[HN Gopher] World of Text is an infinite grid of text editable b...
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World of Text is an infinite grid of text editable by any visitor
Author : throwaway47292
Score : 128 points
Date : 2021-12-16 09:01 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.yourworldoftext.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.yourworldoftext.com)
| literallyaduck wrote:
| Hope you don't mind me using it as a database with base64 storage
| blobs.
| Lapsa wrote:
| Loading...
| xhrpost wrote:
| Neat coding challenge. You get the benefit of something rather
| simple and straight forward while getting to spend more focus on
| how to scale such a system.
| PikachuEXE wrote:
| Is there more "shared message board" type of websites you know?
|
| Or "multiple notes" version of this website.
|
| Edit:
|
| Also reminds me of an unmanaged creative Minecraft word on a
| server. Near centre = lots of crazy stuff, further away = fewer
| but sometimes bigger stuff.
| depaya wrote:
| 2b2t is the famous one.
| omnibrain wrote:
| Check out https://manyland.com
|
| It's a public 2d game with an editable world.
| [deleted]
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| https://burrow.jollo.org (view source to see controls)
| com2kid wrote:
| About 20 years ago there was a game called Incarnations. It was
| a 2d style "build your own house" game but with amazing high
| quality artwork. Players made some incredibly lovely scenes.
|
| I haven't seen anything like it since. An prototype MMO
| designed solely around making things look lovely.
| bdr wrote:
| Creator here. Your World of Text was launched via HN 12 years
| ago! Seems today's traffic took the server down, but we're back
| now.
|
| There's a great, recent podcast episode covering the history of
| the site, including "the line" mentioned in another top-level
| comment:
| https://www.cultorjustweird.com/episodes/episode/1d3933d1/s2...
| RhetoricX wrote:
| This reminds me of the old wide-open, raw HTML experimental wiki
| Metababy:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metababy
|
| As you might expect, as it became better known, it got filled
| with increasingly extreme and offensive material.
| earthbee wrote:
| I was literally trying to find this yesterday but couldn't
| remember the name. Thank you!
|
| It's nice seeing some of the stuff I wrote on less trafficked
| pages or far from the centre on popular pages is still there
| after ten years!
| qsort wrote:
| Everything world-editable is eventually filled with depictions of
| genitals and N-words. Must be a theorem.
| kabdib wrote:
| Quick story.
|
| As I understand it, the UI folks at Nintendo who were working
| on the Wii controller did user testing, of course. In one test,
| they would hand a new user a controller wand with instructions
| to "Just draw stuff on the screen" using a simple drawing
| program.
|
| The metric Nintendo came up with was called TTP, or the how
| long in minutes and seconds -- sometimes, only seconds --
| before the user drew the inevitable male genitals. "Time To
| P-n-s". Averaged something like two or three minutes.
|
| Every new vista humankind opens will be so decorated. And so,
| World of Text: QED. :-)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's ok to write out penis, we're all adults here.
| schnebbau wrote:
| Unless he meant PUNKS, and people have been drawing dudes
| rocking out with spikes and mohawks?
| djrockstar1 wrote:
| It should also be okay to write words in a censored form if
| the writer wishes.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Not if it prevents the point from being made. Which in
| this case it has. And then detracts from the post
| altogether. Which it also has.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| In what ways?
| boomlinde wrote:
| Is it really censorship, though? You insist on conveying
| the meaning of the word, which is what is offensive if
| anything. By omitting a couple of letters you've only
| saved us from its exact spelling.
|
| For example, "fuck you" is offensive because it's rude,
| vulgar and expresses contempt, not because of how exactly
| "fuck" is spelled. "F-ck you" is still rude and vulgar
| because it conveys the exact same meaning. The only
| difference to the recipient of such a request is that
| it's slightly more annoying to read, an annoyance that is
| surely dwarfed by the offense taken to the rude and
| vulgar meaning, and its intent as an expression of
| contempt.
|
| It's better described as the exact opposite, a sort of a
| censorship _circumvention_ ; you can omit or replace a
| few letters to get past dumb word filters or comply with
| poorly worded courtesy policies and still convey the
| meaning to humans. Where no such filters and policies are
| in place, it's pointless.
|
| A scary thought is that we may be so conditioned by
| machines and machine-like policies that our means to
| circumvent them now occur to us naturally even in
| contexts where they don't make a difference.
| I_complete_me wrote:
| I would like to upvote this comment for it's clarity of
| thinking.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| This sort of censorship has been going on for a long
| time. For example 'oh fiddlesticks'. They are still
| swearing. But some sort of odd self censorship happened.
|
| It is an interesting exercise for me. Try not to swear.
| No substitutes allowed. It is oddly difficult for me.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| I think we should be discouraging that kind of self-
| censorship for all but the worst words. Not only do
| people start to use it for ridiculous political posturing
| (e.g. "w _men " or "g_mers") but it just makes what
| you're write ever so slightly harder to understand. And
| for what benefit?
