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Comment by eieio | Hacker News Reader

author here :)

this is my favorite story from running the site, and possibly the best story I've ever been a part of. I'm not a big crier but I have cried so many times thinking and trying to write about it over the past 2 months. And of course, the process of discovery (and going from panic to excitement) was pretty crazy too.

One of my favorite things about this is that it validated one of the core beliefs I have when making these things - that you need constraints for the small group of people that are jerks, but that for the most part those constraints are fodder for the largely-good and very creative folks that play around on the internet.

Happy to answer any questions folks have!

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I had a massive "discussion" (argument) with a friend the other day, they were convinced that the internet is just a place full of trolling and nasty commentary and social media was the thing likely to ruin things for our children. My position was that if you spend your life looking at X, Facebook or whatever then, sure, it can seem a bit of a hellish landscape, but the Internet is and can be so much more than that.

This article is perhaps one of the finest examples of this and I applaud you massively for writing the site, looking at how people used it and then taking the time to share the experience.

It's made me really happy reading it and I'll be sharing it lots. A wonderful experiment, well played and much respect. :)

While you're right that the Internet contains a lot of wonder and exploration, the vast majority of people (and kids) will not interact much with that part of the Internet, if at all. Additionally, social media platforms have collapsed what would have been standalone, somewhat magical experiences into their own uniform platforms. I've heard someone say that kids today tend to think in terms of "apps" and not "websites", because rather than having everything scattered across a lot of small, independently maintained, websites, there are instead a few web apps that contain 99% of what you want to get at.

That means that if you really want to "surf" the web these days you have to dig deep and avoid getting sucked into a social media platform. And when you do dig deep there's not that much out there, because the people who would be maintaining their own web page now just have a facebook page for their business and a twitter account for their personal posts.

I was about to comment something similar but you said it so well - this is the internet at it's best, bringing people together to have fun in interesting ways. I remember when it was all like this, but you can still stumble across little moments like this

Thank you. I enjoyed the sense of play and this story more than anything I have read about the internet in a long time.

I am def burned out, and need to come up with something frivolous. I am reminded of Richard Feynman´s story of spending 10 years depressed after the war, and him finding joy of the physics in a spinning disk one day at lunch, so he could disregard what he had done before.

Speaking from experience: hang in there. It may seem irrecuperable. It may take a long time, but you will recover.

Best of luck to you.

I loved this. It's really.. endearing and adorable? And it's what I wish the internet was used for more.

Thanks for the writeup!

Fantastic telling of it in both text and video form. Great to celebrate these people doing the kinds of things we learned so much from! Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the great writeups, this one, the one about scaling, and your work in general. It's been very inspiring.

Also, you're absolutely right about largely good and creative people.

I built a OMCB clone because the concept possessed me; i threw it online, a day later, okay a couple of dicks, whatever. Holy shit someone put a huge Hokusai's The Great Wave in there! (My version uses a fixed width/height, a big scrollable canvas, so that was easy to spot)

Seeing that felt so good, so joyful :)

Perhaps you have said this elsewhere, but why shut the site down?

A few reasons!

  * More than anything, I think it's good for things to end! I figured interest in the site would die off over time (and it started to), and I thought it was better to close things out providing a special experience for the people that used it than to keep it up to get a few more users
  * Costs started adding up; donations stopped matching them. I coulda figured out how to lower my costs but I wasn't excited about it.
  * While the site was up I felt an obligation to make sure someone hadn't found some trivial workaround to deface the thing and I didn't want to do that anymore.

I'm very pro ephemeral stuff! So I feel good about the decision. But it's a good question.

I enthusiastically agree - and really all that matters is that you feel good about it. As a software engineer who's built (and shut down) many projects, I have always been envious of art forms in which the artist gets to create a piece of work and then "finish" it. We are often at the mercy of perpetual maintenance.

Well done and nice execution.

I don't think I've ever officially shut anything down. Endings are too sad for me.

Just because you've never officially shut anything down, things have still ended. May as well throw a party.

"More than anything, I think it's good for things to end"

You know who else said this (in spirit)? Bill Watterson, author of Calvin and Hobbes.

There are few other people I'd be proud to be in the company of :-).

also R.E.M.

My parents put it as “it’s best to quit while you’re having fun”. Took me years to appreciate it. I’ve passed it on to my kids. They’re finally starting to get it.

I wish they did that with The Simpsons lol

Your story brought a huge smile to my face. Thank you for sharing, those kids are alright.

Would you be willing to open source the backend code for this? Would love to take a look!

This is not what you're looking for, but I built something quite like OMCB to satisfy my curiosity: https://github.com/jarombouts/yougottaclick

This sounds like a perfect recipe for an episode of the Corecursive Podcast!

The messages used the fact that 1,000,000 = 1000 x 1000. But of course 1,000,000 has many other factorizations. Were there messages in any of those?

I guess next time you pick a prime (or a semiprime) if you want to make it harder (or easier) for people to guess a good shape!

The Discord URL message that eieio found could be found without relying on 1000x1000, imagery. The other pictures did described in the article did, though.

As for your question, the answer is yes. Bear in mind that the question you're asking is essentially the same as "if you resize your browser window so you can see a specific number of checkboxes per row, are there any drawings you can see?". And people definitely did draw stuff in widths other than 1000! It was just at a vastly smaller scale and done manually.

That said, I do want to try analyzing any available data to see what I can find, for sure.

That resonates with playing call of duty demo or something like that, free game and only one multiplayer map it was abused for loopholes and bugs because of lots of jerks in a small place and you know every pixel of the game.

Hi! I missed the site but I have enjoyed reading about it after. As much as I enjoyed the last article, I enjoyed this one even more.

Thank you for both the site and the articles.

Great and very emotional (at least for me) story. Thanks for sharing.

It's always nice to hear that internet is still fun for ppl

Never heard of the site til now. How did people start finding about it?

I remember it from a HN thread two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40800869

I'm spending too much time here.

This was really sweet to read. Thanks for sharing.

If you can believe it I found a hack in the early days of PayPal and I was able to buy anything for 1 penny when I was like 15. I just tested it in a couple of e-shops (that was the name back then) and it worked, but I cancelled the order just after checkout just to make sure I was not in the blame for anything coming home that was not expected by the family. Also I was scared of the FBI haha. The only thing I exploited this bug for was to buy all the computer e-books from one of the first publishers. I absolutely devoured the UNIX and x11 ones.

Excellent writeup! I'm curious, why did this scenario make you cry?

I'd guess tears of joy!

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