My first reaction to this, and especially to the "hn" wall, was: this is very cool, we can all collaboratively write some weird/interesting/funny stuff and overall it's going to be artful and inspiring in some way.
Of course, that's not how it turned out.
I've been looking at the "hn" wall there periodically for a while now, and it's interesting because you can see what becomes of people when they're acting anonymously - even when they come from a relatively tightly selected non-anonymous group.
The vast majority of edits are what I would characterize as destructive, because they have one or more of these properties:
- deleting or defacing stuff other people wrote
- leaving boastful remarks on the size of their penis
- posting hate speech, including misogynistic and racist comments
- posting ASCII pornography
- filling the page with kilobytes of garbage
What's surprising to me is we're not exactly a group of random 10 year olds, yet that's what we revert to when we think we're not accountable. Here's a piece of (relatively?) intact dialogue from that wall summing it up:
"<- and somehow we wonder why there are so few women in programming "
"No, that is due to innate sex differences. Read up."
"Yeah right, it can't possibly have anything to do with crap like this"
"It's both, but mostly innate. It's the same with race.
Look up race and IQ studies. (OMG! Did I just say that?!?!)"
"The more relevant question is would you say it with your HN
username attached to that comment?"
"Of course not. The Matriarchy would eat me alive. "
While this is all very depressing, I've also seen users who balance all of this out. There are (or have been at some point) a lot of entertaining posts and short exchanges on that wall, but to me the most amazing thing is there seem to be people who actually clean up the mess and try to preserve the good content. Of course they don't stand a chance, but it's good to know they exist.
(THERE IS ONLY LISP)
and
GROW VAT MEAT!
/\_/\
____/ o o \
/~____ =ø= /
(______)__m_m)
I DEMAND
VEGAN FOOD!
rich hickey is frowning upon your shenanigans!
Are the comments you're quoting really hate speech? They seem to not be, and they are pretty mild as far as internet misogyny and racism go, no doubt because of where the posters came from.
Speaking generally, this is more evidence that anonymous internet communities that prioritize short messages converge towards /b/, which is to say, trolling and pornography. What was unusual was seeing an anonymous and less-so comment platform interact. I found the anonymous scrutinizing of one particular user's behavior and the calls for his ban discomforting.
"(OMG! Did I just say that?!?!)"
"Of course not. The Matriarchy would eat me alive. "
Anon got a point there. These studies do exist, but we don't talk about them because Everyone Knows that only Bad People believe things like that. And once you are a Bad Person there is no shortage of people who will go to great lengths to silence you, lest you spread your Doubleplusungood Crimethink.
Yeah definitely the inspiration. Some of the things I didn't like was the editing ability of text. If I made a typo I would have to rewrite it. Also colours!
This is amazing. Just thought about this idea a few days ago and boom! It exists! Would love to see support to embed any html (think youtube videos) every text area stored as a file on dropbox, support for right to left...
Neat! I like how it appears to have an 'infinite' capacity for expansion in any direction, though I don't know if that's a good or a bad design choice. (Could a constraint be creatively beneficial in this case?) This also seems like a good use case for ASCII art. (If you need one: I've made an image->ASCII converter you can download at www.github.com/datamine/ASCII-IMG)
Edit:
I made a quick walloftext page. I foolishly shared the link here on HN. I regret not recording a video of the mayhem as people began to pour in and edit the wall. People started having little conversations on some parts of the wall. Other people defaced them. It was all-around chaotic, like a full IRC channel with no moderation. It's really an interesting form of communication, and it was very cool to see it unfold. (Sort of like watching Twitch plays Pokemon.)
Oh this is too cool and I would love to hear more of how you did it. What is your backend? Firebase or something?
I made an iPad app (soonish to be universal) called Mindscope which has a similar "wall" idea but when you tap text, it opens up a sub-wall for that piece of text, which enables outliner-like navigation. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-mind-mapping-outli...
I've been considering what I could do to make a web app version of it, but web development is not my strong suit (yet).
I'd like to encourage you to do that, as well as explain more about the infinite canvas implementation, the payload that gets saved, and maybe even alternative implementations you have considered and why you didn't go with them.
I've noticed that most of these walls have an endstate of penises.
No matter how interesting or artful it was, there is always a human drive to defile and debase. Or we start out there because that's all we can do when faced with an empty wall. It's an interesting experiment though.
I would like some simple OneNote like editor (place text and other elements on infinite canvas anywhere) that would run in the browser and produce clean html... sadly the OneNote web version is nowhere near that...
I did this same thing back around 2006. I shut it down, since I figured there's no value to it.
One cool thing that I had on there that you might want to add is little flags next to the texts so you could see where everybody's coming from around the world.
Not sure why I got down voted. I wasn't trying to be mean. I just thought it was funny how similar the idea was and wanted to give a suggestion. I hate when people down vote and don't explain their reason.
There's nothing special about it really. Blobs of text have a grid position, then I set the CSS left/top properties to gridX * gridWidth etc and the scrolling is done by CSS translate on the parent container div. The browser handles it all for me
Ah, that's why I can never find the kind of app I'm looking for (this). I keep using the keyword "canvas" but I can see how "wall" makes more sense. I guess I'll be busy googling tonight.
Of course, that's not how it turned out.
I've been looking at the "hn" wall there periodically for a while now, and it's interesting because you can see what becomes of people when they're acting anonymously - even when they come from a relatively tightly selected non-anonymous group.
The vast majority of edits are what I would characterize as destructive, because they have one or more of these properties:
What's surprising to me is we're not exactly a group of random 10 year olds, yet that's what we revert to when we think we're not accountable. Here's a piece of (relatively?) intact dialogue from that wall summing it up: While this is all very depressing, I've also seen users who balance all of this out. There are (or have been at some point) a lot of entertaining posts and short exchanges on that wall, but to me the most amazing thing is there seem to be people who actually clean up the mess and try to preserve the good content. Of course they don't stand a chance, but it's good to know they exist.