Reddit April Fool’s — The Social Sandbox

The internet has been the engine behind many of the craziest social experiments in modern day. When you give thousands of people the power to interact with one another and also give them a loose scaffold through which to base their interactions you often get unexpected results.

In 2014 the new Twitch channel ‘Twitch Plays Pokemon’ allowed thousands of people to simultaneously control one video-game character. The chaos that ensued caused pseudo religions to spawn along with an internal culture that all of the participants shared. The resulting effects behind Twitch Plays Pokemon were incidental, however this isn’t always the case. Reddit has developed a reputation for planning different social experiments using its community every year. This is a look back on past Reddit April Fools(excluding headdit & mold)their short-term impacts.

Everyone’s An Admin! — 2010

Reddit’s first massive April fool’s social experiment was to make everyone on site an admin. For 24 hours users could ban one another, modify upvotes and delete comments and votes. This was all, of course, fake. Any modifications to reddit only occurred through the user’s perspective. While many caught on, others began threatening fellow users with their admin privileges and went on mini power trips demonstrating that not everyone can be trusted with great power.

Timemachine — 2012

April fool’s 2012 saw the creation of reddit time machine, a set of subreddits imagined from different periods in time. Below is a post from the year 42000 showing us that the immortal Keanu Reeves is an immortal vampire.

While a valiant attempt to have users imagine what the future and past was like, Reddit Time-Machine mostly devolved into memes about Gabe Newell Releasing Half Life 3 and other poorly thought out inside jokes.

OrangeRed Vs Periwinkle — 2013

On the morning of April Fool’s 2013 Reddit released one of it’s biggest social experiments that would become a rubric for each of the experiments that would come in the next five years. Users woke up to find that they’d been assigned a team, their names flaired with either OrangeRed or Periwinkle. While this was a seemingly innocuous move it was the most disruptive to reddit as a whole. Users would mockingly attack one another on the forums based on their allegiances and downvote content by users of competing colors. Users were also given items which could negatively affect themselves or others.

The Button — 2015

2015 saw the creation of The Button a mysterious button on reddit with a continuous countdown of sixty seconds. Each reddit user could only press the button once and they were flaired with a color based on the time the button was at when pushed. Religions formed with different beliefs about what would happen when the button counted down to zero each preaching a different philosophy. Large segments of the community refused to push it believing that those who did were rubes. The button was pushed more than one million times and continued to be pushed until June 5, 2015.

Robin — 2016

2016 saw reddit deploy Robin an open chat channel where users were paired with one another chat-roulette style. Users could vote to merge their chat channels with others repeatedly or destroy the chat channels and connections they’d made. Although most of Robin’s usage wasn’t audited by a third party it’s easy to imagine how the client could be used to examine how communities congregate based on similarities and how they fall apart based on differences.

The Place — 2017

Place was one of Reddit’s most ambitious April Fools undertakings. Each user was given the ability to change the color of a pixel on a massive canvas once every 5 minutes. This lasted for 72 hours until the subreddit was closed and archived. Over the 72 hours multiple communities fought for inches to leave their mark on the final product creating a vibrant ecosystem which more or less defined the 2017 zeitgeist. Not all of Reddit’s community participated in the collaborative effort. Many attempted to vandalize works or preserve a single color.

The circle of trust - 2018

2018 April fools has reddit presenting another social experiment right after easter. The circle of trust is a simple game theory experiment; every user has only one circle with a unique key. If you give the key to another user they have the option of joining your circle or betraying it and destroying its ability to gain additional members.

Numerous tactics have emerged to create the largest circle from finding common connections with strangers to interviews. The Circle of Trust is still up as of this article so go check it out and participate in your very own social experiment.