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Over the years, social media site Reddit has done multiple pranks and events for April Fools' Day.
| This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
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Over the years, social media site Reddit has done multiple pranks and events for April Fools' Day.
For April Fools' Day 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, [1] and delete comments. However, any modifications to Reddit only occurred through the user's perspective.
For April Fools' Day 2011, Reddit replaced its Reddit Gold subscription with Reddit Mold, a joke version of the premium service that could be given to users to make the website experience worse. For example, users who were given Mold would only be able to see fewer posts per page as well as not being able to post anything containing the letter E. These effects were amplified upon receiving more Mold, such as losing the ability to post another letter for each Mold received.
On April Fools' Day 2012, a timeline bar was added to the front page that allowed users to view what the front page would look like in the past or future. [2] [3] Multiple "timereddits" were also created, specific subreddits for different time periods. [4]
Reddit teamed up with Valve, saying Reddit bought Team Fortress 2 by tricking the team's developers with switched documents. [5] Users who logged in during the time were assigned a team: Orangered or Periwinkle. Weapons were added to profiles and could be used on themselves or other users. [6]
Users who connected their Reddit account to their Steam account received a Team Fortress 2 hat depending on what team they were on. [5]
For April Fools' Day 2014, Reddit did "headdit", a joke way to navigate and use the website using the webcam. [7] [8]
For April Fools' Day 2015, a social experiment subreddit called r/thebutton appeared. It displayed a button and a 60-second countdown timer. User accounts created before that day were eligible to participate. A user could only click the button once, or opt not to click it. If a user clicked the button the timer was globally reset to 60 seconds, [9] and the user's "flair" (an icon next to the user's name) changed color. Colors were assigned based on a gradient from purple to red with purple signifying up to 60 seconds and red as low as 0 seconds. The countdown reached zero several times due to technical problems but eventually expired without further problems on June 5, 2015, after which the subreddit was archived. [10]
For April Fools' Day 2016, another experiment was launched involving the "Robin" chat widget. After clicking a titular button, an IRC-like chat window was opened with one other user, and allowed a certain time to pick among three options: "Grow", "Stay" and "Leave". [11] "Grow" would join the chat with another group, "Stay" would close the group chat and create a subreddit with that group as moderators and "Leave" would close the group chat.
For April Fools' Day 2017, featured a social experiment based on r/place. The subreddit contained a collaborative pixel art canvas, where a user could place a pixel every five minutes (the timer was temporarily ten and twenty minutes for a few hours on April 1). [12] Many people worked together to create large graphics, such as flags or symbols. Often subreddits would come together as a group to add a graphic from that community to place. Place was closed on April 3, 2017, at 1:00 PM GMT having been active for a full three days. [13]
For April Fools' Day 2018, an experiment launched on the subreddit r/circleoftrust. [14] Upon clicking a button, each user was given one "circle" that they could entrust to others with the circle's password key to unlock and join the circle. While each user received one personal circle, they could join or betray any other user circles. Clicking the "join" button on another's circle would cause the owner's circle to grow bigger, while the "betray" button would cause the owner's circle to no longer function (having "betrayed" the owner's trust). On the r/circleoftrust subreddit, all users have a "flair" next to their username that displays the number of users who've joined their personal circle, followed by the number of other circles the user has joined. Those who had betrayed another user's circle have a null sign ("∅") next to their numbered flair. The experiment ended on April 6, 2018.
For April Fools' Day 2019, a social experiment subreddit called r/sequence was released. The experiment consisted of a community-driven sequencer that users interacted with by submitting GIFs or text slides to be compiled into a movie. [15] [16] The order of the GIFs and text slides were chosen by users through upvoting one GIF or text slide per scene. The most upvoted GIF or text slide was locked into the next available scene for every three minutes. At the end, once the entire sequence was filled, it was posted as a full story in an external page. The experiment ended at April 3, 2019, 11:08 PM GMT. [17]
For April Fools' Day 2020, r/imposter was released. Users were to identify a machine-generated response from a group of responses to the question "What makes you human?" (and, later, "What makes you an imposter?") and had an option to respond to the question after doing so. The experiment ended on April 3, 2020.
For April Fools' Day 2021, Reddit released r/second, in which users have to guess the second most popular option out of a group of three options. [18] [19] The event ended after 2000 one-minute rounds, with the final round lasting one hour.
For April Fools' Day 2022, Reddit once again featured r/place, similar to the event featured in 2017. The subreddit featured a 1000 x 1000 pixel collaborative canvas which users could edit the color of a single pixel every five minutes. However moderators could edit any color at anytime. The event began on April 1, 2022, at 1:00 PM GMT, and would be live for 87 hours. [20] On the second day of r/place, the canvas was expanded from 1000 x 1000 to 2000 x 1000, allowing for more artwork. [21] On the third day of r/place, the canvas was once again expanded from 2000 x 1000 to 2000 x 2000. Before the event ended, users were only allowed to place white pixels, reverting the canvas back to its original state.
Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and forum social network. Registered users submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are unpaid volunteers. It is operated by Reddit, Inc., based in San Francisco.
A social news website is a website that features user-posted stories. Such stories are ranked based on popularity, as voted on by other users of the site or by website administrators. Users typically comment online on the news posts and these comments may also be ranked in popularity. Since their emergence with the birth of Web 2.0, social news sites have been used to link many types of information, including news, humor, support, and discussion. All such websites allow the users to submit content and each site differs in how the content is moderated. On the Slashdot and Fark websites, administrators decide which articles are selected for the front page. On Reddit and Digg, the articles that get the most votes from the community of users will make it to the front page. Many social news websites also feature an online comment system, where users discuss the issues raised in an article. Some of these sites have also applied their voting system to the comments, so that the most popular comments are displayed first. Some social news websites also have a social networking service, in that users can set up a user profile and follow other users' online activity on the website.
