The only odd thing was it's hard to link directly to images without having to see the original and then have the page snap down to the image. Also if you share a pic in facebook it shows the original not the modified one you want to link to. It would also be nice if I could log in with my facebook account rather than remembering my username/pass.
I had more laughs per pic than browsing an imgur feed, if that means anything. I think I'm going to spend more time here!
Thanks for the suggestions! The facebook thing is something we've wanted to do (and only recently could, reply links used to be anchor #hashes which means the server can't return different facebook image metadata based on them).
We've talked about facebook based login, and were holding off because we intend to lift the facebook requirement, but there are enough people requesting the feature that we'll probably reconsider.
I've been fiddling with Canvas for a while and yeah, it does get boring. But other people continue to use it so it must have some entertainment value. Just not for me, or for you.
What I think Canvas lacks compared to 4chan's imageboards is actual discussion. I'm a regular 4channer and have been for years. Canvas emphasizes images at the expense of text posts. What I like about 4chan is the often amusing, roaming, and dare I say occasionally insightful conversations that take place. If 4chan is like a comic book, Canvas is just a stream of funny pictures. Not my thing, but could be fun for others.
> What I think Canvas lacks compared to 4chan's imageboards is actual discussion. I'm a regular 4channer and have been for years. Canvas emphasizes images at the expense of text posts. What I like about 4chan is the often amusing, roaming, and dare I say occasionally insightful conversations that take place. If 4chan is like a comic book, Canvas is just a stream of funny pictures. Not my thing, but could be fun for others.
Agree completely. It's something we're working on.
Idea: have a keypress+click for attaching stickers - so Q+LMB¹ would be smile, W+LMB would be awful, E+LMB would be classy, etc., you have 3 blocks of 9 keys on a QWERTY keyboard allowing 27 different sticker types to be added in this way.
I realise one could make more blocks or size them larger (eg 1+LMB, 2+LMB) but I think the visual match of 3x3 blocks and the hand-eye-coordination works better this way.
I'm interested in seeing how this is going to become truly profitable, attract more investors, etc.
With images of obese kids with text like "OBJECTION" and "Don't you dare eat it!" and pictures of cats with text "YOU GONNA GET RAPED" and Katy Perry being green slimed with "HULK CAME" all on the front page, I'm failing to really understand where this site goes beyond 4chan with regard to money-making and becoming a truly public, widespread site. If I recall correctly, at TED Moot said that he, for obvious reasons due to the content of 4chan, was having trouble making the site really profitable.
Does prohibition of gore and porn images make Canvas suddenly more profitable than 4chan?
I can just see X company getting really upset when their ad is placed right next to some incredibly racist image/text that slipped through.
I think the stickers are a gimmick that will get boring fast. The user remixes are a real gem. But the real fun wit /b/ Is the nsfw stuff so it's not targeting the same crowd.
I agree, to a point. As a /b/tard, I find the near-sociopathic humour there oscillates between hilarious and pathetic, with the true art of its enjoyment beng derived from one's ability to separate the two. Outside of /b/, those memes that have gained true popularity are generally SFW. Canvas, if successful, could prove to be an extra-*chan generator of content, in the way that reddit sometimes is. It will never be the hotbed of chaos and creation that the chans are, but it may well still be a progenitor of good content. 4chan's inherent entropy creates a holistic filter that weeds out the crap; time will tell if their ranking system is effective.
That said, I've seen more OC on canvas in 5 minutes than I've seen on /b/ in 5 days. Quality is variable, but there certainly seems to be a creative drive there that's been missing from /b/ as of late.
I'm not trying to be negative, but the puerile nature of these type of sites nauseate me. I used to love Ebaums and Compfused a few years back, but now these meme sites seem trite. I guess it's just me getting older.
I'm slightly torn at Canvas' release. I understand that there is a desire for such a site and I think it can fill a void for many. Which is good.
However, for me even though I like the occasional laugh, I'd like for such a site to help clear out such memes and such from other sites (primarily reddit). The reason I'm torn is that as much as I think this is possible, I feel that the opposite may happen, as people now have a large source of repostable memes at their disposal.
Unable to sign up. I get an error "unable to communicate with facebook". I'm signed in to facebook in that browser, not using incognito mode or anything.
