Show HN: Wall of Text

My first reaction to this, and especially to the "hn" wall, was: this is very cool, we can all collaboratively write some weird/interesting/funny stuff and overall it's going to be artful and inspiring in some way.

Of course, that's not how it turned out.

I've been looking at the "hn" wall there periodically for a while now, and it's interesting because you can see what becomes of people when they're acting anonymously - even when they come from a relatively tightly selected non-anonymous group.

The vast majority of edits are what I would characterize as destructive, because they have one or more of these properties:

  - deleting or defacing stuff other people wrote
  - leaving boastful remarks on the size of their penis
  - posting hate speech, including misogynistic and racist comments
  - posting ASCII pornography
  - filling the page with kilobytes of garbage

What's surprising to me is we're not exactly a group of random 10 year olds, yet that's what we revert to when we think we're not accountable. Here's a piece of (relatively?) intact dialogue from that wall summing it up:

  "<- and somehow we wonder why there are so few women in programming "
  "No, that is due to innate sex differences. Read up."
  "Yeah right, it can't possibly have anything to do with crap like this"
  "It's both, but mostly innate. It's the same with race. 
   Look up race and IQ studies. (OMG! Did I just say that?!?!)"
  "The more relevant question is would you say it with your HN 
   username attached to that comment?"
  "Of course not. The Matriarchy would eat me alive. "

While this is all very depressing, I've also seen users who balance all of this out. There are (or have been at some point) a lot of entertaining posts and short exchanges on that wall, but to me the most amazing thing is there seem to be people who actually clean up the mess and try to preserve the good content. Of course they don't stand a chance, but it's good to know they exist.

http://www.yourworldoftext.com/ has been doing something similar for about the last five years.

Neat! I like how it appears to have an 'infinite' capacity for expansion in any direction, though I don't know if that's a good or a bad design choice. (Could a constraint be creatively beneficial in this case?) This also seems like a good use case for ASCII art. (If you need one: I've made an image->ASCII converter you can download at www.github.com/datamine/ASCII-IMG)

Edit:

I made a quick walloftext page. I foolishly shared the link here on HN. I regret not recording a video of the mayhem as people began to pour in and edit the wall. People started having little conversations on some parts of the wall. Other people defaced them. It was all-around chaotic, like a full IRC channel with no moderation. It's really an interesting form of communication, and it was very cool to see it unfold. (Sort of like watching Twitch plays Pokemon.)

Oh this is too cool and I would love to hear more of how you did it. What is your backend? Firebase or something?

I made an iPad app (soonish to be universal) called Mindscope which has a similar "wall" idea but when you tap text, it opens up a sub-wall for that piece of text, which enables outliner-like navigation. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-mind-mapping-outli...

I've been considering what I could do to make a web app version of it, but web development is not my strong suit (yet).

From the help text on a black page (if you're visiting a busy page where the text has been overwritten):

Welcome to your wall of text. Click anywhere and start typing.

- Click and drag white-space to pan the board.

- Click and drag text to move the blob.

- Shift + Click text to select the entire blob.

- Click text to select a blob.

- Click buttons on the left to style selected blob.

I've noticed that most of these walls have an endstate of penises.

No matter how interesting or artful it was, there is always a human drive to defile and debase. Or we start out there because that's all we can do when faced with an empty wall. It's an interesting experiment though.

I would like some simple OneNote like editor (place text and other elements on infinite canvas anywhere) that would run in the browser and produce clean html... sadly the OneNote web version is nowhere near that...

I remember something like this. I wrote a bot to play the game of life on it by interacting with the undocumented javascript via chrome's console.

Apologies if it's down or slow, it's currently running on a micro instance.

Cool project! What were the best use cases you had in mind for this?

I did this same thing back around 2006. I shut it down, since I figured there's no value to it.

One cool thing that I had on there that you might want to add is little flags next to the texts so you could see where everybody's coming from around the world.

how is it possible that the canvas seems to be infinite area?

Cool idea but very buggy

Ah, that's why I can never find the kind of app I'm looking for (this). I keep using the keyword "canvas" but I can see how "wall" makes more sense. I guess I'll be busy googling tonight.