
Moot's Canvas now public. - sahillavingia
http://canv.as/
======
coderdude
I think moot is trolling the 4Chan community. They hate sites like this and
with it being as bubbly looking as it is I'd imagine they must be in shock.
There's nothing actually wrong with the site, but it's not a very novel idea
so I wonder why he spent time on it. Maybe the KnowYourMeme's of the world are
eating away at 4Chan's "market" so he's trying to get more pieces of the pie.
The images people are uploading are basically bottom of the barrel. I'd expect
to see this stuff emailed to me by my aunt in Wisconsin.

Maybe it's an experiment with identity. 4Chan is anonymous yet this site
requires Facebook Connect. (Though it seems that FB won't be required after
the beta.)

~~~
jacobolus
The interface seems pretty substantially better (read: easier to navigate and
interact with) than any other “swap image ‘meme’” sites. The content and
discussion seems about on par with YouTube. I think that’s just what you get
when you build a community consisting of generic 10–20 year-olds. There’s no
reason that I can see for the snide tone of your comment.

~~~
coderdude
That's just how you perceived my comment. I wasn't being snide at all. Perhaps
you were already on the defensive side when you read it. The images really are
unfunny and uninteresting (not their fault), the interface is bubbly[1] (which
isn't a negative thing), and the idea isn't novel. I did go out of my way to
reassure them that there wasn't anything wrong with the site itself.

[1] <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bubbly> (so that we're
clear about what I meant)

~~~
jacobolus
You said you thought the either (a) the site was made as a troll, or (b) you
couldn’t think of any other reason to have spent time on it, because (c) the
content was something you’d get from your (implicitly technically clueless,
rural) aunt. The implication was that whoever made this site was wasting their
time and ours.

I don’t have any reason to be “already defensive” (I had never heard of this
thing before today and I’m definitely not the target audience), and I agree
with you that – given the demographic using the site – most of the content is
pretty juvenile and uninteresting. But your criticism is mostly content free,
and the tone reads as the sort of speculative petty sarcasm that I’d rather
avoid on this site.

Anyway, I haven’t seen this idea before: what other site has a front page
filled with tiled user-submitted pictures, which when clicked on open up a
comment thread wherein each one can be remixed by other users? There are
mediated “funny picture” sites like Can Has Cheezburger, and there are
general-purpose discussion fora like 4chan and Reddit that include many
“funny” pictures, but nothing especially like this current effort, that I’ve
seen.

Funny pictures don’t really appeal to me (for that matter, I think the
overwhelming majority of the content at facebook, youtube, twitter, reddit,
and similar sites is also garbage), but I it’s always interesting to see what
kinds of interfaces new community based sites come up with, what kinds of
interactions they afford, and how that shapes users’ actions and
contributions. There’s more to discuss here than “meh this sucks, it’s
probably just a troll.”

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TimothyFitz
As usual, all HN feedback appreciated! -- Team Canvas

~~~
mibbit
"drag stickers to upvote" sounds like it would very very quickly get boring.

Also IMHO infinite scrollbars make for a terrible confusing and broken user
experience.

Nice design apart from that though.

~~~
starpilot
I've been fiddling with Canvas for a while and yeah, it does get boring. But
other people continue to use it so it must have _some_ entertainment value.
Just not for me, or for you.

What I think Canvas lacks compared to 4chan's imageboards is actual
discussion. I'm a regular 4channer and have been for years. Canvas emphasizes
images at the expense of text posts. What I like about 4chan is the often
amusing, roaming, and dare I say occasionally insightful conversations that
take place. If 4chan is like a comic book, Canvas is just a stream of funny
pictures. Not my thing, but could be fun for others.

~~~
moot
> What I think Canvas lacks compared to 4chan's imageboards is actual
> discussion. I'm a regular 4channer and have been for years. Canvas
> emphasizes images at the expense of text posts. What I like about 4chan is
> the often amusing, roaming, and dare I say occasionally insightful
> conversations that take place. If 4chan is like a comic book, Canvas is just
> a stream of funny pictures. Not my thing, but could be fun for others.