Steve Huffman, also known by his Reddit username spez, is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, a social news and discussion website, which ranks in the top 20 websites in the world. He also co-founded the airfare search engine website Hipmunk, which shut down in 2020.
Fantage was a MMORPG involving a virtual world containing a range of online games and activities, developed by Fantage Inc. The game featured a customizable anime-style cartoon avatar, called a "Fantagian", that users can customize with items ranging from hair to clothing and accessories. Fantage was released to the general public on March 17, 2008, and had since expanded into a large online community— the game had over 16 million registered users by January 2012 and over 30 million by December 2014.
A like button, like option, or recommend button is a feature in communication software such as social networking services, Internet forums, news websites and blogs where the user can express that they like, enjoy or support certain content. Internet services that feature like buttons usually display the number of users who liked the content, and may show a full or partial list of them. This is a quantitative alternative to other methods of expressing reaction to content, like writing a reply text. Some websites also include a dislike button, so the user can either vote in favor, against or neutrally. Other websites include more complex web content voting systems; for example, five stars or reaction buttons to show a wider range of emotion to the content.
A social experiment is a method of psychological or sociological research that observes people's reactions to certain situations or events. The experiment depends on a particular social approach where the main source of information is the participants' point of view and knowledge. To carry out a social experiment, specialists usually split participants into two groups — active participants and respondents. Throughout the experiment, specialists monitor participants to identify the effects and differences resulting from the experiment. A conclusion is then created based on the results. Intentional communities are generally considered social experiments.
On the social news site Reddit, some communities are devoted to explicit, violent, propagandist, or hateful material. These subreddits have been the topic of controversy, at times receiving significant media coverage. Journalists, attorneys, media researchers, and others have commented that such communities shape and promote biased views of international politics, the veracity of medical evidence, misogynistic rhetoric, and other disruptive concepts.
Dubsmash was a video sharing social media service application for iOS and Android.
The Button was an online meta-game and social experiment that featured an online button and 60-second countdown timer that would reset each time the button was pressed. The experiment was created by Josh Wardle, also known as powerlanguage. The experiment was hosted on the social networking website Reddit beginning on 1 April 2015, and was active until 5 June 2015, the first time that no user pressed the button before the timer reached zero. The game was started by a Reddit administrator.
This is a timeline of Reddit, an entertainment, social networking, and news website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links, making it essentially an online bulletin board system.
r/The_Donald was a subreddit where participants created discussions and internet memes in support of U.S. president Donald Trump. Initially created in June 2015 following the announcement of Trump's presidential campaign, the community grew to over 790,000 subscribers who described themselves as "Patriots". The community was banned in June 2020 for violating Reddit rules on harassment and targeting. It was ranked as one of the most active communities on Reddit in the late 2010s.
r/place was a recurring collaborative project and social experiment hosted on the content aggregator site Reddit. Originally launched on April Fools' Day 2017, it has since been repeated again on April Fools' Day 2022 and on July 20, 2023.
r/IAmA is a subreddit for question-and-answer interactive interviews termed "AMA". AMA interviewees have ranged from various celebrities to everyday people in several lines of work. Founded in May 2009, the subreddit has gone on to become one of Reddit's most popular communities.
r/AskHistorians is a subreddit on Reddit where users may ask questions about history. It is one of the internet's largest history forums.
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Social audio is a subclass of social media that designates social media platforms that use audio as their primary channel of communication. This can include text messages, podcasts, tools for recording and editing audio in addition to virtual audio rooms. Still in an evolutionary state, different companies that develop social audio products are still trying to figure out what works for their users, and what doesn't.
r/antiwork is a subreddit associated with contemporary labor movements, critique of work, corporate capitalism and the anti-work movement. The forum's slogan reads: "Unemployment for all, not just the rich!" Posts on the forum commonly describe employees' negative experiences at work, dissatisfaction with working conditions, and unionization. Various actions that have been promoted on the subreddit include a consumer boycott of Black Friday as well as the submission of fake jobs applications to the Kellogg Company after the company announced plans to replace 1,400 striking workers during the 2021 Kellogg's strike. The popularity of r/antiwork increased in 2020 and 2021, and the subreddit gained 900,000 subscribers in 2021 alone, accumulating nearly 1,700,000 subscribers by the end of the year. It is often associated with other ideologically similar subreddits such as r/latestagecapitalism. r/antiwork has been compared to the Occupy Wall Street movement due to the subreddit's intellectual foundations and decentralized ethos.
Lemmy is a free and open-source software for running self-hosted social news aggregation and discussion forums. These hosts, known as "instances", communicate with each other using the ActivityPub protocol.
Apollo for Reddit, shortened to Apollo, was a third-party Reddit client for iOS. Developed by Canadian programmer Christian Selig, a former Apple intern, Apollo was designed as an iOS-friendly successor to Alien Blue, and an alternative to the official Reddit app. It was notable for its large feature set over the official app, including rapid support for newly-introduced iOS features such as Lock Screen widgets. It had a gesture-based design and featured no advertisements.
In April 2023, the discussion and news aggregation website Reddit announced its intentions to charge for its application programming interface (API), a feature which had been free since 2008, causing a dispute. The move forced multiple third-party applications to shut down and threatened accessibility applications and moderation tools.
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