
Show HN: Wall of Text - louisstow
http://walloftext.co
======
fuligo
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.

~~~
Udo
One of my favorite parts from that wall:

    
    
      (THERE IS ONLY LISP)
                     and 
                       GROW VAT MEAT!
    
               /\_/\
          ____/ o o \
        /~____  =ø= /
       (______)__m_m)
        I DEMAND
        VEGAN FOOD!
    
      rich hickey is frowning upon your shenanigans!

------
Icybee
[http://www.yourworldoftext.com/](http://www.yourworldoftext.com/) has been
doing something similar for about the last five years.

~~~
bdr
The more the merrier! See also
[http://www.jotleaf.com/](http://www.jotleaf.com/), a multimedia take on the
same concept.

Your World of Text, for what it's worth, is still going strong. It gets a lot
of traffic for an art project.

~~~
weedow
This is amazing. Just thought about this idea a few days ago and boom! It
exists! Would love to see support to embed any html (think youtube videos)
every text area stored as a file on dropbox, support for right to left...

~~~
bdr
YouTube embeds are supported

~~~
dirkk0
How do I do that?

~~~
bdr
Just paste a YouTube URL.

~~~
dirkk0
This pastes the link there, but doesn't embed it (i.e. no preview pic, etc).

------
johnloeber
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.)

~~~
jensen2k
Too bad, John. We had fun! Let's make some mayhem and test this a little
together at [http://walloftext.co/robots.txt](http://walloftext.co/robots.txt)

Edit: Seems like we gave it the hugh of death. "the server responded with a
status of 504 (Gateway Time-out)"

~~~
johnloeber
I got a 504 earlier. The server must be running at capacity. It's still up for
me.

------
epaga
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...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-mind-mapping-
outliner/id901513028?mt=8)

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).

~~~
louisstow
Hey. The backend is pretty simple, NodeJS + Socket.io for the real-timey and
Redis for quick and simple storage.

I may write an article about it soon.

~~~
billmalarky
Will you open source the code? I'm learning socket io and it would be nice to
look at.

------
zhte415
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.

------
badusername
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.

------
urza
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...

~~~
ultimape
my friend has been working on something like this. he'll occasionally have it
up on dev.normanreed.com

We've been investigating tools like hand.js and paper.js to get it done.

------
ultimape
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.

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

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

~~~
louisstow
General purpose note taking. It's basically a pastebin on an infinite canvas.

------
quaffapint
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.

~~~
quaffapint
Not sure why I got down voted. I wasn't trying to be mean. I just thought it
was funny how similar the idea was and wanted to give a suggestion. I hate
when people down vote and don't explain their reason.

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

~~~
Kiro
This needs an answer!

~~~
louisstow
There's nothing special about it really. Blobs of text have a grid position,
then I set the CSS left/top properties to gridX * gridWidth etc and the
scrolling is done by CSS translate on the parent container div. The browser
handles it all for me

------
thathonkey
Cool idea but very buggy

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innguest
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.

