this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Canvas

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Canvas — A collaborative annual pixel placing event for the Fediverse!

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Suggestions for Canvas and future events! (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by Ategon@programming.dev to c/canvas@toast.ooo
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Hey everyone! Thanks for participating in Canvas. I wanted to make a thread to collect together suggestions people have that can be worked on before the next Canvas.

Feel free to also throw in suggestions for future Events we can build and run for the fediverse.

Ill be collecting suggestions together and making issues for them in the repository for myself or some other contributors to work on (the projects open source so anyones free to contribute! https://git.sc07.company/sc07/canvas Feel free to reach out to me and I can help get you set up with the codebase)

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[–] tuna@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

On mobile I kept opening the whois pixel by accident when dragging. I often tap and hold to initiate a drag because I'm still looking at the art, but when i drag away and let go, it opens the whois thing. I think if you drag a certain screen-space distance away it should cancel the whois pixel lookup.

The heatmap I found too hard to tell where recent pixels were placed. I think at 100% opacity the "cold" pixels should be dark blue instead of their actual color.

A couple times I placed a dot, realized I actually didn't want it there and ran out of time to undo, which felt bad having to wait 30s. I wish it was a bit longer.

When you try to place a pixel a few milliseconds too early I feel like it should queue it and wait the few milliseconds for you.

I'm not super sure on the canvas having transparency. Most people treated the canvas as white, not transparent. If you wanted a white-on-white drawing, people will just make an outline.

Maybe a concept worth testing: if you place a pixel next to your own pixels, you get a (slightly) reduced cooldown, that way you get an extra boost when completing your art. (At the same time, I think there is beauty in the canvas being as simple as possible:)

[–] grant@toast.ooo 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] tuna@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

Happy to participate!

The one thing I wasn't super sure on was the undo timer... was it really 30 seconds 😅? I thought it was 5-15s, but i didnt really time it. And I'll be honest, I missed it maybe 3 times, so not much.

Besides just increasing the delay, there's 2 other thoughts:

  • A bigger target takes less time to hit (tho making it bigger might bother some, as it obstructs the canvas)
  • Two times I missed were bc I failed to notice my mistake. Maybe some extra visual feedback when you place a pixel could help. For example: when the void made it to my art, I accidentally made a dark gray become black, so it was harder to notice the color change. i was too busy focusing where to place the next pixel

Overall if you feel that the undo time was fine as it was I could easily respect that decision :)

[–] eco_game@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

+1 on the mobile draggging issue

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Escalating timers are an antipattern. It punishes anyone who looks away for more than thirty seconds - and thirty seconds per click is not exactly a brisk pace for maintaining attention.

Other than that, good shit, well done. Undo was a welcome surprise. Ditto the repetition prevention.

No wait, one other thing. (Complaint sandwich!) Scaling should be in integer powers. Everything but fully-zoomed-out and extremely-blown-up looked lumpy and distracting. Especially with all the pixel art going on.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like the escalating time, but the pacing issue is a fair point.

So perhaps the escalation could be delayed? Give it a tiny larger timer (let's say, 40s?), and make the second pixel take as much time as the first. Like this:

  • current times - 30s, 60s, 90s, 120s, 150s, 180s; total 630s
  • my proposal - 40s, 40s, 80s, 120s, 160s, 200s; total 640s

This way you'd be only getting less pixels per minute after 80s of inactivity, not 30s.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Longer waits would be worse.

It should be one every thirty seconds until you hit some limit. Do not incentivize continuously staring at a timer. Do not incentivize obsessively checking a timer. Just rate-limit people in the simplest way that could possibly work.

[–] Deebster@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One effect of this is that someone steadily editing got more pixels than someone editing in batches, which felt like a feature when defending against trolls.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Encouraging anyone to stare at a screen for two actions per minute is brutal. Especially when those actions, to be optimal, have to happen the moment the timer rolls over.

This is an addiction mechanic.

This is some free-to-play mobile-game nonsense.

No matter how good the motivations are, no matter what narratives we can build around casual versus attentive use, this is a bad decision for software. It is deliberate manipulation of the user's incentives and habits for destructive patterns of behavior.

[–] carbon_based@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you, very clear! I suggest to add one pixel every 30 seconds, plain and simple. If a modifier to this timer is required for reasons, that could be based on the number of pixels placed during the past x minutes or so.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

I'd rather not discourage consistent use, either. One valid purpose for modifying the rate could be soft botting prevention. Instead of handing people CAPTCHAs, just string them out on 40 seconds, 50 seconds, etc., as suspicion dictates.

What'd be great - and what I think would prevent some botting - is an official queue function. When I was filling in teal for half an hour at a time, I would have preferred to click a few spots in a row and let my browser do them for me. Automating an entire image would be ruinous. That's just a bot war waiting to happen. But if I could leave a dozen pixels floating, at any given time, I wouldn't give a damn when the timer says they'll get placed.