It really reminds me of this paper that was discussed on the Many Minds podcast awhile ago, about a new hypothesis on the evolution of music. Basically this person argued that music evolved as a credible signal for group cohesion - working together is a critical adaptive skill for humans (I recently finished Michael Tomasello's book "The Evolution of Agency" which I think drives that point home even harder), and singing and doing music requires coordination. And putting on a good performance requires really good coordination. So the idea is that it evolved as a signal of "you don't want to fuck with us, look at how much of a well-oiled machine we are".

It's just one hypothesis among others of course but it's compelling enough to me that it's wormed itself into my brain as being obviously true.

Anyway, I kind of want to find that author and link them to r/place and just go like "whaddaya think, is there a paper in this". There are quite a few ways internet communities flex and compete in terms of "we're more numerous and better organized than other communities" but I'm not sure there are others that are as performative as r/places. And I don't think it was intended that way, was it? Like, today's r/place says "alone you can do something, together you can do more" but when they originally did it had they expected explicit subreddit coordination to be such a big part of it? Or were they expecting something much more random and individual-driven?