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.
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.
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?
Context matters. Many people who wrote gibberish or stupid things there might otherwise be quite intelligent and productive. Maybe not, but I'm just saying that you can't read too much into this.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
Coming back from work, mentally drained, with a glass of tea next to the computer. You check HN and stumble on a place where you can write whatever you want. A graffiti corner on the internet. What do you write?
It's just appeasing to some people to stop respecting rules and decorum for a minute. No higher meaning to it. There's some more serious stuff too, but honestly, when I want to read something intellectually stimulating, I don't go to 4chan /b/ or to the textbox where anonymous people write whatever.
http://www.yourworldoftext.com/ -> The center is polluted but the unimaginative hordes haven't realized that you can drag the screen. The areas around remain untouched and astounding.
EDIT upon looking more: I retract that. The companion cube song is oddly intact though.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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).
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.
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).
