I'd say it comes down to the balance of (# of people who make a positive impact * difficulty of positive impact) vs the same for negative impact.
Wikipedia is another example. Sure plenty of people make stupid edits, but enough effort is put into detecting and immediately reverting the vandalism that the effort required to properly vandalize it quickly goes beyond the effort most people will go for a stupid joke.
AFAIK Reddit's /r/space didn't have any obvious vectors of attack so after the 1,000th manual entry of the n-word the trolls just got bored.
If I let myself wax poetic, I saw /r/place as a proxy for the coming internet faction wars: WW3 won't be fought by countries, it will be fought by internet factions.
As I understand it, the UI folks at Nintendo who were working on the Wii controller did user testing, of course. In one test, they would hand a new user a controller wand with instructions to "Just draw stuff on the screen" using a simple drawing program.
The metric Nintendo came up with was called TTP, or the how long in minutes and seconds -- sometimes, only seconds -- before the user drew the inevitable male genitals. "Time To P-n-s". Averaged something like two or three minutes.
Every new vista humankind opens will be so decorated. And so, World of Text: QED. :-)
Boltzmann's Black Dick?
It's an interesting concept as well because the guy could just hand-edit the image and link map, no need to write software to manage it.
Or "multiple notes" version of this website.
Edit:
Also reminds me of an unmanaged creative Minecraft word on a server. Near centre = lots of crazy stuff, further away = fewer but sometimes bigger stuff.
I haven't seen anything like it since. An prototype MMO designed solely around making things look lovely.
It's a public 2d game with an editable world.
Websocket based websites seem to suffer for this massively. I wonder if there's a better way or a better way of doing websockets. How many websocket connections can a single host reasonable handle?
https://matttomasetti.medium.com/websocket-performance-compa...
https://yourworldoftext.fandom.com/wiki/The_True_Diagonal
I seem to remember someone posting a screenshot of a short inspirational essay you would find if you reached the end, but looking around it seems like folks are posting various different screenshots of what’s at the end, so I suppose that adds to the mythology a little bit.
--
Edit: I found the screenshot of the essay in my filesystem so there's no context, but for whatever it's worth here it is:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc...
Beautiful. thank you for sharing that.
It’s just sitting there growing without anyone using it, lol (probably because it requires signup).
There's a great, recent podcast episode covering the history of the site, including "the line" mentioned in another top-level comment: https://www.cultorjustweird.com/episodes/episode/1d3933d1/s2...
- Your World of Text, my current side project. Requires FF3+ or Safari 4, I think. (August 5, 2009 — 136 points, 71 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742268
If you prefer playing as an app over in a browser
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1086630/Spelling_Quest_On...
It was one of my first realtime collaborative experiences in the internet and it was magical at the time, i still believe that services like Miro grew out of World of Text.
Edit: couldn't find the forum post but found the tweet, wow, it was more than a decade ago https://twitter.com/anVlad11/status/23055592331 . Were old pages wiped?
It's nice seeing some of the stuff I wrote on less trafficked pages or far from the centre on popular pages is still there after ten years!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metababy
As you might expect, as it became better known, it got filled with increasingly extreme and offensive material.
However, loads waaaay to long at least for me. I guess some better caching may be required.
