Gradient.horse
224 points
4 days ago
| 30 comments
| gradient.horse
| HN
spython
27 days ago
[-]
Hey, it's my project, nice to see it here! I wanted to do something that I liked in the early times of the web - something small, optimistic and whimsical.

The AI-assisted drawing moderation is inspired by drawafish.com and works quite well at keeping the horse parade family friendly!

reply
spython
4 hours ago
[-]
As a bit of an observation - the horses went viral on tumblr, bluesky and to a lesser extent facebook and instagram and smaller pages at different days, so I could observe how the drawing style and content changes:

- Most beautiful horses and least penises were drawn by tumblr users. Maybe because they've drawn a lot of penises before and got it out of their system : )

- Most penises: HN (but I guess it's my fault for saying there is a filter) followed by b3ta.com and twitter

- Most swastikas: twitter and, somehow, HN.

- Most generous buymeacoffee supporters: tumblr

- Most unexpected source of traffic: substack

- Hardest slashdot effect: bluesky

reply
Imustaskforhelp
2 hours ago
[-]
Is there a thriving tumblr tech community, anything similar to HN on tumblr?

Most penises: HN (but I guess it's my fault for saying there is a filter) followed by b3ta.com and twitter

- Most swastikas: twitter and, somehow, HN.

I expected better from HN :/

Someone once told me that HN is like 4chan but for tech people & I defended a lot against it but now I feel like seeing an overlap between HN,twitter,4chan

> - Most unexpected source of traffic: substack

How much traffic did you get out of substack?

reply
spython
22 minutes ago
[-]
Yeah, I too had probably an idealized image of HN - but I guess what makes the HN great is the moderation :)

And it's not like there are no beautiful horses being drawn - I observed quite a few ingenious horses and non-horses coming in in the last hours. But I'm surprised at the level of.. carelessness.

One way of dealing with it would be training a penis-drawing-recognition ai and only show other penis drawings to people who draw dicks. Though it would go against the whole idea of, well, having a moment together.

Substack traffic is hard to quantify, at least for me as I am only looking at HTTP referrers, and I had the feeling the referrer field was mostly filtered out. It is comparable to facebook and mastodon traffic, both in volume and in the sense that it is a slow burn - the link gets share in a small community, and then gets shared a few days later in a different one. In contrast to tumblr, HN and bluesky, where a spike in traffic comes sudden, a cultural moment is shared by many thousands of people, and then the attention mostly disappears the next day.

reply
echelon
2 hours ago
[-]
Tumblr is still around? That's a good data point.
reply
maxbond
2 hours ago
[-]
They're well on their way to becoming the next PDF.
reply
twism
6 hours ago
[-]
just saw an animated fellatio
reply
bad_haircut72
6 hours ago
[-]
Truly recapturing the early web then
reply
internet2000
5 hours ago
[-]
Just got a 8===D~ drawing past the filter.
reply
spython
4 hours ago
[-]
The filter does not show directly whether it's filtered out or not - it's silent, otherwise the game would be "trick the AI filter" and that's a totally different genre.
reply
LeoPanthera
7 hours ago
[-]
MTBP (Mean Time Before Penis) is about 30 seconds.

If you tab out and then back again it draws about 20 horses all on top of each other making some kind of eldritch horror.

reply
semitones
2 hours ago
[-]
I only see my penis for some reason
reply
llbbdd
22 minutes ago
[-]
Me too but I guess I should have been paying more attention to the screen
reply
Tommix11
1 hour ago
[-]
I saw a xenomorph, who drew that one?
reply
zer0zzz
6 hours ago
[-]
I did my part
reply
gus_massa
26 days ago
[-]
I expected it to detect the legs automaicaly, I guess I'm spoiled by AI.

In a similar project, a hard part was filtering penis and nazi symbols.

Protip: add a few legs parts in the tail, so it moves too.

reply
richstokes
6 hours ago
[-]
Easily one of the top 25 horse drawing sites of 2026
reply
hinkley
3 hours ago
[-]
One of the top 25 horse drawing sites of 2026 so far.
reply
n_u
6 hours ago
[-]
Neat!

Reminds me of Draw a Fish https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719222

and their security incident lol https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44784743

reply
villuv
2 hours ago
[-]
Zooming in and out on iphone introduces flying horses
reply
rhoopr
7 hours ago
[-]
The simplicity of the animation makes this hilariously charming.
reply
Normal_gaussian
6 hours ago
[-]
Some of you can draw some pretty amazing abstract horses.

Some of you cannot.

Some of you choose not to.

reply
dragonfax
6 hours ago
[-]
The backwards horse is my fault, period. I didn't read the direction.
reply
basketbla
6 hours ago
[-]
The unsettling music perfectly matches the vibe of the horse creatures marching along (especially with the non-horses enabled).

Side note I also keep expecting the severance theme after the first note.

reply
acheron
3 hours ago
[-]
I’m so glad ICANN added .horse for all our horse-related sites.
reply
dakolli
4 hours ago
[-]
btw, This is what people are referring to when they say LLMs are revolutionizing software.
reply
stevage
6 hours ago
[-]
Supposedly it filters out non-horses, but I sure saw a lot of dragons and snakes and cows and I don't know what.
reply
ashton314
4 hours ago
[-]
Very happy to see a Trogdor the BURNiNATOR strutting across my screen
reply
gus_massa
3 days ago
[-]
You can draw the head and tail of the horse using the "legs" color, so they move too.

Fake edit: I just draw a Pegasus!

reply
khazhoux
3 hours ago
[-]
I was working on a site where you can draw animated penises, and it would filter out horses, but your version actually makes more sense.
reply
bulletsvshumans
7 hours ago
[-]
Ok I bought my dumb horse on a mug, I admit it.
reply
recursive
7 hours ago
[-]
It wouldn't let me because it said I hadn't drawn any, even though I just watched my majestic yellow horse prance all the way across the screen.
reply
DeepYogurt
5 hours ago
[-]
This is some quality internet
reply
asplake
1 hour ago
[-]
Nord warns: This website may be unsafe We detected that the website you’re about to visit could be a scam.

It was actually the first time I'd seen that message, so, erm, congrats?

reply
nilslindemann
6 hours ago
[-]
There are so many different views of the same concept.
reply
stevage
6 hours ago
[-]
Cool, you can click on them and they jump.

Someone made a pretty ace 8 legged horse.

reply
hinkley
3 hours ago
[-]
My horse did not stomp :(
reply
spython
3 hours ago
[-]
Oh no! Did you use all the colors available?
reply
mym1990
6 hours ago
[-]
Make the internet weird again, part 2!!
reply
klinquist
4 hours ago
[-]
this made my day.
reply
fHr
6 hours ago
[-]
absolute cinema
reply
lovegrenoble
6 hours ago
[-]
Funny enough
reply
efilife
6 hours ago
[-]
whoever drew a fish, great job
reply
twism
6 hours ago
[-]
some creative nsfw ... bravo
reply
diimdeep
1 hour ago
[-]
This and author homepage gives strong impression of the usual contemporary nothing burger.
reply
stephenlf
7 hours ago
[-]
I love this. Btw, TTFP on my feed was about 5 minutes lol
reply
SSchick
6 hours ago
[-]
Ohhh exloitable.
reply