Agree completely. It's something we're working on.

------
mathewsim
I'm interested in seeing how this is going to become truly profitable, attract
more investors, etc.

With images of obese kids with text like "OBJECTION" and "Don't you dare eat
it!" and pictures of cats with text "YOU GONNA GET RAPED" and Katy Perry being
green slimed with "HULK CAME" all on the front page, I'm failing to really
understand where this site goes beyond 4chan with regard to money-making and
becoming a truly public, widespread site. If I recall correctly, at TED Moot
said that he, for obvious reasons due to the content of 4chan, was having
trouble making the site really profitable.

Does prohibition of gore and porn images make Canvas suddenly more profitable
than 4chan?

I can just see X company getting really upset when their ad is placed right
next to some incredibly racist image/text that slipped through.

Time will tell, I guess.

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radagaisus
I think the stickers are a gimmick that will get boring fast. The user remixes
are a real gem. But the real fun wit /b/ Is the nsfw stuff so it's not
targeting the same crowd.

~~~
redthrowaway
I agree, to a point. As a /b/tard, I find the near-sociopathic humour there
oscillates between hilarious and pathetic, with the true art of its enjoyment
beng derived from one's ability to separate the two. Outside of /b/, those
memes that have gained true popularity are generally SFW. Canvas, if
successful, could prove to be an extra-*chan generator of content, in the way
that reddit sometimes is. It will never be the hotbed of chaos and creation
that the chans are, but it may well still be a progenitor of good content.
4chan's inherent entropy creates a holistic filter that weeds out the crap;
time will tell if their ranking system is effective.

That said, I've seen more OC on canvas in 5 minutes than I've seen on /b/ in 5
days. Quality is variable, but there certainly seems to be a creative drive
there that's been missing from /b/ as of late.

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cantbecool
I'm not trying to be negative, but the puerile nature of these type of sites
nauseate me. I used to love Ebaums and Compfused a few years back, but now
these meme sites seem trite. I guess it's just me getting older.

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antidaily
Pretty boring until you see the comments or "remixes": <http://canv.as/p/u5ts>

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TouristBreeder
I'm slightly torn at Canvas' release. I understand that there is a desire for
such a site and I think it can fill a void for many. Which is good.

However, for me even though I like the occasional laugh, I'd like for such a
site to help clear out such memes and such from other sites (primarily
reddit). The reason I'm torn is that as much as I think this is possible, I
feel that the opposite may happen, as people now have a large source of
repostable memes at their disposal.

I guess time will tell. Congrats on the site.

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kevinpet
Unable to sign up. I get an error "unable to communicate with facebook". I'm
signed in to facebook in that browser, not using incognito mode or anything.

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Hominem
Can't drag the stickers on an iPad. Are there any sites that support drag/drop
on an iPad or is it not possible.

~~~
TimothyFitz
This actually should work, but getting drag/drop right on iOS devices is hard.
They just don't have the CPU to rerender our sticker dragging fast enough to
make it feel like you're dragging a sticker; you tap and drag and it never
catches up to render so you never see it work.

We'll optimize the mobile experience and devices will get better, so the HTML
version will be good enough at some point. In the meantime we will, at some
point, invest in mobile Canvas apps (Android and iOS).

~~~
c3o
On iOS4, you need to trigger 3D acceleration to get acceptable redraw
performance. You do this by using a 3D CSS transformation to move the object
the user is dragging (translate3d with a z value of 0). The upcoming iOS5 is
much better in this regard, and makes just setting .left and .top acceptable,
so you could also just wait it out.

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sjmulder
That’s delicious. Why didn’t I think of that? Luckily “Connecting with
Facebook is required.” is preventing me from sending all my free time down the
drawn with this.

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joshu
More hooray! (I'm an investor etc)

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laconian
Neat, but the animated GIFs need stop buttons. The page gets chaotic after
sampling a handful of pictures.

