The population: the record
Of the 777 subreddits credited with an artwork on the atlas or the canvas, 705 stayed: their members wrote about the event while the canvas was open.
Inputs, outputs, contracts, dates and costs
- Input
- Reddit's log of every pixel change; the Arctic Shift archive of posts and comments; an Internet Archive table linking the log's hashed account IDs to usernames; the Place Atlas of the finished canvas
- Output
- the frozen dataset: every pixel change, each community's posts and comments, an hourly pixel table per community, and the census of 705 communities
- Who acts
- collection scripts; the census judgments were ours, some after an agent's reading, each recorded with its evidence
- Rules
- the collection recipes and the census rules
- Dates
- census built 27 August 2026, rebuilt 26 September, final rule 4 October
- Counts
- 16,559,897 pixel changes by 1,166,924 accounts; 7.5 million posts and comments in 2,796 subreddits; 1,473 artworks; 705 communities with 2,130,302 posts and comments
- Cost
- not recorded
- Data used
- The record in numbers shows the distributions; From 2,796 to 705 gives every census step.
Who counts as a community
A credited subreddit stays if its members wrote about the event while the canvas was open. Each judgment is recorded with its evidence and can be reversed. Seventy-eight of the 705, like r/PlaceNL, have no record before the event.
In detail
Everything the run recorded for this part; each folded section says what it holds.
From 2,796 subreddits to 705 communities
The collection is wider than the study: it holds everything anyone wrote in 24,093 subreddits over 24 days around the canvas. The papers' wider dataset is the event window, the 72 hours and the day after, of the 2,796 subreddits that took part in the event: 7.5 million posts and comments. The population model covers 705 of them. This page shows each step between the two, and marks which steps took a judgment and which a count. The judgments are recorded with their evidence in the census files, so each can be checked or reversed.
Where the census starts
The census starts from the Place Atlas of the finished canvas (Place Atlas, 2017). Its curators outlined 1,473 artworks; 1,236 of them credit at least one subreddit. A subreddit that built an artwork and was overwritten before the freeze has no atlas entry, so the census undersamples failure (Denrell, 2003).
The narrowing
One line per step. The artworks column counts the artworks that still credit at least one community on that line.
| Step | Artworks | Communities | Change | Why | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The 2017 atlas | 1,473 | count | |||
| Credit a subreddit | 1,236 | 237 leave | the entry names no subreddit | count | |
| Credit a community | 1,227 | 763 | 9 artworks leave | user pages, r/all, a private subreddit, a Discord group, a name with no archive, a subreddit founded in 2022 | judgment |
| Named on the canvas | 1,227 | 767 | 4 join | the name is written on the final canvas and the community organized there in its own threads | judgment |
| Named as maker in a description | 1,227 | 776 | 9 join | an artwork's description credits it, and it took part in its own threads | judgment |
| A redirect kept as a row | 1,227 | 777 | 1 joins | r/TFLS points to r/TheFarLeftSide, which carries its artworks | judgment |
| Silent while the canvas was open | 1,200 | 748 | 29 leave | nothing posted while the canvas was open | count |
| Active only after the freeze | 1,193 | 741 | 7 leave | talk about a frozen canvas is not organizing on a live one | count and judgment |
| Text takes no part in the event | 1,164 | 709 | 32 leave | a community coder, or a check, read no talk about the event | judgment |
| No writing about the event while the canvas was open | 1,162 | 707 | 2 leave | r/lehigh wrote about it only after the freeze; r/upvote never did | judgment |
| r/place, not a case | 1,161 | 706 | 1 leaves | r/place, where the communities met | judgment |
| Excluded | 705 | 1 leaves | r/The_Donald (below) | judgment |
Show the judgments: 6 decisions behind the count
Which community a link means
The atlas names subreddits as annotators typed them. Each link was
resolved by hand. Typos and folded names were assigned to the community
the artwork belongs to: hyperlightdrifer to
r/hyperlightdrifter, Chelsea to r/chelseafc. Links that
name no community, such as r/all, user pages or a subreddit founded in
2022, were set aside.
What counts as being there
The criterion for evidence of coordination is writing about r/place while the canvas was open. Posting about something else in those hours is not enough, and talking about the frozen canvas afterwards is a different act from organizing to place pixels on a live one.
Whether the text takes part in the event
A word screen flagged likely talk about the event but never removed a community, because its markers are English and miss communities that name their artwork and not the event. A reading decided: a community coder's verdict that the record holds no talk about the event, or a recorded check of the flagged cases.
