‘FUCK SPEZ’: Reddit Users Unite to Turn r/Place Mural Into a Protest
July 21, 2023Reddit brought back one of its most famous, feel-good features this week perhaps in an attempt to remind users about why they love the embattled site in the wake of a very difficult summer that has seen mass protests, moderator revolts, a clamping down of Reddit’s third-party app ecosystem, and an attempt by Reddit the company to centralize power over Reddit the website.
r/place was a 2011 April Fools Day stunt in which users can place individual pixels (but just one at a time) to draw a big digital mural. It is essentially a big group art project designed to unite users that has been brought back a few times over the years and generally becomes a topic of much conversation while it’s running (usually for a long weekend). It’s back now, and users are indeed united: At various times during the first day, huge swaths of the mural read FUCK SPEZ, the Reddit username of CEO Steve Huffman. At the moment I’m writing this, users have worked together to draw a Ukrainian flag that says “FUCK PUTIN FUCK SPEZ FUCK SPEZ FUCK SPEZ.”
Elsewhere in the mural, German users have been working together to write “U/SPEZ IST EIN HURENSOHN” (u/spez is a son of a bitch”) embossed over a German flag. Over the last few hours, many of the "FUCK SPEZ" drawings have started to be taken over by other image, causing users to suggest that Reddit admins are interfering with their art (there is no evidence so far that would prove this).
For a brief moment, a group of users also drew this, though it has since been painted over:
As we’ve written about a handful of times over the last month, Reddit has been thrown into chaos because the company began charging for access to its API, which caused many beloved third-party apps to shut down. You can read more about that here.