Over the weekend I was distracted by Reddit’s April fools experiment. They created a subreddit called “place” where users could create pixel art as a group. See also the English Wikipedia page. It was first held in 2017 and then they waited 5 years to hold another “place” event. The sticking point was that a user could only place one pixel every 5 minutes, so if you wanted to create anything good you had to work together (or have a lot of bot accounts at your disposal I guess!)
As expected, most drawings were done by various groups. The Netherlands also had a Dutch reddit competing, /r/PlaceNL. You can see an image of the various Dutch contributions in the final image. My favorite artwork was probably the NS train with a flag from each province. Of course the paintings “The Night Watch“, “The Seven Provinces” (ship) and “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” were made by bots and/or helper programs. I didn’t use any bots or programs so I spent most of my time defending (aka putting pixels back to the right color), either defending /r/PlaceNL creations or allies of /r/PlaceNL. It was very diplomatic in that regard. It also meant I almost drained my phone battery a few times, since I could only place one pixel every 5 minutes!
/r/PlaceNL was quite proud that, in terms of the country’s population, The Netherlands placed the most pixels of any country (about 6.19 pixels per resident, reddit.com in Dutch).
Also, the coolest thing ever: the 2022 r/place atlas (thanks to Roger who found it!). Use the zoom in tools and then hover over each object to get more details about it. Most of the Dutch contributions are at the very top, with two of the paintings in the lower left.
Hopefully it comes back in April 2023!
Life in the Hague 