
Feel free to type anywhere - MikeCapone
http://www.yourworldoftext.com/msernst
======
edkennedy
Spent 30 minutes scrolling to the side following the trail that promised
infinite treasures. After a endless track following footprints through the
whitespace desert, behold, an oasis of poetry and song. It was like Columbus
landing in the new world.

~~~
snikeris
Which side?

------
zck
Previously, a submission from the creator:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742268>

~~~
bdr
That's actually the first place I announced it. Wasn't sure if it was solid
yet, but the traffic came so I had to roll with it. It somehow hopped straight
from HN to 4chan and out from there.

------
petervandijck
Nice, chatroulette for text. Or Googlewave + 4chan :)

~~~
MikeCapone
With some Google Maps thrown in there. You can drag the screen around.. Try
it.

------
ComputerGuru
My god, how immature are the inhabitants of the web? I was on the site for 2
seconds and was literally quite depressed at what I saw. Why can something
like this not exist except with kiddies turning it into an expletive-filled
hate and anger textbox?

~~~
hughw
Srsly? You're surprised?

~~~
ComputerGuru
It's not surprise. Just sadness at the incredible potential that isn't.

~~~
thunk
What you're looking at actually _is_ potential. It's like we have to flush all
this nonsensical, vile shit out of our unconscious to detox it for big
creativity. Or like you can't have the crest of a wave without a trough.

I see the stuff you described and I'm always so thankful that humanity finally
has public, anonymous dumping grounds for the worst of our id. It's
therapeutic and, I think, healthy.

~~~
aharrison
Psychologists have pretty much debunked catharsis as being a good thing. [1] I
think that having a environment of competitive creation is a good thing only
when it causes people to excel, and only then when it is not done to excess
and thus burnout or what have you. Sometimes, also, you can get some amazing
things [2] when you have a negative influence which causes you to excel, but
that isn't what we are seeing here, either. So sad to see so much time wasted
on unproductive [3] stupidity.

[1] A weak citation is here (but I bet you could find plenty more where that
came from):
[http://books.google.com/books?id=Pye5IkCFgRYC&pg=PA853&#...</a><p>[2] <a
href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1286253"
rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1286253</a><p>[3]
Unproductive in the sense that it isn't helping anybody. As is mentioned in
the book excerpt I cited in [1], this isn't even "relaxing" people, except
from exhaustion. It would be better if they were doing something which reduced
their arousal.

~~~
thunk
It seems to me that creative catharsis is a different beast than the rage
catharsis of punching a pillow or screaming. Giving one's moods free reign
seems a recipe for bad socialisation. But giving creativity free reign seems a
requirement to get some of the stranger or more unexpected results. Ascii
cock-and-balls and racism with bad grammar seems a small price to pay.

------
BoppreH
Ah, world of text. Last year I started a journey in the /jp world.

Two full days (some 20 hours) scrolling north, leaving messages and drawings
along the way. I have met other people in only one occasion, the rest of the
time I was alone with the messages and drawings left by other adventurers.

Energy surges made their toll one time or two, but I still managed to get to
x0y2000. I felt enlightened. It was the most spiritual thing I've ever
experienced.

Its minimalist approach and absolute freedom makes it one of the best "games"
I've played. I strongly recommend trying it at least once.

And if you ever scroll north in <http://www.yourworldoftext.com/jp>, look for
the messages from The Bard ♫ ;)

------
someone_here
It would be interesting to make each cell writable only once (including
spaces).

~~~
vyrotek
Wouldn't we end up with a giant wordsearch? You could even encode secret
messages by skipping spaces for each letter of a word.

Then once you have this huge wordsearch, you sell printed poster versions.

------
curio
and just like chatroulette or most anonymous forums, the tone quickly
deteriorates to the level of graffiti in a public bathroom stall.

~~~
ramchip
_most anonymous forums_

Some of the non-/b/ areas of 4chan are surprising. Look at /jp/: there are
people programming games and animations, people translating visual novels from
Japanese. They even spawned a group project to make a visual novel from
scratch: <http://katawa-shoujo.com/>

I think anonymous forums can work as long they share a strong common interest.

------
edkennedy
This is joyous, scrolling to the side...it reminds me of an old text based
game. I see that the goons and 4chan have arrived already. TXT PARTY!

~~~
mkramlich
If you like text-based games try <http://DeadByZombie.com> great to get
feedback from a fellow HN'er

------
shortformblog
This has been around a while, actually. I remember posting about it a year
ago.

------
locopati
anywhere but the welcome box ;)

------
darius
My first reaction was wtf but after playing with it for a minute I must say
it's fun.

------
mumrah
Anyone have any info on the tech behind this? Is this a node.js demo or
something?

~~~
bdr
It was on App Engine, but now it's just a plain Django site. Updates are
polled every second, which probably isn't how I'd make it now, but it's help
up well.

------
WingForward
Super cool.

The linked page goes to one particular world: msernst which allows you to
enter coordinates to scroll to (as well as drop links to those coordinates).

Looks like you can create your own text world or explore others.

Can this be used for useful collaboration?

------
_flag
I made something like this awhile ago, it's not as nicely done though:
<http://wall.bot.nu/> (wait till the red cursor scrolls all the way to the
bottom)

------
igravious
Oh no, another land rush for a name space yet again. Missed the domain name
rush. Ditto the Twitter rush. And now this - Q: what's your worldoftext handle
that you're homesteading for $8.99 a year? A:
<http://www.yourworldoftext.com/all_the_good_names_were_gone>

------
pigbucket
In the beginning was the word, says John. It probably looked something like
this.

------
moolave
As cliche as it sounds, I definitely see an ad-based revenue stream coming
here.

------
ryanwanger
I just had a fun little therapy session with someone on there. It was my first
glimmer of hope as to the value of chatroulette (the concept of it anyway).

------
dkasper
Someone needs to write a bot to counteract that 2pac bot.

~~~
ja27
I spent about an hour last night, while watching TV, helping keep a 2pac-free
zone clear. Can't understand why.

I also played tic-tac-toe for a while, which somehow became at least 3 player
with someone playing z's as well as X and O.

------
nirmal
How would you implement the UI for browsing search results in this system?
Maybe draw some inspiration from map searching UIs.

------
tomsaffell
Is it an infinite plane, or a sphere?

~~~
omaranto
A sphere sounds quite unlikely. Maybe a torus, though.

~~~
IgorPartola
<http://www.yourworldoftext.com/home/> says it's a plane.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Doesn't it depend on overflows that could be out of their control? If the page
is larger than the largest width that your browser will display then it could
overflow on scrolling and bring you back to the opposite page edge making it a
sphere.

Browser dependent post-modernity!

~~~
mkelly
I don't know how they did, specifically, but I could easily imagine it being
like Google Maps. You need only load the tiles you see (and a few surrounding
ones for good measure).

~~~
bdr
You're correct. It's an "infinite" plane, depending on what integer overflows
first. It would be easy to make a torus or sphere version.

------
Judson
Haha, reminds me of the writing on a run-down gas station bathroom stall.

 _Why am I addicted?_

------
moolave
It would be nice too if we can doodle like doing so at a whiteboard.

------
ja27
Multiplayer notepad!

------
samratjp
I wish I could start playing Pac-man over this text.

------
s-phi-nl
Are they using Etherpad technology?

------
moultano
Wonderful Idea.

------
hackermom
This is the ASCII version of the infamous Drawball(.com).

~~~
BoppreH
But doesn't take two minutes to load a page.

------
GrandMasterBirt
omg fun!

