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Comment by Starlevel004 | Hacker News Reader

> I believe what is happening is that those images are being drawn by some script-kiddies. If I understand correctly, the website limited everyone to 1 pixel per 30 seconds, so I guess everyone was just scripting Puppeteer/Chromium to start a new browser, click a pixel, and close the browser, possibly with IP address rotation, but maybe that wasn't even needed.

I think you perhaps underestimate just how big of a thing this became basically overnight. I mentioned a drawing over my house to a few people and literally everyone instantly knew what I meant without even saying the website. People love /r/place style things every few years, and this having such a big canvas and being on a world map means that there is a lot of space for everyone to draw literally where they live.

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It's also way more than 1px/30s -- Its like 20px/30s and you have a "tank" of them, which you can expand to however big you want.

Placing pixels gives you points, which you can turn into more pixels or a bigger bag of pixels over time. I've seen people who have done enough pixel pushing that they get 3-4K pixels at a time.

> I think you perhaps underestimate just how big of a thing this became basically overnight.

They don’t need to estimate because in the article they talked to the site and got their traffic numbers: An estimated 2 million users.

That’s 1500 requests per user, which implies a lot of scripting is going on.

> I think you perhaps underestimate just how big of a thing this became basically overnight. I mentioned a drawing over my house to a few people and literally everyone instantly knew what I meant without even saying the website.

On the other hand, this is the first I've heard of this thing.

I have known about this kind of pixel drawing but it was on empty canvas.

They have the user count from the dev, 2 million daily users shouldn't be generating billions of requests unless a good portion of them are botting.

Why not? This is tile requests right, not login requests or something, so shouldn't a single user be expected to consume a few thousand zipping around the map while looking at drawings overlaid?

I'm sure there is some botting, it's basically guaranteed, but I wouldn't be surprised if nearly half the traffic was "legitimate". The bots don't normally need to reload (or even load) the map tiles anyways.

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