6 ms·

Show HN: Wall of Text

90 points by louisstow 12y ago

johnloeber 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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)"
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - johnloeber 12y ago
    I got a 504 earlier. The server must be running at capacity. It's still up for me.
epaga 12y ago
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-outliner/id901513028?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-mind-mapping-outli... 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 12y ago
  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.
  - innguest 12y ago
    I'd like to encourage you to do that, as well as explain more about the infinite canvas implementation, the payload that gets saved, and maybe even alternative implementations you have considered and why you didn't go with them. If you have paypal I have $20 to incentivize you.
  - billmalarky 12y ago
    Will you open source the code? I'm learning socket io and it would be nice to look at.
- RBerenguel 12y ago
  Oh, I downloaded Mindscope a week or so ago (maybe you posted it on r/productivity?) but hadn't time to open it. Did now, it's really neat! Add org file "support" (org files can have links to other files, they are from org-mode in emacs) and I'd use it more than email :D Edit: oh, found an org-opml editing mode! I'll play a little more with it and then quite likely unlock the full version :)
Icybee 12y ago
http://www.yourworldoftext.com/ http://www.yourworldoftext.com/ has been doing something similar for about the last five years.
- bdr 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      YouTube embeds are supported
      - dirkk0 12y ago
        How do I do that?
        bdr 12y ago
        Just paste a YouTube URL.
        dirkk0 12y ago
        This pastes the link there, but doesn't embed it (i.e. no preview pic, etc).
- louisstow 12y ago
  Yeah definitely the inspiration. Some of the things I didn't like was the editing ability of text. If I made a typo I would have to rewrite it. Also colours!
ljk 12y ago
how is it possible that the canvas seems to be infinite area?
- Kiro 12y ago
  This needs an answer!
  - louisstow 12y ago
    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
- ultimape 12y ago
  I suspect some type of minecraft style chunking mechanism.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
urza 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
louisstow 12y ago
Apologies if it's down or slow, it's currently running on a micro instance.
wellboy 12y ago
Cool project! What were the best use cases you had in mind for this?
- louisstow 12y ago
  General purpose note taking. It's basically a pastebin on an infinite canvas.
zhte415 12y ago
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.
quaffapint 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
ultimape 12y ago
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.
innguest 12y ago
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.
fuligo 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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!
- desjudopick 12y ago
  Are the comments you're quoting really hate speech? They seem to not be, and they are pretty mild as far as internet misogyny and racism go, no doubt because of where the posters came from. Speaking generally, this is more evidence that anonymous internet communities that prioritize short messages converge towards /b/, which is to say, trolling and pornography. What was unusual was seeing an anonymous and less-so comment platform interact. I found the anonymous scrutinizing of one particular user's behavior and the calls for his ban discomforting.
thathonkey 12y ago
Cool idea but very buggy
badusername 12y ago
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.

90 points by louisstow 12y ago

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 12y ago
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)"
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- johnloeber 12y ago
  I got a 504 earlier. The server must be running at capacity. It's still up for me.

epaga 12y ago

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-outliner/id901513028?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mindscope-mind-mapping-outli... 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 12y ago
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.
- innguest 12y ago
  I'd like to encourage you to do that, as well as explain more about the infinite canvas implementation, the payload that gets saved, and maybe even alternative implementations you have considered and why you didn't go with them. If you have paypal I have $20 to incentivize you.
- billmalarky 12y ago
  Will you open source the code? I'm learning socket io and it would be nice to look at.
RBerenguel 12y ago
Oh, I downloaded Mindscope a week or so ago (maybe you posted it on r/productivity?) but hadn't time to open it. Did now, it's really neat! Add org file "support" (org files can have links to other files, they are from org-mode in emacs) and I'd use it more than email :D Edit: oh, found an org-opml editing mode! I'll play a little more with it and then quite likely unlock the full version :)

Icybee 12y ago

http://www.yourworldoftext.com/ http://www.yourworldoftext.com/ has been doing something similar for about the last five years.

bdr 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    YouTube embeds are supported
    - dirkk0 12y ago
      How do I do that?
      - bdr 12y ago
        Just paste a YouTube URL.
        dirkk0 12y ago
        This pastes the link there, but doesn't embed it (i.e. no preview pic, etc).
louisstow 12y ago
Yeah definitely the inspiration. Some of the things I didn't like was the editing ability of text. If I made a typo I would have to rewrite it. Also colours!

ljk 12y ago

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

Kiro 12y ago
This needs an answer!
- louisstow 12y ago
  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
ultimape 12y ago
I suspect some type of minecraft style chunking mechanism.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

urza 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

louisstow 12y ago

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

wellboy 12y ago

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

louisstow 12y ago
General purpose note taking. It's basically a pastebin on an infinite canvas.

zhte415 12y ago

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.

quaffapint 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

ultimape 12y ago

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.

innguest 12y ago

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.

fuligo 12y ago

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 12y ago
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!
desjudopick 12y ago
Are the comments you're quoting really hate speech? They seem to not be, and they are pretty mild as far as internet misogyny and racism go, no doubt because of where the posters came from. Speaking generally, this is more evidence that anonymous internet communities that prioritize short messages converge towards /b/, which is to say, trolling and pornography. What was unusual was seeing an anonymous and less-so comment platform interact. I found the anonymous scrutinizing of one particular user's behavior and the calls for his ban discomforting.

thathonkey 12y ago

Cool idea but very buggy

badusername 12y ago

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.