9 ms·

World of Text is an infinite grid of text editable by any visitor

155 points by throwaway47292 5y ago

diimdeep 5y ago
Previously submitted: - 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742268
PikachuEXE 5y ago
Is there more "shared message board" type of websites you know? 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- alphabet9000 5y ago
  https://burrow.jollo.org https://burrow.jollo.org (view source to see controls)
- omnibrain 5y ago
  Check out https://manyland.com https://manyland.com It's a public 2d game with an editable world.
- depaya 5y ago
  2b2t is the famous one.
  - PikachuEXE 5y ago
    Nice to know!
- com2kid 5y ago
  About 20 years ago there was a game called Incarnations. It was a 2d style "build your own house" game but with amazing high quality artwork. Players made some incredibly lovely scenes. I haven't seen anything like it since. An prototype MMO designed solely around making things look lovely.
kple 5y ago
You crashed it: can’t establish a connection to the server at wss://www.yourworldoftext.com/ws/
tony-allan 5y ago
A fun website!
qsort 5y ago
Everything world-editable is eventually filled with depictions of genitals and N-words. Must be a theorem.
- majkinetor 5y ago
  And everything that has avatar and chat will be used for mingling eventually.
- kabdib 5y ago
  Quick story. 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. :-)
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    It's ok to write out penis, we're all adults here.
    - djrockstar1 5y ago
      It should also be okay to write words in a censored form if the writer wishes.
      - bobmichael 5y ago
        GP didn't imply it wasn't!
        scubbo 5y ago
        Only by a strictly-literal, context-free reading.
DrinkWater 5y ago
Blank page and loads of errors in the console: Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at wss://www.yourworldoftext.com/ws/.
djrockstar1 5y ago
37 minutes and already hugged to death :(
- kiwijamo 5y ago
  Working for me, although it did take a while to load.
- tarkin2 5y ago
  Can't connect to the websocket, for me 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?
  - tiborsaas 5y ago
    Depends on the implementation: https://matttomasetti.medium.com/websocket-performance-comparison-10dc89367055 https://matttomasetti.medium.com/websocket-performance-compa... https://hashrocket.com/blog/posts/websocket-shootout https://hashrocket.com/blog/posts/websocket-shootout
    - tyingq 5y ago
      Those links are odd because they label the websocket implementations with the language they were written in, rather than the name of the (often 3rd party) library. Where there's more than one choice of library for the language.
majkinetor 5y ago
This one from 2005 used pixels, and sold them for $1/pixel: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
- _hao 5y ago
  It's a bit sad that most of those links are now dead.
- furyg3 5y ago
  I don't know if the "rent pixel ads" guy is insane or brilliant.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Clever idea at the right time, and it got a lot of media attention. There were a lot of copycats that sprung up left and right, but they weren't as successful. 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.
  - justusthane 5y ago
    Probably not insane...the guy who created it, Alex Tew, also founded Calm.
  - xanaxagoras 5y ago
    Brilliant.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
earthbee 5y ago
I was literally trying to find this yesterday but couldn't remember the name. Thank you! 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!
dusted 5y ago
It's just saying "Loading..." Both in Firefox and chrome
usrbinbash 5y ago
A cool idea in theory. However, loads waaaay to long at least for me. I guess some better caching may be required.
Lapsa 5y ago
Loading...
hairofadog 5y ago
At some point during the early days of this site someone started drawing a very long ascii line which you could scroll for many many hours and not reach the end of. It became a satirical – or who knows these days, maybe literal – cult. Here’s the best summary I can find with a few minutes of lazy searching: https://yourworldoftext.fandom.com/wiki/The_True_Diagonal 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-bucket/main/eoFW6.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  > https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-bucket/main/eoFW6.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc... Beautiful. thank you for sharing that.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  This reminds me of an old minecraft server I played on which had a Great Northern Road that someone started building, and was continued by various people. You could just walk on it for hours, through caves, over seas, through mountains... with inns along the way, and scenic overlooks. There was something really special about that, and about extending it when I reached the end. I didn't even play on that server for more than a few days, but that memory is still stuck in my mind.
pcmaffey 5y ago
I made an infinitely expanding tile-art game with the same general MMO principles. Kindof an evolution of r/place… except the canvas expands logarithmically every day. While the number of tiles you get each day grows linearly. It’s just sitting there growing without anyone using it, lol (probably because it requires signup). https://www.oroboria.com https://www.oroboria.com
- dmonitor 5y ago
  You should scale the size of the canvas based on the number of unique signups.
sizediterable 5y ago
There’s a Scrabble version of this that’s free to play https://spellingquest.online https://spellingquest.online If you prefer playing as an app over in a browser https://store.steampowered.com/app/1086630/Spelling_Quest_Online https://store.steampowered.com/app/1086630/Spelling_Quest_On...
literallyaduck 5y ago
Hope you don't mind me using it as a database with base64 storage blobs.
xhrpost 5y ago
Neat coding challenge. You get the benefit of something rather simple and straight forward while getting to spend more focus on how to scale such a system.
RhetoricX 5y ago
This reminds me of the old wide-open, raw HTML experimental wiki Metababy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metababy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metababy As you might expect, as it became better known, it got filled with increasingly extreme and offensive material.
bdr 5y ago
Creator here. Your World of Text was launched via HN 12 years ago! Seems today's traffic took the server down, but we're back now. 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/s2e7-the-line-your-world-of-text https://www.cultorjustweird.com/episodes/episode/1d3933d1/s2...
felubra 5y ago
Too bad Ctrl+F doesn't work.
anVlad11 5y ago
I remember finding it in early 10's and posting link on a local forum - people organized and started writing crazy and fun things here, like a minimap or a two-page-ASCII-tank. 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 https://twitter.com/anVlad11/status/23055592331 . Were old pages wiped?

