Reddit loves April Fools' Day, using it as an excuse to launchodd social experiments each year. There was Reddit Place in 2017, which brought a giant white canvas for the community to draw all over. Circle of Trust in 2018 gave users the chance to create cliques. This year is a bit different, with Reddit Sequence, a more surreal approach to the traditional gags.
What is Reddit Sequence?
On a new "Sequence" subreddit created yesterday, users can submit gifs or sentences that are voted on by the community. Every three minutes, a new picture or sentence is added to the sequence as a scene, attempting to create a coherent story or narrative. Users get one vote per scene and can submit their own if they feel they have a better fit. It's a community-driven project, with images and memes that are popular on the site spreading faster than their less-known counterparts. Reddit admin Jareth called Sequence a "tool for good" and added that it will be "shut down" if used for "evil." That means no NSFW imagery or controversial content.
Sequence works on both reddit mobile and desktop. It's unclear how long this will last, but most reddit April Fools' Day events usually stick around for a week.
The community took a while to figure out how Sequence was supposed to work. "The Prologue" was the first and fans just posted random memes without any idea as to what purpose they should have. Deemed a test by reddit moderators, it showed off the power of what Sequence could be. "Act One" lasts for two and a half minutes, containing everything from Skyrim memes to Game of Thrones compilations. By the middle, the community actually managed to string together a few gifs and create a story of Gandalf flying into space before Monty Python references started showing up.
ACT 1 from r/sequence
Currently, you can vote on "Act Two: Electric Boogaloo" which is already shaping up to be better than its predecessors. We got Avatar The Last Airbender jokes, Lord of the Rings memes and Steve Irwin. As the reddit community starts to figure out how to best use this new tool, it's going to be fascinating to see what comes next. Could the memelord over on r/prequelmemes share the saga of Darth Plagueis or will r/ThanosDidNothingWrong continue to spread the message of the purple titan? Only time will tell, but I'll be checking in to see the madness unfold.
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