Reddit has closed the official forum for its collaborative experiment Place after users filled it with explicit messages directed at the company’s management.
Reddit Place launched for the third time last month, allowing all users to fill in the pixels of a 1-million-pixel canvas.
The six day project came amid protests against Reddit introducing charges that forced third-party apps to close, with chief executive Steve ‘Spez’ Huffman becoming a target of explicit graffiti on the r/Place canvas.
One week after the experiment ended, Reddit announced that no posts or comments would be allowed on the r/Place sub-reddit, which had become a focal point for the ongoing protests against Mr Huffman and the rest of Reddit’s management.
“This community will no longer be open for posting or commenting,” a post pinned to the r/place sub-reddit stated.
“Thank you to everyone who participated in r/place 2023. Until we meet again.”
The post received 7,000 upvotes but the top comment, which stated “F**k u/SPEZ”, received more than 17,000.
The final version of the r/Place canvas included dozens of similar messages directed at Mr Huffman, with some Reddit users accusing admins of censoring parts of the canvas.
The Place experiment was pushed back several times in an effort to avoid coinciding with the worst of the protests, which had seen thousands of high-profile Reddit communities go dark in an effort to force the company into rescinding the proposed API charges to third-party apps like Apollo.
These demands were ignored, and most Reddit communities have since returned to normal operations. The company acknowledged the poor timing of the collaborative art experiment by including the tagline: “Right place, wrong time.”
Reddit did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent about the protests.
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