Hey, it's my project, nice to see it here! I wanted to do something that I liked in the early times of the web - something small, optimistic and whimsical.
The AI-assisted drawing moderation is inspired by drawafish.com and works quite well at keeping the horse parade family friendly!
As a bit of an observation - the horses went viral on tumblr, bluesky and to a lesser extent facebook and instagram and smaller pages at different days, so I could observe how the drawing style and content changes:
- Most beautiful horses and least penises were drawn by tumblr users. Maybe because they've drawn a lot of penises before and got it out of their system : )
- Most penises: HN (but I guess it's my fault for saying there is a filter) followed by b3ta.com and twitter
Is there a thriving tumblr tech community, anything similar to HN on tumblr?
Most penises: HN (but I guess it's my fault for saying there is a filter) followed by b3ta.com and twitter
- Most swastikas: twitter and, somehow, HN.
I expected better from HN :/
Someone once told me that HN is like 4chan but for tech people & I defended a lot against it but now I feel like seeing an overlap between HN,twitter,4chan
Yeah, I too had probably an idealized image of HN - but I guess what makes the HN great is the moderation :)
And it's not like there are no beautiful horses being drawn - I observed quite a few ingenious horses and non-horses coming in in the last hours. But I'm surprised at the level of.. carelessness.
One way of dealing with it would be training a penis-drawing-recognition ai and only show other penis drawings to people who draw dicks. Though it would go against the whole idea of, well, having a moment together.
Substack traffic is hard to quantify, at least for me as I am only looking at HTTP referrers, and I had the feeling the referrer field was mostly filtered out. It is comparable to facebook and mastodon traffic, both in volume and in the sense that it is a slow burn - the link gets share in a small community, and then gets shared a few days later in a different one. In contrast to tumblr, HN and bluesky, where a spike in traffic comes sudden, a cultural moment is shared by many thousands of people, and then the attention mostly disappears the next day.
The filter does not show directly whether it's filtered out or not - it's silent, otherwise the game would be "trick the AI filter" and that's a totally different genre.
Absolutely. Running around with a large format camera (Graflex) with an Instax back (lomograflok) and making photos and immediately giving results back to people changed a lot. Strangers were basically lining up to ask about the camera and have their photo taken. That was a really fun experience, and I noticed how much I missed that excitement - before camera phones took over such moments were much more common.
Now I build/3d print my own large and medium format cameras, and that also makes it much more interesting, but the fun of instant photography with an ancient looking camera is just incredible.
Like a polaroid shot with an actually good lens. Also the whole performative part of making a photograph is of course much richer with an old, manual camera.
Absolutely, I feel like there is a lack of expressivity on the web – sure, I can upvote, comment, block/report or go away, but that's basically it. I can't frown, toss thing off the table, spit, grunt, roll eyes, look away, listen intently, nervously touch my face or fidget with my keys. At least not in any socially significant way. And as we spend so much time online, our expressiveness also kind of gets filtered down to the tools that are available. Not bodily expression but a few very limited gestures. So maybe we can imagine and create new gestures?
My other project was about a similar question - what if our emotional life gets reduced to the emojis provided to us by facebook? This was from 2018 so AI images were very new then :)
https://rybakov.com/blog/zuckerberg_emojis/
And another, more productive approach was to look at gestures available in the physical library of Sitterwerk St.Gallen and translate it to the digital world. This was before tab groups landed in the main browsers (and tbh. the implementation is still not great):
https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/
Yes, I remember a cute cat living on my desktop, chasing my cursor.
Somebody on mastodon also linked to https://kickassapp.com/ - an asteroid game where you destroy DOM elements on websites, a project from 2011.
A few times in my career I've been looking for exactly this role, a place that would value sense and design/ux sensibility as well as an understanding of what is technically possible. Larger companies don't hire for this role, because it does not have a name. You could write “Temple Grandin for the web”, but that is closer to magic, something non-scalable, a position that is created for a specific person. I ended up working in small teams, often in experimental research positions, but that too is very special and esoteric.
If the role had a name, not even a theoretical foundation but simply a name, then and only then it could actually exist.
