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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

    > the obvious desire for transgressive expression by drawing dicks and slurs

this truly is fascinating, that the common denominator of any anonymous, open space for creative expression seems to always be large amounts of doodled dicks... Are there any studies on this?

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I've seen it mentioned somewhere this is known as TTD - Time To Dick - as the amount of time elapsed between releasing a drawing tool in the open and someone using it to draw a dick.

corollary: the mean TTD is inversely proportional to the amount of anonymity granted by the medium

Back in the very early days of online meetings (I’m talking pre-WebEx) I joined a global corporate meeting utilising a new meeting platform.

A few minutes into the presentation, someone discovered annotation tools were freely available.

After a few minutes of increasing experimentation, it then dawned on people that the annotations were completely anonymous.

From that point, TTD was short.

I'm writing a second part of this post right now - about the differences in how separate online communities are drawing horses. There are clear differences in richness of detail, drawing mastery, but also in the amount of dicks drawn. My suspicion that people with more drawing experience draw less dicks simply because they already have drawn all the dicks previously. While people with an untrained drawing muscle perhaps fall back to these easy and familiar shapes. Drawing a horse is hard.

People draw horses because they want to draw horses.

People draw dicks because they feel it’s funnier, it’s a form of rebellion, and/or it’s way easier than almost anything else. And because they can without repercussion.

I understand all that, but how would you explain that 8,6% of drawings from people coming from HN were dicks, while visitors from Tumblr would draw dicks only in 1,6% of the cases? My guess is that people from Tumblr already explored a lot of the transgressions, so it does not interest them much - just like "potty talk phase" stops being interesting after your reach a certain age.

> people coming from HN were dicks

I think you answered your question

Could we hypothesise a different gender ratio from Tumbler vs. HN?

Follow-up: Sexual activity predictability via analysis of preffered social media platforms.

Let's call it unpaid software testing team :) People want to know how good is your filtering.

Anecdote time: Last year my wife asked ChatGPT to make a multiple choice test to learn some Biology topic. I arrived and she showed the test to me. The options were a, b, c or d. I wrote e to see what happens :) ChatGPT gave a good reply explaining that I made a mistake :(

Indeed, I think this is how it starts. However the filtering system does not indicate to the user if their drawing was filtered - otherwise it would turn into a "trick the system" game - a whole different genre. So the visitor always gets the satisfaction of seeing their penis galloping on the horizon. Still, many if not most penis artists then continue to add more and more lewd drawings. So it's not just a test but some other behaviour. Coming from Hacker News, they might feel like a hacker, a rebel breaking the system. And that's fine - after all there are not many ways in a society where you can feel this way and not hurt anyone.

https://rybakov.com/blog/how_do_people_draw_horses/

I see that you posted the same words on your blog but left out comparing HackerNews users to children aged 8 to 10. On purpose?

It's the other way around - I integrated some things I wrote in the comments here into the blog post. I'm still writing the post though - it's not easy to hypothesize about people's intention without sounding like an ass.

not exactly, but there are quotes and aphorisms

https://medium.com/luminasticity/90-crap-48e4c79419a9

"In every time and environment that humans found they could make art by drawing on some surface there has always been one fellow in the community who found he could let people know what a big dick he had by making a rendering available for everybody else in his distribution channel

This base level of dick drawings to other artistic forms represent the minimal level of crap in all aesthetic production."

I have a feeling that being transgressive is universal, but the form of expression is cultural, with independent convergence to some common patterns.

For instance, in Romania I've noticed that the slang term for penis is written far more frequently than a crude drawing of it. I've also seen probably more drawn breasts than dicks as well.

>I have a feeling that being transgressive is universal

It certainly must be, no? Why would we have to culturally encode taboos and legally enforce particular behavior if not for a persistant presence of transgressive behavior?

No one would have sat down to write: "Any person may possess any number of live frogs to use in frog-jumping contests, but if such a frog dies or is killed, it must be destroyed as soon as possible, and may not be eaten or otherwise used for any purpose." (CA Fish & Game Code § 6883) unless there were in fact people eating their war-frogs AND people who believed that said war-frogs deserved proper funeral rites.

I love that dicks are a feature of graffiti even going to ancient times. Pompeii's walls are covered with dicks.

The oldest example I know of is Hadrian's Wall from ~1700 years ago engraved with a larger than life example.

If carved stone phalluses count, Pompeii has loads of those[0] which would knock the date back a few hundred years.

[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/stone-phalluses-of-pompe...

Amazing. Apparently they used to draw them for luck!

"In Roman Britain, the phallus (often called the fascinum) was a symbol of protection. It was believed to ward off the evil eye, bring luck and guard people, buildings and journeys from harm. On the empire’s northern frontier, it also made a diplomatic statement: Rome was here, with its symbols; and Rome was in control."

A quote from this article: https://www.zmescience.com/science/archaeology/phalluses-rom...

>Amazing. Apparently they used to draw them for luck!

Damn, missed a shot on "Fascinating, apparently they used to..."

I had to look it up to be sure, but fascinating does indeed derive from fascinum.

1. Fascinum = protective phallic charm (object)

2. Fascinare = to exert the magical power of such a charm (action/spell)

3. Fascinate = to hold someone's attention irresistibly, as if casting a spell (metaphorical)

4. Fascinating = inherently gripping, captivating, exciting (modern adjective)

Meaning, kind of, that 'fascinating' means 'as captivating/hypnotic as a penis'

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