Gradient.horse
317 points by microflash 5 days ago | 61 comments

spython 5 weeks 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!

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spython 20 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

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nl 11 hours ago
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 10 hours ago
Twitter bots don't drive external traffic, it's why the ROI of advertising there is so shite
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d0100 12 hours ago
How many crabs where drawn?
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spython 11 hours ago
Quite a few actually. Other popular animals: dinosaurs, cats, and snails!
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pjerem 15 hours ago
I saw a penis bypassing the filter. Good job to this user !
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gradientpenis 13 hours ago
I saw a penis while posting my penis :D https://imgur.com/a/VRdRFrJ
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Imustaskforhelp 18 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?

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spython 16 hours 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.

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kubb 13 hours ago
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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scottscambaugh 11 hours ago
[dead]
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echelon 18 hours ago
Tumblr is still around? That's a good data point.
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maxbond 18 hours ago
They're well on their way to becoming the next PDF.
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nkrisc 11 hours ago
Doesn’t seem to catch “five-legged” horses very well.
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twism 22 hours ago
just saw an animated fellatio
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bad_haircut72 22 hours ago
Truly recapturing the early web then
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Juliate 16 hours ago
This is a beautiful idea, thank you!
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internet2000 21 hours ago
Just got a 8===D~ drawing past the filter.
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spython 21 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.
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LeoPanthera 23 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.

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semitones 19 hours ago
I only see my penis for some reason
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llbbdd 16 hours ago
Me too but I guess I should have been paying more attention to the screen
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Tommix11 17 hours ago
I saw a xenomorph, who drew that one?
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zer0zzz 22 hours ago
I did my part
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gus_massa 4 weeks 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.

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dmit 16 hours ago
> 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 23 hours ago
Easily one of the top 25 horse drawing sites of 2026
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hinkley 20 hours ago
One of the top 25 horse drawing sites of 2026 so far.
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n_u 22 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

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rhoopr 23 hours ago
The simplicity of the animation makes this hilariously charming.
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Normal_gaussian 22 hours ago
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 22 hours ago
The backwards horse is my fault, period. I didn't read the direction.
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acheron 19 hours ago
I’m so glad ICANN added .horse for all our horse-related sites.
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ashton314 21 hours ago
Very happy to see a Trogdor the BURNiNATOR strutting across my screen
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ErneX 14 hours ago
curses!
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villuv 18 hours ago
Zooming in and out on iphone introduces flying horses
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basketbla 22 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.

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zkmon 12 hours ago
Fill the internet with this kind of trivia. Victory to humans!
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DeepYogurt 22 hours ago
This is some quality internet
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gus_massa 5 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!

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stevage 23 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.
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dakolli 20 hours ago
btw, This is what people are referring to when they say LLMs are revolutionizing software.
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stevage 23 hours ago
Cool, you can click on them and they jump.

Someone made a pretty ace 8 legged horse.

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bulletsvshumans 23 hours ago
Ok I bought my dumb horse on a mug, I admit it.
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recursive 23 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.
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mym1990 23 hours ago
Make the internet weird again, part 2!!
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khazhoux 19 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.
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nilslindemann 22 hours ago
There are so many different views of the same concept.
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hinkley 20 hours ago
My horse did not stomp :(
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spython 20 hours ago
Oh no! Did you use all the colors available?
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countWSS 11 hours ago
Crashed my browser, very poor code.
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fHr 23 hours ago
absolute cinema
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klinquist 20 hours ago
this made my day.
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lovegrenoble 22 hours ago
Funny enough
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twism 22 hours ago
some creative nsfw ... bravo
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efilife 22 hours ago
whoever drew a fish, great job
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sublinear 11 hours ago
Just like the early web, I expect it to become a graffiti playground full of dicks.
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asplake 18 hours 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?

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stephenlf 23 hours ago
I love this. Btw, TTFP on my feed was about 5 minutes lol
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diimdeep 17 hours ago
This and author homepage gives strong impression of the usual contemporary nothing burger.
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SSchick 22 hours ago
Ohhh exloitable.
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