The r/Place subreddit has taken over the internet for the last few days, especially on Twitch. Streamers from every corner of the website have joined in to collaborate with their viewers and create pixel art. But for one of Twitch’s most popular streamers, it turned into more of a tug-of-war with the subreddit’s admins than anything else.
R/Place was originally an experiment hosted by Reddit on April Fools’ Day in 2017. Five years later, the event has returned, garnering a massive surge in popularity in part from streamers on Twitch broadcasting the experiment as it unfolds. And in a stream yesterday, xQc dove back into r/Place content in the hopes of creating some artwork with his loyal viewers but ran into some trouble with the subreddit’s admins.
“They censored it, wait they censored it,” fellow streamer Mizkif pointed out while in a call with xQc. The artwork, which was originally supposed to be an image of 2B’s butt from Nier: Automata, had a massive black rectangle placed on top of it by one or more of the admins of r/Place.
At first, the streamer thought the admins of the subreddit could actually be “helping.” But xQc’s optimistic look on the situation was quickly quelled when the admins covered the pixel art a second time less than five minutes later. “So is this how we manipulate the fun game? We put something that is barely anything lewd onto a big canvas and we just black it out,” the 26-year-old said.
Viewers who attempted to recreate the art were banned for 15 years from the subreddit, meaning they won’t be able to participate in the experiment for the next three cycles of its return.
Despite this small hiccup during his stream, or maybe in part due to it, xQc shattered his previous viewership record with 233,000 concurrent watchers during his most recent r/Place Twitch stream.
