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:
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.
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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:
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.
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.
My own personal joke is likely to endure for dozens of years, possibly for the remainder of human history, because no one reads the citations? I’m a little proud of that.
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.
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.
/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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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. "wmen" or "gmers") but it just makes what you're write ever so slightly harder to understand. And for what benefit?
Censored words are much more likely to be ambiguous. I wasn't referring to that specific example but now you mention it, p_n_s does take a fraction longer to understand than penis.
And no-one is talking about taking away people's freedom. You can write all your emails in all caps if you want, but we can discourage people from doing that.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
I remember finding it in early 10's and posting link on a local forum - people organized and started writing crazy and fun things here, like a minimap or a two-page-ASCII-tank.
It was one of my first realtime collaborative experiences in the internet and it was magical at the time, i still believe that services like Miro grew out of World of Text.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...