The Most Frequently Used Tile Color on r/Place by Country

On April Fools Day 2017 reddit introduced /r/place, an experimental subreddit consisting of a white canvas with 1000 x 1000 tiles on which redditors could draw by placing a colored tile every 5 minutes.

The Place experiment lasted for 72 hours, 1.2 million redditors participated placing 16.5 million tiles to create the presumably largest collaborative art project in history. For each tile placement redditors could choose one of 16 available colors.

The map above shows the most frequently used color by country based on data released by reddit two weeks after the event ended. Countries without data are filled with a black & white stripe pattern.

Black, or more precisely a dark gray tone (#222222), is the dominant color in many countries. One reason for its popularity is probably because it's used to separate entities from each other. Red is also quite popular, especially in countries where it appears in the flag, such as Denmark, Indonesia, Norway, Russia and Turkey. Other countries where colors are dominant that resemble flag colors include Colombia, France, Pakistan, and Sweden.

This map is just a very superficial look at one aspect of the data gathered in this huge social experiment. I hope I'll find some time to dig a little deeper and am curious what other people create from this dataset.

For more information on r/Place check out the following resources:

For more information about the data and methodology see the accompanying jupyter notebook.