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| How is the original comment harder to understand?
|
| If there is one freedom people have is to control their
| language, wether to avoid certain words or to utter words
| that other find silly.
| Kranar wrote:
| They are welcome to avoid certain words, and I am welcome
| to criticize it.
| philovivero wrote:
| In a previous sentence they mentioned TTP, then they
| mentioned P-n-s. I thought this was another acronym of
| sorts. Like "Posts not sexy" or whatever. I spent a
| couple seconds to figure out what it meant, failed, and
| just moved on.
|
| Figured out what it was supposed to mean from the
| replies.
| bobmichael wrote:
| GP didn't imply it wasn't!
| scubbo wrote:
| Only by a strictly-literal, context-free reading.
| Symbiote wrote:
| It seems odd to write "genitals" but not write "penis".
|
| H-w f-- -an we t-k- wr--i-g -ord- in a -ens--r-d f-rm?
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| If my children are remotely average (sometimes I wonder)
| then kids know about penises as well.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| heck, around half of them even have one!
| samsolomon wrote:
| I took the comment that 'Time to PNS' was a kind of code
| name for the metric at Nintendo. Honestly, I think that's
| hilarious.
|
| Edit: TTP is the metric name. Sorry, it's early.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Could also have been TTPP
| globular-toast wrote:
| Did they only test it on men, or do women draw penises too?
| mysterydip wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised the first astronauts on the moon
| didn't draw one with their finger in the dust.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Maybes there's a patch of the moon dust that they all
| agreed to never photograph, where they drew all the boobs
| and dicks.
|
| Imagine: aliens get the Arecibo message but don't quite
| know what to make of it, until they see the boobs and dicks
| drawn on the moon and they correlate it with their own
| crass fascination with reproductive organs, and only then
| do they recognize humanity as a self-aware species.
|
| That, or they just smudged it out after doing it.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| How do you know they didn't?
| Laremere wrote:
| Reddit's /r/place is perhaps an interesting counter example. It
| started that way, but as space on the image grew tight and
| contested, all of that kind of stuff went away. Towards the
| middle and end, the only significant images were those which
| could get enough people on board to maintain, and people tend
| to care more about other stuff, it seems.
|
| I'd say it comes down to the balance of (# of people who make a
| positive impact * difficulty of positive impact) vs the same
| for negative impact.
|
| Wikipedia is another example. Sure plenty of people make stupid
| edits, but enough effort is put into detecting and immediately
| reverting the vandalism that the effort required to properly
| vandalize it quickly goes beyond the effort most people will go
| for a stupid joke.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| /r/place was weeeeeiiird. It figured there'd be some trolls,
| but not massive troll brigades intent on spreading every form
| of hate the world has seen from the last century. The number
| of people that were involved was in the 100,000's battling to
| control the content.
|
| If I let myself wax poetic, I saw /r/place as a proxy for the
| coming internet faction wars: WW3 won't be fought by
| countries, it will be fought by internet factions.
| Retric wrote:
| For good or ill, I don't think Wikipedia qualifies as
| globally editable anymore.
| culi wrote:
| the majority of wikipedia is still editable without even
| having an account
| chalst wrote:
| Not all pages are, and quite a few IP ranges are blocked,
| but there is plenty of content being added by non-logged-in
| editors.
| Retric wrote:
| Yes, editable != globally editable.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy
|
| On top of this, bots such as ClueBot will most dong
| postings on even less trafficked locations.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClueBot_NG
| earthboundkid wrote:
| My vandalism from 2011 is still up though, thanks to
| being protected by a bogus citation. :-)
| tptacek wrote:
| A weird thing to be proud of.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| The last two apartments I lived in had Comcast and the
| IPs were banned from editing. Very weird.
| kple wrote:
| like the swedish flag
| Jenk wrote:
| and programmability. Most publically manipulable stuff only
| gets hijacked by a few people with a bit of time and a few
| scripts. PitBull/Bieber "Where to perform next?" online
| polls, that ML Twitter bot MS recalled (was it Tammy or
| something?) etc were all attacked by spam bot style flooding
| of votes and messages to poison the data, and it's a lot
| easier to just spam incoherent unpleasantries than it is to
| spam coherent substantial messages.
|
| AFAIK Reddit's /r/space didn't have any obvious vectors of
| attack so after the 1,000th manual entry of the n-word the
| trolls just got bored.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _that ML Twitter bot MS recalled (was it Tammy or
| something?)_
|
| Tay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
| Laremere wrote:
| Plenty of people used bots on /r/place, but there were two
| mitigating factors: 1. You could only make a single pixel
| change once every (iirc) 5 minutes. 2. Only user accounts
| created before the (entirely unannounced) event could
| participate, preventing people bypassing the time limit
| with more accounts.
| Jenk wrote:
| Spam mitigation by rate limiting and preventing account
| cycling :)
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Oddly enough, the first thing I saw was a giant ASCII penis
| saying "good morning citizen, do you want to be my friend?"
