To reconnect with its angry users, the Reddit forum is relaunching the Pixel War this Thursday

Materialize the Louvre or the football player Zidane with small dots (pixels) on a digital canvas, where Internet users from all over the world seek to leave a trace, even virtual. This is the whole concept of Reddit Place or r/Place, a channel of the eponymous English forum, known for its discussion groups around various and varied subjects. Reddit Place first opened in 2017 and then in April 2022, for a period of a few days. The event, relaunched this Thursday, has become a reference on the web in competitions between users to create this drawing made of dots, also called Pixel art. The announcement, made in the evening by Reddit, is already the subject of more than 50,000 tweets.

During the few days that Reddit Place is made accessible, communities fight to materialize pixelated symbols of their country, at the rate of a colored dot that each Reddit user can drop every five minutes. The challenge lies in this ability to collaborate with several people to design forms from these points and, ultimately, create a work of a new kind.

In April 2022, the enthusiasm was such that the event was dubbed the “Pixel War” or pixel war. Internet users, mainly French, Spanish and American, had fought a merciless battle to impose themselves on this digital web. Well-known French streamers, such as Squeezie, Zerator or Kameto, had encouraged their subscribers to join “the fight”. The football player Zidane himself, had thanked Kameto and his community, to have materialized on the giant fresco.

And for Reddit, the operation turned out to be a success. In one day, the only French page of the forum had gained nearly 20,000 new members and, on average, a few hundred new people joined the forum per day. “An absolute record”, explained a moderator to Figaro at the time.

A feat that Reddit would like to repeat this year in the context of discontent from its users. At the origin of this, the increase in prices to access its API (its application programming interface), decided unilaterally by the platform last June. A massive blow for the forum's moderators and volunteer developers, who used the API to design third-party applications to make using Reddit more enjoyable, like a Tweetdeck for Twitter.

This decision led to a strike in many Reddit communities in mid-June, with a call for a boycott of the site. Thousands of forums (dubbed "subreddits") have been temporarily shut down by their moderators in protest, causing problems accessing the platform. For the time being, Reddit has refused to reverse its decision, leading to an extension of this strike but in other forms, with forums publishing ironic messages about this price increase.

On Twitter, several Internet users denounce a new edition of the “Pixel War” intended to “divert attention from the protest movement”. Pixel caricatures of CEO Steve Huffman (nicknamed Spez) are already circulating on social media. For its part, Reddit still justifies the increase in its prices by the current craze for generative artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that requires large databases, such as discussions of users on social networks such as Reddit. "Reddit's body of data has a lot of value," Steve Huffman said in an interview with The New York Times last April.

The forum is not isolated in this decision to monetize access to its data, faced with the development of tools such as the now famous Chat-GPT, designed by Open AI. Twitter also made its paid API in April. The end, perhaps, of a free Internet, where volunteer Internet users enrich the platforms. It remains to be seen whether the pixel war will turn into a new area of ​​protest this year, in the showdown started by users against Reddit.