World of Text is an infinite grid of text editable by any visitor
yourworldoftext.com
yourworldoftext.com
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.
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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:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc...
Beautiful. thank you for sharing that.
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.
I've randomly found several, and I'm just one person.
On top of this, bots such as ClueBot will most dong postings on even less trafficked locations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClueBot_NG
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.
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. :-)
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.
It is an interesting exercise for me. Try not to swear. No substitutes allowed. It is oddly difficult for me.
H-w f-- -an we t-k- wr--i-g -ord- in a -ens--r-d f-rm?
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.
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.
Figured out what it was supposed to mean from the replies.
Edit: TTP is the metric name. Sorry, it’s early.
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.
Boltzmann's Black Dick?
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...
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.
- 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
It’s just sitting there growing without anyone using it, lol (probably because it requires signup).
If you prefer playing as an app over in a browser
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1086630/Spelling_Quest_On...
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.
Edit: couldn't find the forum post but found the tweet, wow, it was more than a decade ago https://twitter.com/anVlad11/status/23055592331 . Were old pages wiped?
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.
I haven't seen anything like it since. An prototype MMO designed solely around making things look lovely.
It's a public 2d game with an editable world.
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!
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?
https://matttomasetti.medium.com/websocket-performance-compa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metababy
As you might expect, as it became better known, it got filled with increasingly extreme and offensive material.
However, loads waaaay to long at least for me. I guess some better caching may be required.