T w e n t y S i d e d

Steven thinks Oceangrams are doomed to failure, because sooner or later the spammers will infest the thing and then 99% of the messages will be for C*H*E*A*P drug5 n0 perscr1pshin neaded! I’m sort of amazed this hasn’t happened already. It does seem sort of obvious. Maybe the community is just too small to go after. They just now hit mesage #500,000 delivered last night. Since the site has been running for a while now, this means the message volume is probably too low to interest spammers.

But this thing presents a few other interesting hurdles that spammers would need to overcome:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “More Oceangramming”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Now here is an interesting social… program… experiment… thingy. What do you even call this sort of thing? Oceangram is a software implementation of the old message-in-a-bottle idea.

You can write messages and chuck them into the ocean where they will find their way to other people, or just sit there until a message washes up on shore. When you get a message, you can choose to throw it away or add your own comments to it and throw it back in. You can’t change what others have written, only append your message to the end of what is already there. At first when I saw you had to wait for a message to arrive I was a little annoyed, but now that I’ve done it a few times I can see it’s actually an important part of the system. I’d probably sit there and “leech” if I could just click and get a message. Since you have to wait for them, I’m more reluctant to throw them away and more tempted to add to it and throw it back in. They seem to come at the rate of one every five minutes or so, although I gather some people get around this by opening the page in several windows at once. I suppose you could keep four or five windows open, which is probably plenty to keep them coming at a steady rate if you’re adding responses.

Here is an example of one I found:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Oceangram”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.