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Show HN: EveryoneDraw – An infinite collaborative drawing canvas

Author: seangransee

Score: 20

Comments: 12

Date: 2021-12-03 19:46:52

Web Link

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finiteseries wrote at 2021-12-04 13:40:46:

17 hours after launch and of course, a solid rainbow road is already in place!

_edit_ wow, that got very 4chan, very fast in the hour since my comment. The Internet for ya!

rgtomaz wrote at 2021-12-03 20:46:37:

Very cool project!

That would be great if I could drag the mouse to draw instead of just clicking.

An "export area" would be a nice-to-have feature in the future as well.

Cheers.

seangransee wrote at 2021-12-03 22:21:49:

Thanks for the feedback!

My initial implementation actually did exactly what you suggested where you could drag the mouse to draw. I ultimately moved away from that approach, mostly because it made it way too easy to "spam" the canvas by quickly drawing random pixels all over the screen. Requiring users to draw pixel-by-pixel forces drawings to be a bit more intentional. The UX also gets more complex when a drag can either mean "draw" or "pan", so having a drag always pan the canvas simplifies things.

As for an "export area" feature, I also considered that, but figured people would rather just use their device's screenshot functionality. It's still something on the backlog that I'll prioritize if I hear similar feedback though.

rgtomaz wrote at 2021-12-03 23:19:29:

I totally understand and agree with your points. Right on man!

Thank you very much for the response.

seangransee wrote at 2021-12-04 17:58:30:

Shutting this thing down for now. Anyone speculating that this would devolve into a cesspit was totally right.

adjagu wrote at 2021-12-04 22:28:14:

Thank you for sharing this. I had more fun using it than expected. It is too bad that this had to be removed. Do you have any plans to release the source? I would absolutely love to be able to host something like this locally to play around with.

Again, thanks for this it was very fun while it lasted.

kanaaba wrote at 2021-12-04 18:10:16:

bring it back :(

plura6420 wrote at 2021-12-04 18:36:04:

boooooo

plura6420 wrote at 2021-12-04 18:20:51:

You faggot.

seangransee wrote at 2021-12-03 19:47:50:

OP here. It’s been a while since I built something outside of work, so I decided to build something I would have fun using and sharing with others.

It’s inspired by Reddit’s r/place experiment from 2017, with four key differences:

- The canvas is infinite [1]

- There’s no time limit. The canvas can keep evolving forever.

- There’s no signup required. Just click the link and start drawing.

- You can randomly teleport far away from the center to start your own drawing that nobody will find without the link. For example: [2]

Everything displays in real time. It should be fun to watch when there are a bunch of people drawing simultaneously.

A few similar apps have popped up over the years, but I found them all to be a bit cluttered, so I wanted to build something with more of a focus on the art. When zoomed in, there’s minimal UI aside from what’s needed to select a color. When zoomed out, the canvas covers 100% of the viewport. I also tried to make drawing and navigating easy on both desktop and mobile.

The frontend is mostly custom built using native browser Canvas and Websocket APIs. The backend is Go code running on AWS Lambda with pixels stored in DynamoDB. I mostly optimized for making it cost as little as possible to run long-term. When there’s low usage, the AWS bill is $0.50 per month (for Route 53) and the actual hosting costs are free. I’m hoping to keep this running indefinitely without having to worry about cost and maintenance.

Draw something and let me know what you think! Happy to answer any questions about how it was built.

[1] Okay, the canvas isn’t actually infinite right now. Things stop working once you run up against Javascript’s MAX_SAFE_INTEGER. I plan on eventually having the canvas wrap around when it hits that value, making the canvas work for any huge number the user might hard-code into the URL.

[2]

https://everyonedraw.com/-2/5030/81159

sam_bristow wrote at 2021-12-04 02:54:57:

How do you plan on avoiding this turning into the usual collection of swastikas, penises and racial slurs that usually happens?

seangransee wrote at 2021-12-04 04:07:01:

That stuff is unavoidable with anonymous user-generated content like this. For now I’m relying on human moderation to draw over that stuff after it happens. My hope is that legitimate art will drown out the bad content over time.

Depending on how much time I feel like devoting to this, maybe I’ll turn that problem into a fun machine learning project. I know that won’t eliminate bad actors, but hopefully a combination of tactics will keep it to a minimum.

voakbasda wrote at 2021-12-04 14:39:14:

Sounds like an arms race waiting to happen. Swastikas drawn over rainbows, that were drawn over swastikas, that were drawn over rainbows…. It will be rainbows and swastikas all the way down…. Come to think of it, that sounds like the rest of the internet. Carry on.