212 r/Place and the Legacy of the "Million Dollar Homepage"

r/Place is a blank canvas on Reddit. Every five minutes, you can add one pixel of any color. The result is thousands of Redditors working together (or against each other!) to carve out a visual space for their community, country, sports team, favorite video game, or a co-operative pixelated Mona Lisa.

This fascinating social experiment has been conducted twice on Reddit, but also has roots in a similar gambit from 2005 called "The Million Dollar Homepage," where pixels were sold to any person (or brand) with enough cash to make a statement on this early Web billboard.

Alli and Lindsey speak with Jay Hoffman, who documents this and many other Internet phenomena in his "History of the Web" newsletter. They discuss the extraordinary artwork created on this collaborative free-for-all, and why it never devolved into madness, thanks to a variety of self-policing communities.

Read Jay's issue and subscribe to his fantastic newsletter here: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-power-of-the-pixel/

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