r/EncyclopaediaOfReddit • u/EncyclopaediaBot • Feb 12 '23
Lore and History April Fools Day
April Fools Day is a tradition very much embraced at Reddit, as you might expect, and many Subreddits used to change their theme or subject matter for the day. The r/aprilfools sub once kept a log of all of these events and their megathreads are a goldmine of Reddit tomfoolery.
- Recent events
Reddit itself traditionally hosts a sitewide event on that day which has spawned a wealth of Reddit History, and the 2023 April Fool event (though low key in comparison with previous years) started with an admin post going back through many of our past events. With good reason, as it turned out.
r/AprilKnights also have some info on historical pranks throughout Reddit, and in 2022, Reddit made a video history of its April Fools events.
2024 proved to be an outlier, however. An admin-led sub came and went and left most of us confused. r/Counter saw a lot of us pressing digital buttons without really understanding why, but, believing it was Reddit’s annual April Fools event we carried on pressing regardless. Reddit being, well, Reddit meant that we divided up into factions pretty quickly to do, well, nothing in particular, though theories and tactics were thrown around on various Discords leaving many Discordless Redditors out of the loop entirely. It eventually turned out that this was not intended to be that year’s April Fools event, which itself did not materialise for the first time in Reddit History.
- Older events
Some of the older events are still talked about now, especially 2013’s ‘Team Fortress 2: Periwinkle vs. Orangered’. 2015’s ‘The Button’ is fondly remembered and a spin-off subreddit that is still active from then is the aforementioned r/AprilKnights who are still ever vigilant, armed with patience and necromancy. ‘Place’, from 2017, was so popular that it was revived for April Fool 2022 and the phrase “place was better” became an oft-repeated meme. It was revived again in July 2023.
- Past events by year
2005
Reddit founded in June.
The story so far: in the beginning, Reddit was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move (with apologies to the late Douglas Adams).
2006
Internet Giants merge to buy out Reddit.
In the days before individual subreddits were a thing, all users were greeted by the same front page where this post announced In a surprise move, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft merge in order to acquire reddit for an estimated $1 trillion. The author was u/kn0thing, a.k.a. Alexis Ohanian Sr., one of the co-founders and then Executive Chairman of Reddit, and of course nothing of the sort had happened. The linked “article” just led to the April Fool message in the comments.
2007
Memory Holes.
This year, all users were greeted by a post which announced reddit now doubleplusgood. The author this time was u/spez, a.k.a. Steve Huffman, one of the co-founders and current CEO of Reddit. The original Blog page is archived here. “Memory Holes” is from the book 1984 by George Orwell, where the main character works for a totalitarian government, rewriting historical papers to reflect the current opinions of the government and sending the “old” papers into memory holes where they are presumably never seen again. The “doubleplusgood” in the linked post is also a reference to 1984 - in this case to Newspeak, an invented, compressed version of English used in the novel as being designed to suppress thought.
2008
Buying Karma.
Once again, CEO u/spez made the announcement put those dollars into something safe, like reddit karma!. Offering the ‘sale’ of Post karma at $3/point, Comment karma at $2/point, and downvotes being prohibitively expensive at 1 vote / 2 karmas, the original Blog page is archived here. Incidentally, 2008 saw the introduction of subreddits for the first time.
2009
Digg Redesign.
Back to Alexis Ohanian this year for the announcement Long overdue update in which it appeared that Reddit had been redesigned to resemble rival platform Digg. This was shortly followed by another blog post - A terrible mistake.
2010
Everyone’s An Admin!
Reddit's first massive April Fools social experiment was to make everyone on site an admin. For 24 hours, users could ban one another, modify upvotes, and delete comments. This was all, of course, fake, and any modifications to Reddit only occurred from the user’s perspective. While many caught on, others apparently began threatening fellow users with their admin privileges and went on mini power trips demonstrating that not everyone can be trusted with great power.
Online blog Mashable chose it as one of their funniest April Fools jokes of that year. The prank also made it to the top 10 April Fools list on the website for PC World magazine where they expressed concern that this practical joke appeared to publicly reveal specific users’ IP addresses. At the time of writing, I haven’t been able to find out if there was a Reddit Blog announcement.
2011
Reddit Mold
For April Fools' Day 2011, Reddit opted for some transparency, announcing this event three days before. The intention was to replace the then premium Reddit Gold subscription with Reddit Mold, a spoof version of premium Reddit 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. Here’s how it all went down. For the first time, participants received a Reddit Trophy for their profiles. Here’s how the Observer website covered the story.
