Angry Redditors Take Over r/Place Subreddit to Insult CEO

Reddit resurrected a popular project today only to watch it devolve into a new way to protest the company’s CEO, Steve Huffman. 

The social media platform revived r/Place(Opens in a new window), which lets users change the pixels across a giant digital canvas to draw whatever pictures they want. After hosting it two times before, Reddit launched r/Place again, perhaps in the hopes it would unify the community following weeks of protests over the company’s controversial API change. 

“Hey, what better time to offer a blank canvas to our communities than when our users and mods are at their most passionate… right?” the company said(Opens in a new window) in the announcement. 

But it looks like the effort backfired. Users were quick to draw images for protest messages, including telling Reddit’s CEO, who goes by the screen name Spez, to screw off. 

(Credit: Reddit)

As a result, r/Place risks drawing more attention to the strife ensnaring the social media platform, which began charging access to its API this month. The change caused the shutdown of several popular third-party clients, which continues to anger some users. Not helping the matter is that Huffman derided the protesting volunteer moderators as the “landed gentry” while threatening to boot them out.  

“Never forget what was stolen from us r/save3rdpartyapps,” wrote one protest message on r/Place. Others attempted to draw a guillotine executing(Opens in a new window) Reddit’s mascot, but they claim admins at the company have intervened to color over it. 

(Credit: Reddit)

Reddit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. However, the platform is trying to patch things up with volunteer moderators, a core group who launched the protests over Reddit’s API change. On Wednesday, the company said(Opens in a new window) it would host small-scale meetings with moderators to listen to their needs. But so far, the announcement has faced a harsh reception. 

“We made our ‘needs’ pretty damn clear over the past two months. Why weren’t you listening then?” one moderator wrote(Opens in a new window) in response.

“What good is our feedback when Reddit seems perfectly happy to ignore all of it? What’s the point?” wrote(Opens in a new window) another.