A few months into Jason Lee’s new job at Reddit[1], the office was buzzing with excitement. It was April 2017 and Reddit had just launched r/place[2], a collaborative project that invited more than 100,000 communities on Reddit to contribute to a great mosaic of the internet. Redditors would land on a random tile on the canvas, which they could then change to any color they wanted.
Lee, a product manager who hadn't used Reddit much before joining its staff, watched in awe. The mosaic morphed from a scattering of weird blobs (and, OK, a distinctly phallic shape) to a patchwork of everything Redditors loved[3]: a pixelated rendition of the Mona Lisa, the logo for Stranger Things, the Swedish flag, and hundreds of other symbols, smashed into one great digital quilt. “It all clicked for me,” says Lee, “what strangers can do when they band together.”
But Lee and other Reddit staffers also noticed something else. As communities fought to colonize the canvas, they started planning in their own subreddits, and then off Reddit altogether. It took coordination for communities to make their mark on the 1000 x 1000 canvas, but Reddit didn't have any way to support those fast-paced conversations. You could leave a comment on a thread, but in order to see the replies in real time, you'd have to constantly refresh the page—an impractical and inelegant way to get anything done. So moderators redirected their communities to Google Docs or Google Sheets, using the color picker to replicate the r/place map; others huddled on Slack or, oddly, even Facebook Messenger to plan their conquests.
The experiment proved something to Lee and other members of the product team: When strangers come together...