Individually you can create something.
Together you can create something more.
I appreciate when the internet gets playful and creative for April Fools' Day.
Reddit has been doing projects for years that typically are a combination of testing the maximum server burden, demographics, and/or new potential functions for the site.
I've participated in each year since the OrangeRed vs. Periwinkle battle of 2013. Hats hats hats.
I stayed gray for The Button as a part of the waiting Red Guard.
In Robin last year, I helped grow with several huge chats and ended up in the final merged chat before it all crashed. Those of us who lasted to the 17th tier (about 3,000 people) have a private subreddit named after the chat's final merged names /r/ccKufiPrFaSh...
This year was /r/place. Reddit users could place one pixel at a time on a single, shared blank canvas. You would then wait a set period of time to place your next pixel. The time varied, starting at 20 minutes, but eventually dropping to 5.
The result after three days is what you see above. Well, not exactly. There was a huge follow-up effort to clean up stray pixels and restore certain areas that had been swallowed by the Void. But the actual final piece isn't much different from this. There are dozens of articles around the net about how this all went down, so I won't go into that sort of thing here.
The timelapses and heat maps are absolutely brilliant to watch. The most spectacular follow-up is The /r/place Atlas. A detailed, crowd-sourced, map to every little thing on the canvas, complete with thorough explanations.
It's this kind of thing that reminds me how much I love the internet for the incredible cooperation that is possible. /r/place is a manifestation of that in general. There were probably a lot of expectations of it being a vile trainwreck of bigotry and hate symbols. Turned out to be quite the opposite.
It was damned heartwarming.
I just have a few things to say about my individual contribution after the jump.
