graphite2213 / chalkboard

Site where everyone can draw anything; Hack4pan submission

Chalkboard

Site where everyone can draw anything; Hack4pan submission

Why?

This project, that you could call a 4chan for artists (ill get into this analogy more later) was made to represent the internet, you could call it a social experiment because it very much is that. It was made to make it easy to visualize a question that has been bugging everyone for years especially in these trying times of the pandemic. That question is "Can humans cooperate?". You can observe the question really well through watching the canvas and chat go absolutely wild drawing masterpieces but also destroying art and being cunts towards eachother. This website is like an art 4chan because there is no identification or rules. Anyone can at any point join one of the 5 provided servers and just draw, no matter what who when or where.

This site, this project, was made to represent the internet as a whole, it was built to show the internet's true potential. It was built to represent the internet as a society and to show if people can thrive in such an environment by cooperating and creating some sort of mutual agreement to not destroy art.

The in-site chat was initially not intended to exist but i decided to add it in the last moment as to provide easier communication between artists.

TL;DR

The point of this project is to see if humans can function and cooperate in a completely anon environment where anyone can do anything (even if they might not want to). This social experiment has 2 outcomes:

1. It gets overrun by people who just want to vandalize and nobody can draw anymore
2. That doesn't happen

As observed on sites like 4chan humans are much more violent and hateful when completely anonymous.

What i expect:

Lots and lots of funny number jokes, sus jokes, people just blacking/whiting out anything that gets drawn.

More insight on the technical difficulties of this project

This project was built mostly on my phone and im incredibly proud of the fact that it was built in those conditions and in 5 days.

Somehow i managed to bodge together a testing setup using termux and i just wrote code. By some miracle it almost all worked when moved onto a server.

Also i had to learn 2 things i didn't ever use before for this project: Websockets and HTTPS (getting the certificates delayed getting demo images and video for quite a while)

You can find more technical difficulties on my slides

Demo

You can also see the current state of the canvas and participate in it yourself using this link.

Here is an image of the server #1 canvas after the first 10 hours:

I was asleep while this went down but it seems like at first there was fighting for canvas space, and there was some vandalism although people started asserting dominance by making larger and more beautiful drawinngs so it stopped. Also a single person seems to have taken over server #3 and #2:

< I Would insert an image here but its likely not appropriate for twitch and youtube >

These images also prove how the internet's sense of humor has gone massively downhill since 2018. The most prominent jokes are Among Us and FNAF memes.