Moot's Canvas now public.
canv.as
canv.as
Since you have a "best of" list, what's your approach to slightly differing duplicates - such as stretched or re-compressed ones?
Also IMHO infinite scrollbars make for a terrible confusing and broken user experience.
Nice design apart from that though.
What I think Canvas lacks compared to 4chan's imageboards is actual discussion. I'm a regular 4channer and have been for years. Canvas emphasizes images at the expense of text posts. What I like about 4chan is the often amusing, roaming, and dare I say occasionally insightful conversations that take place. If 4chan is like a comic book, Canvas is just a stream of funny pictures. Not my thing, but could be fun for others.
Agree completely. It's something we're working on.
I realise one could make more blocks or size them larger (eg 1+LMB, 2+LMB) but I think the visual match of 3x3 blocks and the hand-eye-coordination works better this way.
Any thoughts?
pbhj
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1 - Left Mouse Button [Click]
I had more laughs per pic than browsing an imgur feed, if that means anything. I think I'm going to spend more time here!
We've talked about facebook based login, and were holding off because we intend to lift the facebook requirement, but there are enough people requesting the feature that we'll probably reconsider.
With images of obese kids with text like "OBJECTION" and "Don't you dare eat it!" and pictures of cats with text "YOU GONNA GET RAPED" and Katy Perry being green slimed with "HULK CAME" all on the front page, I'm failing to really understand where this site goes beyond 4chan with regard to money-making and becoming a truly public, widespread site. If I recall correctly, at TED Moot said that he, for obvious reasons due to the content of 4chan, was having trouble making the site really profitable.
Does prohibition of gore and porn images make Canvas suddenly more profitable than 4chan?
I can just see X company getting really upset when their ad is placed right next to some incredibly racist image/text that slipped through.
Time will tell, I guess.
That said, I've seen more OC on canvas in 5 minutes than I've seen on /b/ in 5 days. Quality is variable, but there certainly seems to be a creative drive there that's been missing from /b/ as of late.
However, for me even though I like the occasional laugh, I'd like for such a site to help clear out such memes and such from other sites (primarily reddit). The reason I'm torn is that as much as I think this is possible, I feel that the opposite may happen, as people now have a large source of repostable memes at their disposal.
I guess time will tell. Congrats on the site.
We'll optimize the mobile experience and devices will get better, so the HTML version will be good enough at some point. In the meantime we will, at some point, invest in mobile Canvas apps (Android and iOS).
On a different topic; I saw you speak at General Assembly last month and didn't have a chance to thank you then. The topic (Continuous Deployment) was pretty interesting and it was nice to see how you guys are implementing that at canv.as.
Maybe it's an experiment with identity. 4Chan is anonymous yet this site requires Facebook Connect. (Though it seems that FB won't be required after the beta.)
[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bubbly (so that we're clear about what I meant)
I don’t have any reason to be “already defensive” (I had never heard of this thing before today and I’m definitely not the target audience), and I agree with you that – given the demographic using the site – most of the content is pretty juvenile and uninteresting. But your criticism is mostly content free, and the tone reads as the sort of speculative petty sarcasm that I’d rather avoid on this site.
Anyway, I haven’t seen this idea before: what other site has a front page filled with tiled user-submitted pictures, which when clicked on open up a comment thread wherein each one can be remixed by other users? There are mediated “funny picture” sites like Can Has Cheezburger, and there are general-purpose discussion fora like 4chan and Reddit that include many “funny” pictures, but nothing especially like this current effort, that I’ve seen.
Funny pictures don’t really appeal to me (for that matter, I think the overwhelming majority of the content at facebook, youtube, twitter, reddit, and similar sites is also garbage), but I it’s always interesting to see what kinds of interfaces new community based sites come up with, what kinds of interactions they afford, and how that shapes users’ actions and contributions. There’s more to discuss here than “meh this sucks, it’s probably just a troll.”
And anyway, Canvas can't stay in public beta forever, can it?
I mean, is Volkswagen trolling VW Bug owners by pushing Audi as a mainstream luxury brand?
Bare in mind Moot created 4chan before its, should we say, "unique" community developed. It was originally an weeaboo style anime site, of sorts.
Moot doesn't necessarily like or hate the same things as the /b/tards do.
Something I think to keep in mind is, that making it easy for the non-artist and non-technical person to create and publish content removes a giant filter that would keep out a lot of trash. The effort "cost" of producing a remix of content is much lower now, so there's going to be more people with half-baked ideas creating garbage, and everyone will shit on them for posting it...bad experiences all around. Meanwhile, those people that would've still created and published good content (had the effort-cost been higher) may view Canvas as being too canned and immature for their time.
That's just my $0.02. Best of luck Moot, wish you had returned my emails :)
To me, the biggest part of the fun of internet image culture all over the web is that it's mostly generated and appreciated by people who aren't really artists. If you look at the lively amusing stuff popular on 4chan/Reddit/Tumblr over the past few years - rage comics, dogfort comics, advice animals, complex reaction images referring to six different memes all at once in a humorous way, and a zillion other innovations that are only fresh for a week each - a lot of this stuff is made with MS Paint, copy-and-paste, GIF makers, and rudimentary Photoshop skills. The culture is very much enriched by people who know what they're doing with a drawing tablet, but overall it's folk art for everyone on the web who has time on their hands, art that is messy and wild and funny.
Canvas does something pretty neat: it lowers the barrier to entry even more, which adds even more folk-energy to this primordial soup. But it means that Canvas needs really good organic filters so that the best stuff bubbles up to the top in a readable way, like it does on Reddit and even 4chan (after you learn how to read 4chan). Canvas does some of this already, but I'm hoping for seeing even more, easier, faster ways to have fun browsing it without being already deeply enmeshed in the community (or even if you've been enmeshed in it before but took a break for a few weeks and now feel entirely out of the loop, etc)...I'd be interested in seeing more "entry paths", more blog posts with bits of context/explanation/decoding, and maybe also a lighter-page-weight option for browsing around (since I'm stuck on slow internet connections more often than I'd like).
I think I just found God. He was hiding in the canvas.