This actually should work, but getting drag/drop right on iOS devices is hard. They just don't have the CPU to rerender our sticker dragging fast enough to make it feel like you're dragging a sticker; you tap and drag and it never catches up to render so you never see it work.
We'll optimize the mobile experience and devices will get better, so the HTML version will be good enough at some point. In the meantime we will, at some point, invest in mobile Canvas apps (Android and iOS).
On iOS4, you need to trigger 3D acceleration to get acceptable redraw performance. You do this by using a 3D CSS transformation to move the object the user is dragging (translate3d with a z value of 0). The upcoming iOS5 is much better in this regard, and makes just setting .left and .top acceptable, so you could also just wait it out.
That’s delicious. Why didn’t I think of that? Luckily “Connecting with Facebook is required.” is preventing me from sending all my free time down the drawn with this.
In fact they do, if you hover the GIF you get a pause button that pauses the GIF (and by that I mean swaps it out for the static thumbnail again; browsers don't give you any real control over GIFs).
Though there is a bookmarklet to add various controls to animated gifs at http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/ and also http://playgif.com/ (I believe the first one appeared on HN a couple of months ago)
Yeah, I've been keeping my eye on the javascript GIF scene (there are now decent decompressors and compressors), but all of the existing options are fairly expensive and don't work on older browsers / slower JavaScript engines / slower computers. At the moment swapping static thumbnails with the actual GIFs gets us a lot of benefit with little perf overhead.
Makes sense - you could also always add it as a feature, or allow for graceful degradation to the static thumbnail on the event certain feature checks fail or loading/decompression takes too long.
On a different topic; I saw you speak at General Assembly last month and didn't have a chance to thank you then. The topic (Continuous Deployment) was pretty interesting and it was nice to see how you guys are implementing that at canv.as.
If you're expecting something orderly and predictable, you're probably not the intended audience. moot specializes in millisecond attention spans, formalized chaos is probably what he wants.
I think moot is trolling the 4Chan community. They hate sites like this and with it being as bubbly looking as it is I'd imagine they must be in shock. There's nothing actually wrong with the site, but it's not a very novel idea so I wonder why he spent time on it. Maybe the KnowYourMeme's of the world are eating away at 4Chan's "market" so he's trying to get more pieces of the pie. The images people are uploading are basically bottom of the barrel. I'd expect to see this stuff emailed to me by my aunt in Wisconsin.
Maybe it's an experiment with identity. 4Chan is anonymous yet this site requires Facebook Connect. (Though it seems that FB won't be required after the beta.)
The interface seems pretty substantially better (read: easier to navigate and interact with) than any other “swap image ‘meme’” sites. The content and discussion seems about on par with YouTube. I think that’s just what you get when you build a community consisting of generic 10–20 year-olds. There’s no reason that I can see for the snide tone of your comment.
That's just how you perceived my comment. I wasn't being snide at all. Perhaps you were already on the defensive side when you read it. The images really are unfunny and uninteresting (not their fault), the interface is bubbly[1] (which isn't a negative thing), and the idea isn't novel. I did go out of my way to reassure them that there wasn't anything wrong with the site itself.
You said you thought the either (a) the site was made as a troll, or (b) you couldn’t think of any other reason to have spent time on it, because (c) the content was something you’d get from your (implicitly technically clueless, rural) aunt. The implication was that whoever made this site was wasting their time and ours.
I don’t have any reason to be “already defensive” (I had never heard of this thing before today and I’m definitely not the target audience), and I agree with you that – given the demographic using the site – most of the content is pretty juvenile and uninteresting. But your criticism is mostly content free, and the tone reads as the sort of speculative petty sarcasm that I’d rather avoid on this site.
Anyway, I haven’t seen this idea before: what other site has a front page filled with tiled user-submitted pictures, which when clicked on open up a comment thread wherein each one can be remixed by other users? There are mediated “funny picture” sites like Can Has Cheezburger, and there are general-purpose discussion fora like 4chan and Reddit that include many “funny” pictures, but nothing especially like this current effort, that I’ve seen.
Funny pictures don’t really appeal to me (for that matter, I think the overwhelming majority of the content at facebook, youtube, twitter, reddit, and similar sites is also garbage), but I it’s always interesting to see what kinds of interfaces new community based sites come up with, what kinds of interactions they afford, and how that shapes users’ actions and contributions. There’s more to discuss here than “meh this sucks, it’s probably just a troll.”
I don't think the two actions (raising money and trolling 4Channers) are mutually exclusive. I don't think he deliberately went out of his way to troll anyone, but that is most likely how it will be seen by some users. For their Commander in Chief to create a site like this it's actually funny. There's no way in the world he doesn't know that 4Chan users hate sites like these. Maybe he doesn't want them to migrate over? He does want to make some money, after all.
I don't think it's trolling at all. It's just taking the same wildly successful (traffic-wise) image board concept and remaking it for the exact opposite audience (one who would never participate on 4chan, and has the added bonus of being advertisable to).
I mean, is Volkswagen trolling VW Bug owners by pushing Audi as a mainstream luxury brand?
I met him and his team at SHDH48 on Microsoft campus in mountain view last year. It's not trolling. In fact, they invited a bunch of core 4chan users to be early canvas users. He's just moving on to another project, this time with a team of valley insiders he persuaded to move to New York.
You seem to be associating all of 4chan (and moot) with the wildly infamous subset of culture that exists on b/. It isn't all about Anonymous and troll memes, there's plenty of bubbly happy content and silly stuff on 4chan, and this site seems to fit into that side of it. I will agree that the content seems pretty weak right now and the design looks fairly childish, from the stickers and the colors to the layout. If they are going after the tween market, it might be a gigantic hit. If they are hoping to capture the power users that made 4chan what it is today, I don't see that happening.
He's not really trolling them tbh. 4chan's community is just worried that moot will shut down 4chan in favour of Canvas. A lot of 4chan users look at Canvas as another Web 2.0 company that will quickly sell out.
And anyway, Canvas can't stay in public beta forever, can it?
Just from a quick look, it looks like Moot is trying to take some of the interactions that grew organically out of 4chan and build them into Canvas, then making it easy for the non-technical person. From personal experience, it seems like whenever you try to parameterize and enforce something that was organic, you run the risk of killing it.
Something I think to keep in mind is, that making it easy for the non-artist and non-technical person to create and publish content removes a giant filter that would keep out a lot of trash. The effort "cost" of producing a remix of content is much lower now, so there's going to be more people with half-baked ideas creating garbage, and everyone will shit on them for posting it...bad experiences all around. Meanwhile, those people that would've still created and published good content (had the effort-cost been higher) may view Canvas as being too canned and immature for their time.
That's just my $0.02. Best of luck Moot, wish you had returned my emails :)
> making it easy for the non-artist and non-technical person to create and publish content removes a giant filter that would keep out a lot of trash.
To me, the biggest part of the fun of internet image culture all over the web is that it's mostly generated and appreciated by people who aren't really artists. If you look at the lively amusing stuff popular on 4chan/Reddit/Tumblr over the past few years - rage comics, dogfort comics, advice animals, complex reaction images referring to six different memes all at once in a humorous way, and a zillion other innovations that are only fresh for a week each - a lot of this stuff is made with MS Paint, copy-and-paste, GIF makers, and rudimentary Photoshop skills. The culture is very much enriched by people who know what they're doing with a drawing tablet, but overall it's folk art for everyone on the web who has time on their hands, art that is messy and wild and funny.
Canvas does something pretty neat: it lowers the barrier to entry even more, which adds even more folk-energy to this primordial soup. But it means that Canvas needs really good organic filters so that the best stuff bubbles up to the top in a readable way, like it does on Reddit and even 4chan (after you learn how to read 4chan). Canvas does some of this already, but I'm hoping for seeing even more, easier, faster ways to have fun browsing it without being already deeply enmeshed in the community (or even if you've been enmeshed in it before but took a break for a few weeks and now feel entirely out of the loop, etc)...I'd be interested in seeing more "entry paths", more blog posts with bits of context/explanation/decoding, and maybe also a lighter-page-weight option for browsing around (since I'm stuck on slow internet connections more often than I'd like).
removing barriers to entry might make it easier to innovate but it also makes it easy to copycat and beat ideas to death. the first rage comic might have been funny but they just get worse and worse with each new iteration.