~~~
TimothyFitz
In fact they do, if you hover the GIF you get a pause button that pauses the
GIF (and by that I mean swaps it out for the static thumbnail again; browsers
don't give you any real control over GIFs).

~~~
elliottcarlson
Though there is a bookmarklet to add various controls to animated gifs at
<http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/> and also <http://playgif.com/> (I believe the first
one appeared on HN a couple of months ago)

~~~
TimothyFitz
Yeah, I've been keeping my eye on the javascript GIF scene (there are now
decent decompressors and compressors), but all of the existing options are
fairly expensive and don't work on older browsers / slower JavaScript engines
/ slower computers. At the moment swapping static thumbnails with the actual
GIFs gets us a lot of benefit with little perf overhead.

~~~
elliottcarlson
Makes sense - you could also always add it as a feature, or allow for graceful
degradation to the static thumbnail on the event certain feature checks fail
or loading/decompression takes too long.

On a different topic; I saw you speak at General Assembly last month and
didn't have a chance to thank you then. The topic (Continuous Deployment) was
pretty interesting and it was nice to see how you guys are implementing that
at canv.as.

------
AndrewMoffat
Just from a quick look, it looks like Moot is trying to take some of the
interactions that grew organically out of 4chan and build them into Canvas,
then making it easy for the non-technical person. From personal experience, it
seems like whenever you try to parameterize and enforce something that was
organic, you run the risk of killing it.

Something I think to keep in mind is, that making it easy for the non-artist
and non-technical person to create and publish content removes a giant filter
that would keep out a lot of trash. The effort "cost" of producing a remix of
content is much lower now, so there's going to be more people with half-baked
ideas creating garbage, and everyone will shit on them for posting it...bad
experiences all around. Meanwhile, those people that would've still created
and published good content (had the effort-cost been higher) may view Canvas
as being too canned and immature for their time.

That's just my $0.02. Best of luck Moot, wish you had returned my emails :)

~~~
britta
> making it easy for the non-artist and non-technical person to create and
> publish content removes a giant filter that would keep out a lot of trash.

To me, the biggest part of the fun of internet image culture all over the web
is that it's mostly generated and appreciated by people who aren't really
artists. If you look at the lively amusing stuff popular on
4chan/Reddit/Tumblr over the past few years - rage comics, dogfort comics,
advice animals, complex reaction images referring to six different memes all
at once in a humorous way, and a zillion other innovations that are only fresh
for a week each - a lot of this stuff is made with MS Paint, copy-and-paste,
GIF makers, and rudimentary Photoshop skills. The culture is very much
enriched by people who know what they're doing with a drawing tablet, but
overall it's folk art for everyone on the web who has time on their hands, art
that is messy and wild and funny.

Canvas does something pretty neat: it lowers the barrier to entry even more,
which adds even more folk-energy to this primordial soup. But it means that
Canvas needs really good organic filters so that the best stuff bubbles up to
the top in a readable way, like it does on Reddit and even 4chan (after you
learn how to read 4chan). Canvas does some of this already, but I'm hoping for
seeing even more, easier, faster ways to have fun browsing it without being
already deeply enmeshed in the community (or even if you've been enmeshed in
it before but took a break for a few weeks and now feel entirely out of the
loop, etc)...I'd be interested in seeing more "entry paths", more blog posts
with bits of context/explanation/decoding, and maybe also a lighter-page-
weight option for browsing around (since I'm stuck on slow internet
connections more often than I'd like).

~~~
rimmjob
removing barriers to entry might make it easier to innovate but it also makes
it easy to copycat and beat ideas to death. the first rage comic might have
been funny but they just get worse and worse with each new iteration.

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gautaml
Reason I'm not going to sign up: Facebook

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omouse
If you're a redditor, please submit your meme images to canv.as and help keep
reddit true to its non-meme roots.

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pthreat
Awesomeness at its best!

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indrora
Oh god. Its like 4chan but with more... more... /brains/.

I think I just found God. He was hiding in the canvas.