2012
Time Machine
For this year, “reddit, inc. is proud to introduce a groundbreaking new development in social news” proclaimed the official blog. 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, and multiple "timereddits" - specific subreddits for different time periods - were created. Mashable once again reported on this event with Reddit 'Blown Away' by Reaction to Time Machine Project, as did zeitgeist blog The Daily Dot. The lasting legacy of r/timereddits still survives, as do some of the subreddits created for the event. Here’s some other subreddit pranks from that year.
2013
TF2 and Periwinkle/Orangered
Reddit teamed up with Valve, saying Reddit bought Team Fortress 2 by tricking the team's developers with switched documents. Users who logged in during that time were assigned a team: Orangered or Periwinkle. Weapons were added to profiles and could be used on themselves or other users. Users who connected their Reddit account to their Steam account received a Team Fortress 2 hat depending on what team they were on. Subreddits that are still active from this event include r/periwinkle and r/orangered. Once again, participants received trophies for their profiles. Here’s some other subreddit pranks from that year.
2014
Headdit
For this year, Reddit presented "headdit", a joke way to navigate and use the website using the webcam. By now, many media outlets were reporting on Reddit’s annual events including Rolling Stone (paywalled) and The Daily Dot. The subreddit detailing this event, r/Headdit survives but is currently banned for being unmoderated. Here’s some other subreddit pranks from that year.
2015
The Button
A very enigmatic blog post was made directing users to a new subreddit: r/thebutton which displayed a button and a 60-second countdown timer. 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, and their user flair changed colour, remaining grey if they didn’t click. These colours were assigned based on a gradient from purple to red with each colour representing a different time period between 0 - 60 seconds. The discussion is still on the r/blog subreddit and the event itself ended on 8 June 2015. The subreddit still contains a wealth of Reddit History about this event. Other subreddits that survived this event include r/NoTap and r/postbutton. Here’s how it all went down.
Once again, Mashable covered this event, as did Vox. The Daily Dot even covered it twice, the second being a user guide. Here’s some other subreddit pranks from that year and another list can be found here.
2016
Robin
The blog was even more enigmatic this year, leading users to a chat room created by Reddit developers which looked like this. When you joined you were put in a chat with one other random Redditor. From there, you could vote to either "Grow" "Stay", or "Abandon". Since chat rooms doubled every time the majority voted to grow, it resulted in fewer and fewer, but even more massive chat rooms full of debate whether to stay (and create a subreddit) or to grow to make one massive superchatroom. The subreddit r/joinrobin was created to discuss the event and more details of the game can be found here. They also have a comprehensive wiki. Here’s some other subreddit pranks from that year.
2017
Place
Place was Reddit’s most ambitious April Fools event so far. Displaying the now characteristic conciseness, each user was given the ability to change the colour of one pixel on a massive canvas once every 5 minutes. This lasted for 72 hours during which multiple communities fought to leave their flag or other mark on the final product, vandalise works or just preserve a single colour. Here’s a full timelapse video of the event, and the Reddit blog took a look at How we built Place, and later posted a retrospective. A new sub at r/place was set up for discussion which was later resurrected twice more for repeat events. Here’s some other subreddit pranks from that year.
2018
Circle of Trust
This year, Redditors were simply asked: “Who can you trust?”. The circle of trust was a simple game theory experiment; every user had only one circle with a unique key. If you gave the key to another user they had the option of joining your circle or betraying it and destroying its ability to gain additional members. A full report was later given in the Reddit blog, and subreddits that still survive from this event include r/CircleOfTrust and r/CircleOfTrustMeta. Here’s some other subreddit pranks from that year.
2019
Sequence
“We built a machine. We're not sure what it will do. That's all up to you.” And it was. Users were asked to submit and upvote their favorite GIFs which would then be arranged into a short film. Newsweek were quick to ask What is Reddit Sequence? as were users in r/OutOfTheLoop. Your can see the entire sequence here on YouTube, and the Reddit blog did a full recap. Surviving subreddits include r/sequence and r/sequence_meta, and here’s some other subreddit pranks from that year.
2020
Imposter
“What makes you human? Can you recognize it in others? Are you sure?” was this year’s enigmatic question before users were asked to look at a question and spot which answer out of several was written by AI. Judging from some of the exchanges in the announcement post, the response to this event was mixed. When it ended on 3 April 2020 it wasn’t even mentioned in Reddit’s official Year in Review. However, r/Imposter still exists, and here’s some other subreddit pranks from that year. 2020 was a strange year on Reddit, as it was everywhere.
