On the 1st April the team behind reddit did something interesting. Without any warning they opened a new subreddit called /place. Here is the description:
There is an empty canvas.
You may place a tile upon it, but you must wait to place another.
Individually you can create something.
Together you can create something more.
The rules were that every reddit user had power over one square on a grid 1000 x 1000 pixels big. You had a choice of 16 colours and you could change any pixel you wanted, but you could only change it once every five minutes.
What resulted was an amazing visual expression of the power of online communities.
Over the few days that reddit ran the experiment, different online groups and subreddits fought and worked together to place their stamp on the canvas.
In the early hours the bottom right corner disappeared in ocean-coloured blue as one group tried to flood the entire canvas. Another group (‘the Void‘) tried to cover the centre with blackness. Other users countered by planting and defending the American flag in the middle of the canvas.
Each corner of the canvas was a different little story. Here Newsweek describes how things unfolded:
“It took less than a day for flags to start appearing on the canvas, as members of Reddit communities (known as subreddits) dedicated to individual countries began to mobilize. One of the largest was the German flag, created through the efficient collaboration of Germany’s subreddit, and it soon began to grow toward a smaller French flag nearby.
Despite calls by some members to not invade their neighbor—one user wrote, “last time we did… well let’s say it didn’t work out that great in the end”—the black, red and gold stripes had completely covered the French tricolor. To bring an end to the battle, one Reddit user came up with “Operation EU Love,” which saw hundreds of users paint the European Union’s flag on the disputed territory between the historical enemies.”
Here’s where things ended up:
I think when I started making video for online, I thought of the internet as a series of interconnected users – nodes spread out evenly on a grid like something from Tron. In fact when you google-image search ‘social network’ you get images like this:
But the internet is made up of more than individuals. It’s made up of networks, clusters, subreddits, newsletters, hubs and influencers, and tapping into these can be incredibly powerful. It’s more like a landscape of cities and towns:
The first time I realised this was when we made a film about vegans. Originally we were going to make a film about vegetarians because it was a bigger group. That’s how we’re used to thinking as broadcasters – we go after the general viewer, we go after big groups.
We never made the vegetarians film so its hard to compare, but the vegan film ended up getting 2.2m views and I don’t think doing a film about vegetarians would have been as successful even if it was a bigger group.
In this case the smaller group had more viral potential than the bigger group.
Firstly they had a stronger need. As a vegan you need a lot of information and support (there’s even an app to help Vegans answer the question, is it vegan?), yet you might well be the only vegan you know. This is the kind of community the internet is well-suited to serve by creating places and services for the community to gather.
And these places are perfect for when you’re trying to make viral films. In our case a popular newsletter featured our film, giving it a huge signal-boost.
Making content for niche groups can also work well because a narrow group is more “taggable”. By that I mean, if I start talking about vegans, there’s a strong chance someone in particular will come to mind. This means that if you saw a film for vegans which was good, it might well enter your mind to tag them in the comments (or send the film in some way). Doing this is a way of being nice and building a connection, and it’s one of the biggest mechanisms by which viral media spreads.
However, if the group is too large (e.g. vegetarians, office workers, women etc) the chances are that no-one comes to mind because the group is so big. Who will you tag in the Facebook comments? Everyone you know?
So when you’re making internet video, think about who the audience is. Is it a big group or narrow one? Could you get a bigger audience by being narrower? Are there ways to serve lots of small audiences with different videos, thereby adding up to the big audience?
And are there any ways to bring together the groups in the kind of way Reddit did?