Gradient.horse
326 points
1 month ago
| 33 comments
| gradient.horse
| HN
spython
2 months ago
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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!

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spython
1 month ago
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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

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Imustaskforhelp
1 month ago
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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?

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spython
1 month ago
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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.

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kubb
1 month ago
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Neo-Nazi recruitment has been running free on Twitter since Musk takeover, and a lot of technology communication also happens there.

I wouldn’t expect tech folks to be more susceptible by nature, they just hang out in these spaces and are exposed to the content more than average.

Being tech savvy doesn’t make you immune to the recruitment tactics.

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nl
1 month ago
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Bluesky driving the most traffic is unexpected.

I have to say I've been enjoying it quite a lot lately. It's not as militantly anti everything as it used to be and that's improved it a lot.

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morkalork
1 month ago
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Twitter bots don't drive external traffic, it's why the ROI of advertising there is so shite
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d0100
1 month ago
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How many crabs where drawn?
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spython
1 month ago
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Quite a few actually. Other popular animals: dinosaurs, cats, and snails!
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pjerem
1 month ago
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I saw a penis bypassing the filter. Good job to this user !
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gradientpenis
1 month ago
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I saw a penis while posting my penis :D https://imgur.com/a/VRdRFrJ
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echelon
1 month ago
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Tumblr is still around? That's a good data point.
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maxbond
1 month ago
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They're well on their way to becoming the next PDF.
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twism
1 month ago
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just saw an animated fellatio
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bad_haircut72
1 month ago
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Truly recapturing the early web then
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nkrisc
1 month ago
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Doesn’t seem to catch “five-legged” horses very well.
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Juliate
1 month ago
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This is a beautiful idea, thank you!
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internet2000
1 month ago
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Just got a 8===D~ drawing past the filter.
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spython
1 month ago
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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.
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LeoPanthera
1 month ago
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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.

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semitones
1 month ago
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I only see my penis for some reason
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llbbdd
1 month ago
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Me too but I guess I should have been paying more attention to the screen
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zer0zzz
1 month ago
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I did my part
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Tommix11
1 month ago
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I saw a xenomorph, who drew that one?
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gus_massa
2 months ago
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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.

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dmit
1 month ago
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> In a similar project, a hard part was filtering penis and nazi symbols.

Check out how the precursor of this project did it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719222

> I built a basic CNN trained against penises and swastikas, and then anything that doesn't hit the 63% confidence score gets sent to a mod queue, a vibe-coded fish-tinder (https://bsky.app/profile/bigass.bsky.social/post/3luvikxn3f2...).

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richstokes
1 month ago
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Easily one of the top 25 horse drawing sites of 2026
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hinkley
1 month ago
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One of the top 25 horse drawing sites of 2026 so far.
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n_u
1 month ago
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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

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rhoopr
1 month ago
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The simplicity of the animation makes this hilariously charming.
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Normal_gaussian
1 month ago
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Some of you can draw some pretty amazing abstract horses.

Some of you cannot.

Some of you choose not to.

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dragonfax
1 month ago
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The backwards horse is my fault, period. I didn't read the direction.
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khazhoux
1 month ago
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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.
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acheron
1 month ago
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I’m so glad ICANN added .horse for all our horse-related sites.
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ashton314
1 month ago
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Very happy to see a Trogdor the BURNiNATOR strutting across my screen
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ErneX
1 month ago
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curses!
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basketbla
1 month ago
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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.

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villuv
1 month ago
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Zooming in and out on iphone introduces flying horses
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DeepYogurt
1 month ago
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This is some quality internet
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gus_massa
1 month ago
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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!

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stevage
1 month ago
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Supposedly it filters out non-horses, but I sure saw a lot of dragons and snakes and cows and I don't know what.
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dakolli
1 month ago
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btw, This is what people are referring to when they say LLMs are revolutionizing software.
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stevage
1 month ago
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Cool, you can click on them and they jump.

Someone made a pretty ace 8 legged horse.

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zkmon
1 month ago
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Fill the internet with this kind of trivia. Victory to humans!
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bulletsvshumans
1 month ago
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Ok I bought my dumb horse on a mug, I admit it.
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recursive
1 month ago
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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.
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mym1990
1 month ago
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Make the internet weird again, part 2!!
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nilslindemann
1 month ago
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There are so many different views of the same concept.
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fHr
1 month ago
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absolute cinema
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efilife
1 month ago
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whoever drew a fish, great job
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hinkley
1 month ago
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My horse did not stomp :(
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spython
1 month ago
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Oh no! Did you use all the colors available?
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sublinear
1 month ago
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Just like the early web, I expect it to become a graffiti playground full of dicks.
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klinquist
1 month ago
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this made my day.
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lovegrenoble
1 month ago
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Funny enough
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twism
1 month ago
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some creative nsfw ... bravo
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countWSS
1 month ago
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Crashed my browser, very poor code.
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stephenlf
1 month ago
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I love this. Btw, TTFP on my feed was about 5 minutes lol
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asplake
1 month ago
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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?

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diimdeep
1 month ago
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This and author homepage gives strong impression of the usual contemporary nothing burger.
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SSchick
1 month ago
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Ohhh exloitable.
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