hckrnws

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!

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

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.

Twitter bots don't drive external traffic, it's why the ROI of advertising there is so shite

I saw a penis bypassing the filter. Good job to this user !

I saw a penis while posting my penis :D https://imgur.com/a/VRdRFrJ

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?

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.

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.

[dead]

How many crabs where drawn?

Quite a few actually. Other popular animals: dinosaurs, cats, and snails!

Tumblr is still around? That's a good data point.

They're well on their way to becoming the next PDF.

Doesn’t seem to catch “five-legged” horses very well.

just saw an animated fellatio

Truly recapturing the early web then

This is a beautiful idea, thank you!

Just got a 8===D~ drawing past the filter.

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.

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.

I only see my penis for some reason

Me too but I guess I should have been paying more attention to the screen

I saw a xenomorph, who drew that one?

I did my part

Easily one of the top 25 horse drawing sites of 2026

One of the top 25 horse drawing sites of 2026 so far.

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.

> 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...).

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

The simplicity of the animation makes this hilariously charming.

Some of you can draw some pretty amazing abstract horses.

Some of you cannot.

Some of you choose not to.

The backwards horse is my fault, period. I didn't read the direction.

I’m so glad ICANN added .horse for all our horse-related sites.

Very happy to see a Trogdor the BURNiNATOR strutting across my screen

curses!

Zooming in and out on iphone introduces flying horses

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.

Fill the internet with this kind of trivia. Victory to humans!

This is some quality internet

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!

Supposedly it filters out non-horses, but I sure saw a lot of dragons and snakes and cows and I don't know what.

btw, This is what people are referring to when they say LLMs are revolutionizing software.

Cool, you can click on them and they jump.

Someone made a pretty ace 8 legged horse.

Ok I bought my dumb horse on a mug, I admit it.

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.

Make the internet weird again, part 2!!

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.

There are so many different views of the same concept.

My horse did not stomp :(

Oh no! Did you use all the colors available?

Crashed my browser, very poor code.

absolute cinema

this made my day.

Funny enough

some creative nsfw ... bravo

whoever drew a fish, great job

Just like the early web, I expect it to become a graffiti playground full of dicks.

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?

I love this. Btw, TTFP on my feed was about 5 minutes lol

This and author homepage gives strong impression of the usual contemporary nothing burger.

Ohhh exloitable.