Previously submitted: - 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742268

PikachuEXE 5y ago

Is there more "shared message board" type of websites you know? 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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alphabet9000 5y ago
https://burrow.jollo.org https://burrow.jollo.org (view source to see controls)
omnibrain 5y ago
Check out https://manyland.com https://manyland.com It's a public 2d game with an editable world.
depaya 5y ago
2b2t is the famous one.
- PikachuEXE 5y ago
  Nice to know!
com2kid 5y ago
About 20 years ago there was a game called Incarnations. It was a 2d style "build your own house" game but with amazing high quality artwork. Players made some incredibly lovely scenes. I haven't seen anything like it since. An prototype MMO designed solely around making things look lovely.

kple 5y ago

You crashed it: can’t establish a connection to the server at wss://www.yourworldoftext.com/ws/

tony-allan 5y ago

A fun website!

qsort 5y ago

Everything world-editable is eventually filled with depictions of genitals and N-words. Must be a theorem.

majkinetor 5y ago
And everything that has avatar and chat will be used for mingling eventually.
kabdib 5y ago
Quick story. 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. :-)
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  It's ok to write out penis, we're all adults here.
  - djrockstar1 5y ago
    It should also be okay to write words in a censored form if the writer wishes.
    - bobmichael 5y ago
      GP didn't imply it wasn't!
      - scubbo 5y ago
        Only by a strictly-literal, context-free reading.

DrinkWater 5y ago

Blank page and loads of errors in the console: Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at wss://www.yourworldoftext.com/ws/.

djrockstar1 5y ago

37 minutes and already hugged to death :(

kiwijamo 5y ago
Working for me, although it did take a while to load.
tarkin2 5y ago
Can't connect to the websocket, for me 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?
- tiborsaas 5y ago
  Depends on the implementation: https://matttomasetti.medium.com/websocket-performance-comparison-10dc89367055 https://matttomasetti.medium.com/websocket-performance-compa... https://hashrocket.com/blog/posts/websocket-shootout https://hashrocket.com/blog/posts/websocket-shootout
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Those links are odd because they label the websocket implementations with the language they were written in, rather than the name of the (often 3rd party) library. Where there's more than one choice of library for the language.

majkinetor 5y ago

This one from 2005 used pixels, and sold them for $1/pixel: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

_hao 5y ago
It's a bit sad that most of those links are now dead.
furyg3 5y ago
I don't know if the "rent pixel ads" guy is insane or brilliant.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Clever idea at the right time, and it got a lot of media attention. There were a lot of copycats that sprung up left and right, but they weren't as successful. 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.
- justusthane 5y ago
  Probably not insane...the guy who created it, Alex Tew, also founded Calm.
- xanaxagoras 5y ago
  Brilliant.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

earthbee 5y ago

I was literally trying to find this yesterday but couldn't remember the name. Thank you! 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!

dusted 5y ago

It's just saying "Loading..." Both in Firefox and chrome

usrbinbash 5y ago

A cool idea in theory. However, loads waaaay to long at least for me. I guess some better caching may be required.

Lapsa 5y ago

hairofadog 5y ago

At some point during the early days of this site someone started drawing a very long ascii line which you could scroll for many many hours and not reach the end of. It became a satirical – or who knows these days, maybe literal – cult. Here’s the best summary I can find with a few minutes of lazy searching: https://yourworldoftext.fandom.com/wiki/The_True_Diagonal 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-bucket/main/eoFW6.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-bucket/main/eoFW6.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc... Beautiful. thank you for sharing that.
marcellus23 5y ago
This reminds me of an old minecraft server I played on which had a Great Northern Road that someone started building, and was continued by various people. You could just walk on it for hours, through caves, over seas, through mountains... with inns along the way, and scenic overlooks. There was something really special about that, and about extending it when I reached the end. I didn't even play on that server for more than a few days, but that memory is still stuck in my mind.

pcmaffey 5y ago

I made an infinitely expanding tile-art game with the same general MMO principles. Kindof an evolution of r/place… except the canvas expands logarithmically every day. While the number of tiles you get each day grows linearly. It’s just sitting there growing without anyone using it, lol (probably because it requires signup). https://www.oroboria.com https://www.oroboria.com

dmonitor 5y ago
You should scale the size of the canvas based on the number of unique signups.

sizediterable 5y ago

There’s a Scrabble version of this that’s free to play https://spellingquest.online https://spellingquest.online If you prefer playing as an app over in a browser https://store.steampowered.com/app/1086630/Spelling_Quest_Online https://store.steampowered.com/app/1086630/Spelling_Quest_On...

literallyaduck 5y ago

Hope you don't mind me using it as a database with base64 storage blobs.

xhrpost 5y ago

Neat coding challenge. You get the benefit of something rather simple and straight forward while getting to spend more focus on how to scale such a system.

RhetoricX 5y ago

This reminds me of the old wide-open, raw HTML experimental wiki Metababy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metababy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metababy As you might expect, as it became better known, it got filled with increasingly extreme and offensive material.

bdr 5y ago

Creator here. Your World of Text was launched via HN 12 years ago! Seems today's traffic took the server down, but we're back now. 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/s2e7-the-line-your-world-of-text https://www.cultorjustweird.com/episodes/episode/1d3933d1/s2...

felubra 5y ago

Too bad Ctrl+F doesn't work.

anVlad11 5y ago

I remember finding it in early 10's and posting link on a local forum - people organized and started writing crazy and fun things here, like a minimap or a two-page-ASCII-tank. 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 https://twitter.com/anVlad11/status/23055592331 . Were old pages wiped?