My gut says this is an effort to make employees feel good after layoffs and protests, but also this looks to be someone to juice the monthly active users metric before an IPO roadshow or fundraising or something.
Ironically /r/place would be a good opportunity to win users to the official app, they probably should have done that before the API price changes to shake the tree of third party apps, so to speak.
Anyways, this is going to be 80% "fuck /u/spez" memes, a German flag, the Apollo logo, and a perfect OSU game logo.
I almost decided to make an account just to participate in the new /r/place, but then I would be supporting Reddit.