1. How did you first hear about r/place, and what motivated you to participate in the project?

I venture on reddit from time to time, whether for entertainment or when I'm looking for the answer to something specific. One day I saw an anouncement on reddit about r/place and was immediately intrigued. For me reddit was just posts and threads, and r/place was something totally different. I loved the idea of communities fighting for pixels on a virtual canvas, and immediately started placing my own pixels. Little did I know how invested I would have become in this project.

1. Can you describe your overall experience with r/place, and how much time you spent contributing to the project?

During the couple days that r/place was up, I was spending almost all day and night checking up on it. I was completely addicted. I think the factor that I like the most was the sense of community that it brought. By myself, placing one pixel at a time every couple of minutes didn't have much of an impact since they would often be immediately replaced. But I joined discord servers of communities that I liked and helped them make art and that really gave the whole thing alot more purpose. I would also watch streamers fight against other streamers to defend their artwork and logos. It was all super engaging and alot of funny r/place "events" happened. There are many youtube videos out there that will showcase that.

1. What did you think of the project design and user experience, and what about it do you find intuitive and helpful in understanding your goal as a participator?

I think the most intriguing part of r/place was the mystery aspect of it. We had no idea when, if, or how it would end. We could only base our theories based on the how the 2017 r/place happened, but it clearly went down a little differently. When they grew the canvas it caught everyone by surprise and everyone rushed to try to claim a portion of the new canvas. It made it seem like anything could happen.

The instructions were simple and intuitive, place a pixel, wait a couple minutes, and then you can place another. There was no "skill" necessary. I also loved how people were totally free to create whatever they wanted. It kind of acted like a time capsule of internet culture. I really like how it started as a simple white square and that it got filled up with art of so many different things.

I also found it really cool the way they ended it. Completely unannounced all colors were unavailable other than white, and the canvas slowly started turning back to white. Eventually it was a white canvas again making it finish where it started. Everything that was created was only temporary and that kind of has some beauty to it.

1. What were your goals or motivations for participating in r/place, and how did they evolve over time?

At first I was just intrigued and just having fun with it, for example placing green pixels on faces to make it seem like they had a runny nose or making tiny among us characters. But when I joined the france discord community I became way more invested. We had no idea how long this thing would be up for and we wanted to leave our mark. The journey is incredible and fun, but in the end everyone wants to have their community represented in the final screenshot.

1. Can you describe your creative process or approach when contributing to r/place, and how you collaborated with other participants?

I spent most of my time coordinating with members of the r/place France discord server to try and place pixels in a organized manner. Some of the members were extremely talented and would create amazing pixel art of french figures and culture. There was even a chrome extension that we found that would allow us to overlay the correct color of pixels of whatever art we wanted onto the reddit website. We used it to collectively change whichever pixels were wrong and to defend our art. There are accusations of some communities using bots to automatically place down pixels but I didnt participate in that. In the discord servers we would all make suggestions and vote on what art we liked best, and then execute.

1. Did you meet or engage with anyone new as a result of r/place?

I met alot of cool people through voice and text channels. We would joke around and organize our art pieces one minute, and be alerted of an attack the next, and have to coordinate to defend. The craziest part is when we got involved with hugely popular french streamers who would act as generals of an army and tell us what to do with our clicks. We would "invade" and "defend" areas with pixels against other communities. There was a big war between the french streamers and american streamers. The france flag got attacked many times and we would be split into blue, white and red groups to defend the flag's colors.

1. Would you be interested in participating in a similar project in the future, and what suggestions do you have for improving the r/place project design or user experience?

I would absolutely be interested in participating in a similar project. I loved every aspect of it and I think most people can say the same. Everyone had a fair shot at the project which made it really accessible to all users. I wish that they could make this a yearly thing, something to look forward to, to prepare for. However, anything more frequent than yearly would make it less valuable. Other than that I think that it was perfect project, everything worked well and it was really fun. I hope that they keep the mystery aspect to it and change it up again next time. Maybe one direction for improvement could be to make it more mobile-friendly, but besides that I think it was a great success.