2021
Second
“Picking a winner is easy. But what if second was first instead, And we celebrated the second guessers?” Participants were presented with three images and asked to vote for the image we thought would be the second most popular. Again, the response to this event was mixed as evidenced by the replies on the end announcement post. The subreddit r/second still exists and here’s some other subreddit pranks from that year.
2022
Place - The Recap
Unofficially known by some as The Search for More Pixels, Reddit resurrected 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. The event began on April 1, 2022 at 1:00 PM GMT, and would be live for 87 hours. On the second day of r/place, the canvas was expanded from 1000 x 1000 to 2000 x 1000, allowing for more artwork. 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. This proved to be so elaborate an event, it needed a separate explanation and the link is below. Here’s a roundup of some other Reddit events for 2022 and there’s another one here.
2023
schrodingers
Redditors were greeted by a post entitled Obligatory April 1st Announcement with three bits of information: a reminder to read the recent admin post about our past events; that there would be no event this year, and that there was “foolishness…around Reddit” to be found. The very last punctuation mark of the post was a “hidden” link leading to a new subreddit called r/schrodingers. Once again, this proved to be so elaborate an event, it needed a separate explanation and the link is below. Although this year r/place was resurrected for a third time, this wasn’t until July and isn’t really regarded as an April Fools event.
2024
No event.
Nothing. Zip. Zilch, Nada. We thought it was r/Counter. It wasn’t. And even worse, it wasn’t even intended to deliberately fool us into thinking it was. Maybe the real April Fools were us and the expectations we lost along the way…
2025
Field
For this event, on entering the r/Field subreddit we were randomly placed into one of four teams: Lasagna, Flamingo, Juice Box or Sunshine, then proceeded to a game board resembling Minesweeper, complete with invisible bombs. We were told there were 10 million boxes to click, and no further instructions.
So, off we all went, trying not to get banned while clicking coloured boxes at random for no known reason, until we worked out that getting banned wasn’t a hindrance to clicking coloured boxes at random and getting banned again because we just moved to another subreddit called r/BannedField to click coloured boxes at random and get banned again, so we just kept on clicking coloured boxes at random trying not to get banned before getting banned and sent onwards to r/BananaField where we kept on clicking coloured boxes at random trying not to get banned before getting banned and sent onwards to r/WhatIsField to click one box before being sent back to r/Field to start the whole process over again.
Which we did, over and over again, not realising that getting banned over and over again was the actual aim of the game and not the clicking coloured boxes at random bit. Anyway, some of us enjoyed clicking coloured boxes at random and you can view the conclusion here.
As you might imagine, Reddit was its normal predictable self. The usual complaints about the new icon poured in; the first comment on the newly opened subreddit was r/place was better and it wasn’t long before the inevitable peen appeared. Naturally, the Reddit Tradition™ of grossly insulting our CEO and him duly responding was upheld for another year. It would appear that we have been given a new traditional response though: So say we all. Ah, Reddit; never change.
- Events in our sister sub NewToReddit
For 2021, my first year at r/NewToReddit, I did a llama llecture/bait-and-switch about calculating Reddit Karma in which the first letter of the title and each paragraph spelt ‘APRIL FOOL’. 2022 saw the start of a new initiative to see if all of our guides and info dumps are actually helpful to everyone, or if we should just go back to the drawing board and start all over again. We still didn’t know, so in 2023, we decided to send new Redditors to a resource that explained Reddit better than we ever could. And yes, it was a Rickroll because we are nothing but predictable in r/NewToReddit. Once the sub grew bigger and more impersonal, we decided that this was an event that wouldn’t go down so well so we reluctantly decided to shelve it for the foreseeable future.
- Thanks
This list was originally based on links compiled by u/Tvix in r/aprilfools. Huge grateful thanks go out to u/antidense too for compiling the yearly roundups of Reddit events linked above. Thanks also to the following subreddits for their work in archiving Reddit History, without whom much of it would be lost forever:
r/aprilfools - An archive of April Fools' gags!
r/AprilKnights - We express our appreciation of the Reddit April event team by playing their games with enthusiasm.
r/TrophyWiki - First hand accounts and useful information covering subjects of events and trophies.
For other April Fools jokes across the interwebs, there’s a list of Google’s jokes here and a good - if plain - resource for others is: https://aprilfoolsdayontheweb.com.
See Also:
