Hacker News Reader

Comment by drivers99 | Hacker News Reader

Scrolled down randomly, found a swastika, clicked back.

On the old internet, there was a rule, which was, "if you let users create dicks and swastikas, they're going to create dicks and swastikas".

Worked in a games company in the early(ish) days of UGC - we (and I'm sure we weren't alone) dubbed it the "Swasticock problem"

Honestly that was one of my first thoughts when I saw this, someone is going to draw one of those. People love trying to be offensive in something that barely allows communication. I remember seeing some MMORPG that had no chat where players would log in and just stand in the shape of a swastika.

Makes me wonder if it's reasonable to write an algorithm to detect that.

Which MMO was that in? I'm working on my own and now I have a new worry on my plate. Short of standard moderation, an algorithm to detect it could be interesting.

Took me a while to remember the name, it was Habbo. The swastikas are mentioned on the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo

You could search for the article about how the Lego mmo (or that's what i think it was) was shut down, then stop worrying about it. Unless you want to spend the rest of your natural life on detecting penises, swastikas and everything else. I mean, everything is offensive to someone.

I realized it would be easy enough to detect when certain lines are forming and manually shuffling the players a few spots, but your comment made me smile. Somewhere in there is the start of a biography title.

I built a grid-based music sequencer for the web a while ago that lets people see projects other people made in a side panel.

I very quickly realized I needed some manual content moderation because some people immediately started sharing patterns that looked like dicks and swastikas lol

Paternalism at its finest.

Here's an extra part of the spec: Deliberately there is no correct WWW browser window width. So you'll also have to account for the swastika writers using a whole range of window widths.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40801007

People draw these things precisely because of this kind of pearl clutching overreaction

Reply on news.ycombinator.com