Reddit's /r/place is perhaps an interesting counter example. It started that way, but as space on the image grew tight and contested, all of that kind of stuff went away. Towards the middle and end, the only significant images were those which could get enough people on board to maintain, and people tend to care more about other stuff, it seems.

I'd say it comes down to the balance of (# of people who make a positive impact * difficulty of positive impact) vs the same for negative impact.

Wikipedia is another example. Sure plenty of people make stupid edits, but enough effort is put into detecting and immediately reverting the vandalism that the effort required to properly vandalize it quickly goes beyond the effort most people will go for a stupid joke.

For good or ill, I don’t think Wikipedia qualifies as globally editable anymore.

Not all pages are, and quite a few IP ranges are blocked, but there is plenty of content being added by non-logged-in editors.

My vandalism from 2011 is still up though, thanks to being protected by a bogus citation. :-)

A weird thing to be proud of.

My own personal joke is likely to endure for dozens of years, possibly for the remainder of human history, because no one reads the citations? I’m a little proud of that.

Just like who knows how many bits of false information. Which then get copied, pasted and repeated across the web and the world.

I've randomly found several, and I'm just one person.

Yes, editable != globally editable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy

On top of this, bots such as ClueBot will most dong postings on even less trafficked locations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClueBot_NG

The last two apartments I lived in had Comcast and the IPs were banned from editing. Very weird.

the majority of wikipedia is still editable without even having an account

and programmability. Most publically manipulable stuff only gets hijacked by a few people with a bit of time and a few scripts. PitBull/Bieber "Where to perform next?" online polls, that ML Twitter bot MS recalled (was it Tammy or something?) etc were all attacked by spam bot style flooding of votes and messages to poison the data, and it's a lot easier to just spam incoherent unpleasantries than it is to spam coherent substantial messages.

AFAIK Reddit's /r/space didn't have any obvious vectors of attack so after the 1,000th manual entry of the n-word the trolls just got bored.

Plenty of people used bots on /r/place, but there were two mitigating factors: 1. You could only make a single pixel change once every (iirc) 5 minutes. 2. Only user accounts created before the (entirely unannounced) event could participate, preventing people bypassing the time limit with more accounts.

Spam mitigation by rate limiting and preventing account cycling :)

> that ML Twitter bot MS recalled (was it Tammy or something?)

Tay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

/r/place was weeeeeiiird. It figured there'd be some trolls, but not massive troll brigades intent on spreading every form of hate the world has seen from the last century. The number of people that were involved was in the 100,000's battling to control the content.

If I let myself wax poetic, I saw /r/place as a proxy for the coming internet faction wars: WW3 won't be fought by countries, it will be fought by internet factions.

like the swedish flag

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. :-)

It's ok to write out penis, we're all adults here.

Unless he meant PUNKS, and people have been drawing dudes rocking out with spikes and mohawks?

It should also be okay to write words in a censored form if the writer wishes.

Is it really censorship, though? You insist on conveying the meaning of the word, which is what is offensive if anything. By omitting a couple of letters you've only saved us from its exact spelling.

For example, "fuck you" is offensive because it's rude, vulgar and expresses contempt, not because of how exactly "fuck" is spelled. "F-ck you" is still rude and vulgar because it conveys the exact same meaning. The only difference to the recipient of such a request is that it's slightly more annoying to read, an annoyance that is surely dwarfed by the offense taken to the rude and vulgar meaning, and its intent as an expression of contempt.

It's better described as the exact opposite, a sort of a censorship circumvention; you can omit or replace a few letters to get past dumb word filters or comply with poorly worded courtesy policies and still convey the meaning to humans. Where no such filters and policies are in place, it's pointless.

A scary thought is that we may be so conditioned by machines and machine-like policies that our means to circumvent them now occur to us naturally even in contexts where they don't make a difference.

This sort of censorship has been going on for a long time. For example 'oh fiddlesticks'. They are still swearing. But some sort of odd self censorship happened.

It is an interesting exercise for me. Try not to swear. No substitutes allowed. It is oddly difficult for me.

I would like to upvote this comment for it's clarity of thinking.

It seems odd to write "genitals" but not write "penis".

H-w f-- -an we t-k- wr--i-g -ord- in a -ens--r-d f-rm?

I think we should be discouraging that kind of self-censorship for all but the worst words. Not only do people start to use it for ridiculous political posturing (e.g. "wmen" or "gmers") but it just makes what you're write ever so slightly harder to understand. And for what benefit?

How is the original comment harder to understand?

If there is one freedom people have is to control their language, wether to avoid certain words or to utter words that other find silly.

Censored words are much more likely to be ambiguous. I wasn't referring to that specific example but now you mention it, p_n_s does take a fraction longer to understand than penis.

And no-one is talking about taking away people's freedom. You can write all your emails in all caps if you want, but we can discourage people from doing that.

In a previous sentence they mentioned TTP, then they mentioned P-n-s. I thought this was another acronym of sorts. Like "Posts not sexy" or whatever. I spent a couple seconds to figure out what it meant, failed, and just moved on.

Figured out what it was supposed to mean from the replies.

They are welcome to avoid certain words, and I am welcome to criticize it.

GP didn't imply it wasn't!

Only by a strictly-literal, context-free reading.

Not if it prevents the point from being made. Which in this case it has. And then detracts from the post altogether. Which it also has.

I took the comment that ‘Time to PNS’ was a kind of code name for the metric at Nintendo. Honestly, I think that’s hilarious.

Edit: TTP is the metric name. Sorry, it’s early.

Could also have been TTPP

If my children are remotely average (sometimes I wonder) then kids know about penises as well.

heck, around half of them even have one!

I'm honestly surprised the first astronauts on the moon didn't draw one with their finger in the dust.

Maybes there's a patch of the moon dust that they all agreed to never photograph, where they drew all the boobs and dicks.

Imagine: aliens get the Arecibo message but don't quite know what to make of it, until they see the boobs and dicks drawn on the moon and they correlate it with their own crass fascination with reproductive organs, and only then do they recognize humanity as a self-aware species.

That, or they just smudged it out after doing it.

How do you know they didn’t?

Did they only test it on men, or do women draw penises too?

Oddly enough, the first thing I saw was a giant ASCII penis saying "good morning citizen, do you want to be my friend?"

This is a Rule 34 corollary.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34

And everything that has avatar and chat will be used for mingling eventually.

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

Boltzmann's Black Dick?

This page seems to says that users can claim parts of the grid and make them members only. This would prevent some trolling. https://www.yourworldoftext.com/~Help/3

Ah the famous MTTP (mean time to penis) metric!