I like the idea. I've used services like this before. I do wonder if monospaced font is really the best route. It makes anything longer than a couple hundreds words a pain to read.
Never realized how uncomfortable it is to read a paragraph of monospaced font text, even though I read 1000s of lines of code in monospaced font without any issues.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I enjoy reading in monospace. And I certainly prefer it over a sans-serif font with font-weight set to 0.01 and poor contrast!
You POST your uploaded doc to 'do.php', which renders into an html file and puts it on disk, which is served by Apache. That's about as simple as you can get. Let the web server do what it does best (serve files).
Some markdown features aren't working, like code blocks and newlines (by ending a line in double-spaces). Also, unknown routes don't 404 nicely; they just hit the Apache default.
I HATE gray text. I haven't had a single book with gray on white, not a single newspaper with gray on white, what is this gray-on-white trend in the internet, I don't understand it. But that's illegible, that's an eyesore, and if I were to have to read it, I'd first go to the dev console and change the foreground colour.
>> Black on white? How often do you see that kind of contrast in real life?
I mean where these people live? Don't they read anything on paper? Don't they look ad ads on the road, ads on TV. God, is this a plot on our eyes?.
If it's well done, you don't immediately realize the text isn't exactly black. You'd have to have a closer look to find that out.
The paper color of good books isn't glaring white, either, but has a slight yellowish tint. FWIW, I think the background color of HN might be a nod to that.
I nearly snorted my morning coffee when I read:
> Shit's legible and gets your f...ing point across (if you had one instead of just 5mb pics of hipsters drinking coffee)
So good. For the record I'm a programmer, not a hipster. ;)
The problem with these sites is, they're hard to discover. Telegra.ph is the most awesome (rich text, widgets for youtube & co...), but can't be found when you type "richtext pastebin" on Google, because the welcome page is too simple, obvious, perfectly ergonomic, ultimately simplistic...
Aren't people who visit Hacker News already familiar with a ton of ways to publish anything they want instead of soon-to-cease-to-exist service that only serves raw text?
I say this not to be mean -- I understand where you're coming from, I myself have written a "pure plain text" service in the past and thought it would be revolutionary due to its simplicity.
I don't think its author thinks its revolutionary (at least it doesn't send off that kind of vibe). Just a neat personal project that some people might find useful.
They definitely are, but it's still an interesting, useful project.
As someone also building and running a "plain text" service, I know there's a lot you can do with such a simple product, if you care to. [0][1] It's great to have more services like this -- it's what the web is all about.
Really. Is THIS what the web is about? Just sharing text? Of course sharing text is part of what the web is about, but hey, how can we find this text? How can the author know what he has written? How can we be sure of who wrote it? How can we make sense of what text refers to what? Which of these texts is more worth reading?
Just in the field of text-sharing, there are tons of problems which are not being solved by these pure plain text services, while these are not new problems and other services are already trying to solve them in multiple different ways.
> Really. Is THIS what the web is about? Just sharing text?
Text is communication. Anything else is an increase of human efficiency at a cost of data. I wouldn't say the web's about text...but I would say that it's about communication, and that services like this clear away the extra frills to get to the essence and remind us all.
I meant "this" as in people creating simple tools and services for everyone. I meant your pure plain text service would've been a nice addition to the web. Everyone who creates things online brings their own ideas to the table, and that's what the web is about. (And of course it's good for other things.)
And certain services (like Write.as) keep track of all the posts you've written, and they can optionally can be tied to a pseudonym. I don't think that an assurance on who wrote what is always necessary. If the writing is good, the author doesn't necessarily matter. And anecdotally I think people who abuse anonymity online are in the minority -- most people use anonymity to share more candidly where they otherwise feel repressed.
And I think "worth" is best decided by the reader, and a human touch continues to be superior to any technical solutions we've come up with. Platforms who try to uniformly enforce some standard of "worth," in my opinion, risk alienating a large amount of people, and usually miss the entire standard they were going for in the first place.
But what other problems do you think exist with text publishing services? Or what do you think needs to change? How do we solve those things?
> I don't think that an assurance on who wrote what is always necessary
I'm not saying it is always necessary, but that it is a recurring problem that occur but txt.fyi doesn't care about.
