it would you be like oh I want [10:22] to get orange flare the Chrome extension [10:24] would notify you and say hey you should [10:25] go and press the button so the button [10:29] was like a huge success over a million [10:31] people chose to press the button what [10:33] that led to was the timer kept running [10:35] for over two months right so over two [10:37] months every 60 seconds some human [10:41] decided to press the button which like [10:43] blew my mind [10:44] completely and the lessons that we got [10:46] from that users are more creative than [10:50] us this ties into the orange red versus [10:52] periwinkle thing again we decided to [10:55] keep it simple by giving users a [10:56] framework and let them be the creative [10:58] ones and all this mythos and all these [10:59] ideas that they created around it they [11:01] really flourished and the other one that [11:03] really stuck with me and has been the [11:06] that led to the the future we did was [11:08] this idea that uniting people through [11:10] differences easy so in the same way with [11:13] orange red versus periwinkle and the [11:16] button essentially what we did is we [11:18] just put people on separate teams and it [11:20] turns out people are really really good [11:22] at creating stuff even if they're like [11:23] messing around when they say I'm part of [11:25] this group I'm not part of that group [11:26] and I felt that would redditor kind of [11:30] demonstrated that it could do that that [11:32] we could make these fun creative [11:34] projects if we did that and I instead [11:36] wanted to ask the question well could we [11:37] build an experience to actually [11:39] encourage people to collaborate with one [11:41] another rather than like pretend pretend [11:43] fight so this leads back to this initial [11:49] premise right like what is a real [11:52] problem that we're having on reddit the [11:54] way I see it as well as for a lot of [11:56] online platforms I see one of the issues [11:59] that we face is around collaboration [12:01] right like we're a small group of toxic [12:04] people can disrupt the experience for [12:06] the many basically and so I wanted to [12:09] know could we use April Fool's Day to [12:11] try and build an experience that [12:12] resisted that kind of abuse from a few [12:15] individuals and this wasn't the first [12:18] project by any means that's explored [12:19] this idea of like mass collaboration [12:21] online and there have been a ton so this [12:24] was twitchplayspokemon which launched in [12:26] 2014 it was a group of it's over 100,000 [12:32] people playing the game boy game pokemon [12:34] red on Twitch by issuing chat commands [12:38] you would say up and then the character [12:40] would go up but the problem was [12:41] thousands of other people were issuing [12:43] commands at the same time so just like [12:45] total chaos led to the character [12:47] spinning in the circle and in the middle [12:49] but after two weeks they managed to [12:51] complete the game which was kind of a [12:52] great a great triumph other examples of [12:55] getting groups to collaborate have been [12:58] slightly different so this was one from [13:00] last year that you probably heard of [13:02] Bodhi mcboatface so this was an online [13:03] poll to name an Arctic research vessel [13:06] and this probably wasn't the name that [13:11] the poll creators had in mind when they [13:13] set up the poll right but it's kind of [13:15] like this is kind of like the anarchic [13:17] kind of chaotic but kind of benign [13:20] this is what you can get when you ask [13:22] the the the Internet to collaborate [13:24] which is kind of fun but harmless [13:27] in other cases things can be actually [13:30] quite dangerous so this was Tay Tay was [13:33] a Twitter bot from Microsoft and the way [13:35] teh worked is you would tweet at a and [13:39] then she would take what you said and [13:41] use it in her future replies so the idea [13:44] that she would become more human as time [13:46] went on and as you can imagine this led [13:47] to some like pretty horrendous stuff [13:49] almost almost immediately and so this is [13:52] like one of the mildest tweets I can [13:54] find from Tay and this was kind of [13:57] tragic I thought I ended up having to be [13:59] having to be shut down because they just [14:01] couldn't control what people were trying [14:02] to to do with it and so her question [14:06] really came up for me well why does some [14:08] of these projects that ask people to [14:09] collaborate online succeed and why does [14:11] some of them fail and after talking with [14:13] a bunch of people about this I kind of [14:16] came up with this idea that our [14:18] interactions are defined by the [14:20] platform's we build this is kind of like [14:22] a roundabout way of saying that when we [14:24] create a space for people to interact [14:26] online the decisions that we make when [14:29] we create that space will determine that [14:31] the interactions that they can have and [14:34] so going into the next a Fool's Day [14:38] project the question I was really trying [14:40] to ask was well can we build a platform [14:43] that encourages collaboration and [14:44] resists abuse specifically in the case [14:46] of can we prevent single bad actors [14:49] disrupting the experience for the many [14:51] and that was how we came up the idea for [14:53] the project that we did last year and I [14:55] proposed a called place and place was [14:58] pretty straightforward there's a blank [15:00] canvas it was a million pixels wide by a [15:03] million pixels high and you could place [15:07] a pixel anywhere on the canvas but once [15:09] you did that the time has started [15:11] counting down from 5 minutes and you [15:13] weren't able to place another pixel [15:14] until that time had elapsed so what [15:18] became apparent there is that - you can [15:22] draw anything on this canvas by yourself [15:24] right it was going to take a really [15:25] really long time to do anything but if [15:27] you've got a bunch of other people you [15:28] could really quickly achieve your goals [15:30] so [15:32] place essentially de-emphasize the [15:35] individual in favor of the group I think [15:38] most of our interaction online we're [15:40] used to the individual being the most [15:43] important part right like we interact we [15:45] get an immediate response but in place [15:46] we kind of slowed that down and instead [15:49] suggested hey if you want to achieve [15:51] something you need to find a group of [15:53] people to collaborate with and we summed [15:56] this up with this idea individually you [15:57] can create something together you can [15:59] create something more okay [16:10] so reddit just gave millions of people [16:13] the opportunity to anonymously draw [16:15] whatever they wanted on a blank canvas [16:18] what could go wrong so this is about two [16:22] hours in this rather phallic image [16:25] started to emerge on the canvas and this [16:27] was like super disappointing right like [16:28] this I felt this is going the direction [16:30] of Tay this is the abuse case emerging [16:33] and we thought we were going to have to [16:34] shut it down but then we went back to [16:38] this idea that if we truly believe that [16:40] the interactions that people have in [16:43] this experience are determined by us by [16:45] what we created well we're in control of [16:47] that scenario and one thing we realized [16:49] that we were doing is we were starting [16:50] everyone off in the same spot right in [16:52] the center of the canvas which was where [16:54] this image emerged and so we made a [16:58] really simple change we just randomized [17:00] the starting position of everyone on the [17:02] canvas and instantly that image [17:05] disappeared our thinking was that people [17:06] arrived they didn't fully grasp what [17:08] they could do with the canvas so they [17:09] just contributed to the first thing that [17:11] they saw whereas when we randomized [17:13] their starting position and they started [17:14] in parts of the canvas that didn't have [17:16] anything they really thought about what [17:17] they wanted to do with the space and so [17:19] instantly we saw some really amazing [17:21] forms of collaboration start to emerge [17:23] so this was one of the first things that [17:26] I really liked the demerger it's called [17:28] the blue corner it appeared in the [17:30] bottom right hand corner of the canvas [17:31] it was pretty simple how you [17:33] participated in the blue corner you just [17:35] painted blue where there wasn't blue in [17:38] the bottom right hand corner um this was [17:40] really amazing it was like they came up [17:42] with a form of collaboration that [17:45] described itself it was very easy here [17:47] to know how to participate then over [17:51] time some more more complicated forms of [17:54] collaboration emerge so this is the [17:56] video game character Megaman being drawn [17:58] I think the fact that it's based on a [17:59] sprite like an eight or 16-bit sprite [18:01] makes it easy for people to there was a [18:03] map for people to go off and then over [18:06] time people started drawing like way [18:09] more creative things on the canvas than [18:11] we thought possible so what you're [18:13] seeing right now is thousands of people [18:14] working together to draw the Mona Lisa [18:17] on a canvas each person placing a single [18:20] pixel pixel every five minutes or so and [18:23] this like totally blew totally blew our [18:25] minds like this was place achieving [18:28] going beyond what we thought it could [18:29] achieve so what I'm going to show you [18:32] now is a time-lapse of the entire canvas [18:34] I've been showing you chunk zoomed in [18:36] place lasted for three days I'm gonna [18:38] speed that up into about ten seconds [18:40] just so you can see get a sense for what [18:41] went on so you can see the blue corner [18:45] down there on the right country flags [18:46] really popular for easy for people to [18:48] organize around country they're like [18:49] memes video games it kind of feels like [18:54] the internet or reddit kind of threw up [18:57] on itself but in a delightful way I [18:59] think it reminds me a lot of there was a [19:01] project in the early 2000s called the [19:04] million dollar homepage which some of [19:05] you may be familiar with and I feel this [19:08] has a very familiar or very similar [19:11] aesthetic which I really really like um [19:13] and because there's so much that [19:15] happened on the canvas it's hard for me [19:17] to talk about all these things in great [19:18] detail so I'm just gonna talk you [19:20] through one story that was a very [19:22] personal for me so one morning I'm [19:26] browsing the canvas and I see this image [19:29] in the top right so a bunch of groups [19:30] have figured out if you put your [19:32] subreddit name so are slash good boy is [19:34] the name of a community on reddit if you [19:36] put your name on your artwork people who [19:38] wanted to participate could figure out [19:40] where to go to find out how to join in [19:43] so I wanted to join in I love good boy [19:45] it's great meme I go there and I see wow [19:48] they're using a Google spreadsheet to [19:51] figure out where each person should pray [19:53] place the next tile which is amazing [19:55] that's great and then down below they're [19:57] having [19:58] discussion and this part really stood [20:00] out to me someone says why is one of his [20:02] clogs bigger than the other clogs and [20:03] the other person says the Dutch drew it [20:06] like that I don't know and I'm thinking [20:08] like what are they talking about clocks [20:10] and I go back and I look and sure enough [20:11] the dog on the left is wearing clogs and [20:14] then I'm like what's going on and then i [20:16] zoom out and I realize it's because the [20:18] good boy group is sharing a border with [20:21] the Dutch group and these two unrelated [20:23] groups right like the Holland contingent [20:26] and the good boy contingent have somehow [20:28] arrived at this like diplomatic solution [20:30] to sharing a border which is putting [20:32] clogs on a small dog which just totally [20:36] blew my mind I loved it [20:38] so over 72 hours more than a million [20:41] pics million people placed pixels on [20:45] place but actually I think the most [20:49] amazing thing was what didn't appear on [20:51] the canvas it was really hard for people [20:54] to abuse place because of the emphasis [20:57] we placed on the group rather than their [20:59] single individual it was way easier for [21:03] people to group together to do a good [21:04] thing rather than it was for people to [21:06] group together to do a negative thing um [21:09] um one thing I want to be realistic [21:12] about is place going really well doesn't [21:15] actually change the way Reddit works [21:16] right we're not gonna suddenly read it [21:18] just becomes a website about a canvas um [21:21] but that was never the goal I think what [21:23] place has done is provided some insight [21:26] for the future when we're making [21:28] decisions about how people interact with [21:30] one another the the success of place [21:34] will make us think about how we can [21:36] construct those interactions preferably [21:39] that emphasizes our group more than here [21:42] more than the individual so if any of [21:46] you happen to work for tech companies [21:49] and as April Fool's Day approaches this [21:52] year I would encourage you to think [21:54] about what is something what does a real [21:56] problem your company's facing in is [21:58] there a creative solution that you could [22:00] use April Fool's Day as an opportunity [22:02] to explore oh thank you [22:05] [Applause] [22:12] cool yeah