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| This page seems to says that users can claim parts of the grid
| and make them members only. This would prevent some trolling.
| https://www.yourworldoftext.com/~Help/3
| smitty1e wrote:
| This is a Rule 34 corollary.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34
| majkinetor wrote:
| And everything that has avatar and chat will be used for
| mingling eventually.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Ah the famous MTTP (mean time to penis) metric!
| jhgb wrote:
| > Everything world-editable is eventually filled with
| depictions of genitals and N-words. Must be a theorem.
|
| Boltzmann's Black Dick?
| dusted wrote:
| It's just saying "Loading..." Both in Firefox and chrome
| DrinkWater wrote:
| Blank page and loads of errors in the console: Firefox can't
| establish a connection to the server at
| wss://www.yourworldoftext.com/ws/.
| djrockstar1 wrote:
| 37 minutes and already hugged to death :(
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Working for me, although it did take a while to load.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Can't connect to the websocket, for me
|
| Websocket based websites seem to suffer for this massively. I
| wonder if there's a better way or a better way of doing
| websockets. How many websocket connections can a single host
| reasonable handle?
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Depends on the implementation:
|
| https://matttomasetti.medium.com/websocket-performance-
| compa...
|
| https://hashrocket.com/blog/posts/websocket-shootout
| tyingq wrote:
| Those links are odd because they label the websocket
| implementations with the language they were written in,
| rather than the name of the (often 3rd party) library.
| Where there's more than one choice of library for the
| language.
| kple wrote:
| You crashed it: can't establish a connection to the server at
| wss://www.yourworldoftext.com/ws/
| sizediterable wrote:
| There's a Scrabble version of this that's free to play
|
| https://spellingquest.online
|
| If you prefer playing as an app over in a browser
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1086630/Spelling_Quest_On...
| usrbinbash wrote:
| A cool idea in theory.
|
| However, loads waaaay to long at least for me. I guess some
| better caching may be required.
| majkinetor wrote:
| This one from 2005 used pixels, and sold them for $1/pixel:
|
| http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
| _hao wrote:
| It's a bit sad that most of those links are now dead.
| [deleted]
| furyg3 wrote:
| I don't know if the "rent pixel ads" guy is insane or
| brilliant.
| justusthane wrote:
| Probably not insane...the guy who created it, Alex Tew, also
| founded Calm.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Clever idea at the right time, and it got a lot of media
| attention. There were a lot of copycats that sprung up left
| and right, but they weren't as successful.
|
| It's an interesting concept as well because the guy could
| just hand-edit the image and link map, no need to write
| software to manage it.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| Brilliant.
| hairofadog wrote:
| At some point during the early days of this site someone started
| drawing a very long ascii line which you could scroll for many
| many hours and not reach the end of. It became a satirical - or
| who knows these days, maybe literal - cult. Here's the best
| summary I can find with a few minutes of lazy searching:
|
| https://yourworldoftext.fandom.com/wiki/The_True_Diagonal
|
| I seem to remember someone posting a screenshot of a short
| inspirational essay you would find if you reached the end, but
| looking around it seems like folks are posting various different
| screenshots of what's at the end, so I suppose that adds to the
| mythology a little bit.
|
| --
|
| Edit: I found the screenshot of the essay in my filesystem so
| there's no context, but for whatever it's worth here it is:
|
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc...
| marcellus23 wrote:
| This reminds me of an old minecraft server I played on which
| had a Great Northern Road that someone started building, and
| was continued by various people. You could just walk on it for
| hours, through caves, over seas, through mountains... with inns
| along the way, and scenic overlooks. There was something really
| special about that, and about extending it when I reached the
| end. I didn't even play on that server for more than a few
| days, but that memory is still stuck in my mind.
| [deleted]
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-
| buc...
|
| Beautiful. thank you for sharing that.
| diimdeep wrote:
| Previously submitted:
|
| - Your World of Text, my current side project. Requires FF3+ or
| Safari 4, I think. (August 5, 2009 -- 136 points, 71 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742268
| pcmaffey wrote:
| I made an infinitely expanding tile-art game with the same
| general MMO principles. Kindof an evolution of r/place... except
| the canvas expands logarithmically every day. While the number of
| tiles you get each day grows linearly.
|
| It's just sitting there growing without anyone using it, lol
| (probably because it requires signup).
|
| https://www.oroboria.com
| dmonitor wrote:
| You should scale the size of the canvas based on the number of
| unique signups.
| tony-allan wrote:
| A fun website!
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(page generated 2021-12-16 23:01 UTC)