On April 1, Reddit released r/Place, a collaborative art project consisting of a large empty canvas where each Reddit user could place a single colored pixel every five minutes. After several false starts, a group of 160 EAs collaborated to make the following image:

In this post-mortem, we’d like to go over our method, what we should have done differently, and show off some interesting looking timelapses of both our failed and ultimately successful efforts.

False Starts

Several of us did not initially appreciate just how difficult it would be to create and maintain an image on r/Place. Harrison Durland and Caleb Biddulph started off with high ambitions, suggesting that we might be able to take up a moderately large space, but these initial efforts were aborted early on. The first real attempt was by Jelle Donders and Gruffydd Gozali, who were able to organize a number of redditors in the r/EffectiveAltruism subreddit and create a temporary discord server to help direct users on where to place pixels.

Before long, it became clear that the only way to keep an image up was to do outreach to neighboring groups. Via this method, we attempted negotiations for space several times, sometimes successfully with multiple neighbors — but without agreements with all neighbors, we found ourselves failing twice more. You can see a timelapse of these false starts (and our eventual place) below.

A Secured Spot

When we finally found our final place on r/Place, it was in the newly blank area at the bottom of the canvas. It was through a renewed sense of camaraderie and shared fun that we were able to paint this new area, and it was through successful early negotiations that we were able to keep the area until the end of r/Place.

Our strongest alliance was with the neighboring My Little Pony community, which has supported effective altruism charities several times in the past, particularly through Bronies for Good. Thanks to Lorelei in our discord server, we were able to convince them to generously include us as a part of their template, which meant a large number of their users (and a fair number of their bots) would defend not just their artwork, but also the Effective Altruism logo on r/Place.

Was This Effective?

No. But it nevertheless felt worthwhile.

While the return on investment in terms of communications value versus how much effort we put into this collaborative art project is ...

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