Who read
Two Claude sessions made 19 of the 22 checks in
validations.jsonl. A Cowork session read four flagged
communities on 27 August 2026. A chat read the four names on the canvas
and the Robin link on 26 September, and the nine makers in atlas
descriptions and the r/TFLS redirect on 27 September, on our
instructions in that chat. Neither records its model. We ruled the other
three, r/place, r/lehigh and r/upvote; the last two followed readings by
the aggregator's first stage. The coder verdicts in
MASTER-census.csv come from the earlier coding with Claude,
under contracts 16 to 29, which the final coding with gpt-5.6-sol later
redid; that output is not shipped. 335 communities carry a verdict (292
full, 12 trace, 31 none). The sheet's model column, sonnet for 267 and
opus for 68, was assumed and not read from the transcripts, as its
builder states. Read from the run transcripts, 281 of the 298
communities with an earlier run were coded by Claude Opus 5 and 17 by
Claude Sonnet.
The r/place subreddit
r/place, the subreddit the event was named after, is credited with one small artwork on the atlas. It holds more posts than any other subreddit, and many of them narrate what the other communities did. It is the square where the communities met, and the census does not count it as a case. The Field agent is reading it, and its account will be set against the model as an independent record.
r/The_Donald
We left out one community for two reasons. Reddit banned it in June 2020 for repeatedly hosting content that broke its rules, the first of which bans promoting hate based on identity or vulnerability (Reddit, 2020). Its exclusion also has little bearing on the model: its single artwork covered 108 pixels, within the lowest quartile of the census, and was largely overwritten before the canvas froze.
What the 705 hold
The 705 communities wrote 2,130,302 posts and comments from the opening to a day after the freeze, and account for 90% of all pixel changes. Their community coders produced 115,388 first-order codes and 7,844 second-order themes. The record in numbers shows how they are distributed.
Files
The census ships as coder/census/ in the repository:
MASTER-census.csv (one row per community, with its counts,
verdicts and disposition), the link worksheets,
validations.jsonl (every reading that decided a membership,
with its evidence) and ROOM-RULES.md (the rules, stated).
The counts can be rebuilt from the downloads; the judgments are
inputs.
Show the references: 3 works
Denrell, J. (2003). Vicarious learning, undersampling of failure, and the myths of management. Organization Science, 14(3), 227–243.
Place Atlas. (2017). atlas-2017 [Data set]. GitHub. https://github.com/placeAtlas/atlas-2017
Reddit. (2020, June 29). Update to our content policy. r/announcements.
Steps, strengths and limitations
Show the 5 steps, with r/PlaceNL beside each
Download the pixel log and the atlas.
Reddit's log gives the time, position, color and hashed account of each change. The atlas outlines the artworks on the finished canvas and the subreddits that claim them.
r/PlaceNL
The atlas credits r/PlaceNL with eight artworks, the largest the Entire Dutch Area at 33,760 pixels.
Collect each community's posts and comments.
For every credited subreddit: the week before the event, the 72 hours of the event and the day after.
r/PlaceNL
701 posts and comments in the coders' window, 591 of them while the canvas was open, and none in the week before.
Join pixels to people.
Usernames are hashed the way the pixel log hashes them, so a placer can be matched to a poster. Usernames are used only for this join and are omitted from shared outputs.
r/PlaceNL
Of 450,680 pixel changes inside r/PlaceNL's artworks, 17,373 (3.9%) came from accounts that posted in r/PlaceNL.
Draw the census.
A credited subreddit stays if its members wrote about the event while the canvas was open. Each judgment is recorded with its evidence.
r/PlaceNL
r/PlaceNL is one of the 78 communities with no record before the event: it was founded for it.
Freeze.
Every file is hashed. The coders and the aggregator read only frozen copies.
Show where each component runs: 3, with their instructions and folders
| Component | Who or what | Instructions and outputs | In the repository |
|---|---|---|---|
| Collection | scripts for pixels, posts and the atlas | data guide | data/ |
| Hourly pixels per community | pixel table and week-before activity | the record in numbers | data/pixels-hourly/ |
| Census | one row per community, rules, validations | census steps | coder/census/ |
The full research repository can be shared with the editor on request.
Show the strengths and limitations: 3 and 4
Strengths
- Every source is public and can be retrieved again with the shared scripts.
- Pixels and posts are joined by account, so writing and placing can be compared for each community.
- Each census judgment is recorded with its evidence and can be reversed.
Limitations
- The atlas records only artworks that survived to the finished canvas, so failure is undersampled.
- Coordination on Discord and in other chats is not archived.
- Posts and accounts deleted since 2017 are missing.
- The username table cannot be redistributed, so readers rebuild the join with the scripts.
No agent acts in this stage. The agent readings that informed census judgments are recorded with the census.
In the contract
No stage of the aggregator's contract: the record and the census come before it. The collection follows its own brief and recipes (how collection works); the census rules and every judgment are above, under From 2,796 subreddits to 705 communities.
Elsewhere on the site
- The record in numbers: pixel changes, artwork sizes, community sizes
- New communities: the communities founded for the event
The population: introduction and all parts · How this part works