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:<p><a href="https://yourworldoftext.fandom.com/wiki/The_True_Diagonal" rel="nofollow">https://yourworldoftext.fandom.com/wiki/The_True_Diagonal</a><p>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.<p>--<p>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:<p><a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-bucket/main/eoFW6.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc...</a>
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.<p>There's a great, recent podcast episode covering the history of the site, including "the line" mentioned in another top-level comment: <a href="https://www.cultorjustweird.com/episodes/episode/1d3933d1/s2e7-the-line-your-world-of-text" rel="nofollow">https://www.cultorjustweird.com/episodes/episode/1d3933d1/s2...</a>
Blank page and loads of errors in the console:
Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at wss://www.yourworldoftext.com/ws/.
This one from 2005 used pixels, and sold them for $1/pixel:<p><a href="http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/</a>
Previously submitted:<p>- Your World of Text, my current side project. Requires FF3+ or Safari 4, I think. (August 5, 2009 — 136 points, 71 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742268" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742268</a>
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.<p>It’s just sitting there growing without anyone using it, lol (probably because it requires signup).<p><a href="https://www.oroboria.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.oroboria.com</a>
There’s a Scrabble version of this that’s free to play<p><a href="https://spellingquest.online" rel="nofollow">https://spellingquest.online</a><p>If you prefer playing as an app over in a browser<p><a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1086630/Spelling_Quest_Online" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/1086630/Spelling_Quest_On...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>Edit: couldn't find the forum post but found the tweet, wow, it was more than a decade ago <a href="https://twitter.com/anVlad11/status/23055592331" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/anVlad11/status/23055592331</a> . Were old pages wiped?
Is there more "shared message board" type of websites you know?<p>Or "multiple notes" version of this website.<p>Edit:<p>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.
I was literally trying to find this yesterday but couldn't remember the name. Thank you!<p>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!
This reminds me of the old wide-open, raw HTML experimental wiki Metababy:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metababy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metababy</a><p>As you might expect, as it became better known, it got filled with increasingly extreme and offensive material.
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.