It wasn’t really a prank, but it was probably the most fascinating April 1st thingy ever.
A blank canvas and for 72 hours, users could choose from sixteen colors and place a single pixel anywhere every five minutes. Beautiful chaos ensued.
The following article tells it best, but has a lot of hi-res animated .Gifs, so beware. Here it is. (BANDWIDTH WARNING)
Here’s a Newsweek article.
Here’s the actual, uh, place.
Damn, don’t know if it’s just my phone right now, but it’s possible all three of my links should have had a bandwidth warning. Might be better to wait to check this out on a PC with nice big screen, video card and good internet.
It isn’t that similar but it reminds me of the “game” www.cursors.io
It is just spontaneous cooperation that is fun. There are no directions and you have to figure out how to play it yourself with whoever is on at any given time.
Huh. There’s actually levels there. The one I remembered just had you show up and do stuff. You could rotate your cursor or change it. You could chase other cursors around, or dance, or whatever.
“They proposed drawing Dickbutt.”
Out in the unclaimed territory of the middle of the canvas, with no Protector to mediate between them, Germany and France engaged in an epic battle that sent shockwaves through Place.
I think it’s interesting that Germany overran France again. There’s just no end to the amusement provided by the internet. 
The Skyrim logo on the right side, by r/greenlattice? I got to help with that!
My favourite story from the whole thing is the way Temmie from the Undertale game was adopted by those from /r/ireland creating the Irish national flag. She’s still on their banner now.
The flag of the Philippines that I had contributed a few pixels towards building was partially obscured by the giant pink osu! logo. We then worked out that we’d redraw our flag in a vertical orientation next to the osu! logo rather than trying to fight to maintain it. Which was just as well as the black Void got it into its collective head to try to obliterate the pink circle. If you look at the time lapse it looks like a nuke had gone off there. Then osu! redrew their logo before the Void nuked it again. And so on. Glad we got out of the way of that.
After we successfully redrew our flag we helped out some folks that we had also trampled over, most notably FNaF and the smiley face guy.
Glad to see Aladdin Sane survived.
I found out about it on Monday after it had already finished. I’m fascinated by both the time lapse and the finished artwork. I could look the finished product for hours: Moomins! Undertale! Calvin and Hobbes! etc…
Here is a 4:30 time lapse video on Youtube
Here is a high res image of the final artwork. You can also find “clean” versions where errant pixels are removed and no void.
Seriously thinking of buying a poster of it and putting it up on the wall.
I’m jealous of all those who participated! I may have to join Reddit just so I can be eligible for this kind of thing in the future.
There’s a bunch of other related videos, with different people’s timelapses that focus on other areas, if you go to Wednesday’s video link.
It’s all really fascinating!