> most people use anonymity to share more candidly where they otherwise feel repressed.
It doesn't matter if you share something anonymously in txt.fyi if nobody is ever going to find it.
> And I think "worth" is best decided by the reader, and a human touch continues to be superior to any technical solutions we've come up with.
You're proposing that we go read everything on the internet to pass our judgments on what is worth. That was the problem in first place. Categorization, ratings and reputation are some of the solutions already tried. I don't know if they've solved everything or if there is room for better solutions. What I know is that txt.fyi doesn't care about this problem.
> But what other problems do you think exist with text publishing services? Or what do you think needs to change? How do we solve those things?
I don't know. I just imagine that there are many problems we know of (such as the ones I listed) and the author of txt.fyi is not trying to solve any of these. Other problems may exist or come into existence, and it is up to platform developers to try to solve them too. There is of course room for pure plain text published anonymously, but the supply is already immense there. I don't think we should incentive new developers to write one more of these services (and worse: keep running it an improving it technically for a long time).
Since the site is already experiencing the HN hug of death, it makes me wonder how doable it would be to make something like this but backed by a P2P store, possibly verified by blockchain
I don't think I have that many interesting stories, it was just the time involved with dealing with emails from irate individuals, companies, and (occasionally) law enforcement agencies!
But in an AMA, it's the audience that asks interesting questions, with you discovering that your stories are more interesting than you originally thought they would be!
Nofollow links seem to help with getting the target indexed. So, the spammers create their second and third tiers of actual content on sites that do not use nofollow. However, they'll use anything with any kind of links to get those tiers crawled and indexed.
i guess thats what they did. funny, it seems they got penalized regardless somehow, because i started getting emails asking to please remove the spam they posted.
Edit: It seems some of them were trying to damage competitor's SEO ranking by posting irregular links. SEO is wild west.
I can confirm that. I made https://pastery.net, a pastebin (THE BEST ONE), and I looked a few weeks later to find that it had a few hundred thousand pastes. I was very happy to see that people were using it that much, until I realized that most of it was spam.
I wrote some heuristics to delete spam pastes, and only about 1,000 pastes were left, about half of which were spam still :(
I don't even know why they do this. They just do it.
Cheaper for their scripts to indiscriminately spam than them manually work out which forms and public sites are indexed and will actually bring them value.
Require some complex js codes workflow to post using websocket or something and most automated spam goes away. They are mass mindless bot, not targeted spammers.
That's a good idea, but most of the functionality of the site comes from its API. Then again, it's easy to require a key and a captcha to sign up, so your idea is good, thank you.
We (and by we, I mean, I) launched "Oh By"[1] last year which is very, very much like what is going on here, but with deliberately human-readable and recognizable codes ("Oh By Codes") ....
Do you have any comments ?
Of course we had pastebin very much in mind - not as a model to follow but as an analogous service in some ways. Our message is limited to 4096 characters so it isn't quite as useful for large docs ... but it's much easier to pass around the "code" chalked on the street ...
Hahaha, I built something just like this site once, just to see what would happen.
Wouldn't this be fun? No auth, no rules, no permanent database, just plain text that hangs out for a while (though people could reply to it - ours was more like a forum). The ones with replies jump to the top, everything else slowly falls off into the abyss where it can never be found again.
Literally had people posting ASCII-rendered child pornography within 24 hours
Apart from the last line, that site design sounds like a lot of fun. I'm guessing you went "okay this isn't going to work" and killed it - or is it still quietly buried somewhere?
Also, did you keep the code? Might be a fun startpoint for others to springboard off of.
God i feel you. Everytime a pastebin close we get a surge of dox / warez / child porn activity on http://0bin.net. Since by design we can't monitor it we just get notified after the fact by concerned citizens mailing us. One month our mailbox is empty, the other one it's report day every day.
How confident are you in your legal shield that, although you know your service is being used for child porn, you're claiming not to be responsible for it?
Edit: I see you're behind whoisguard but hosted in Bulgaria, which is probably uninterested enough in chasing you.
If you're implying that the technically literate are either better or worse in this respect (or even just differently distributed), you might want to back that up with some arguments. Maybe you tried to say something else but otherwise I don't see the point of this remark.
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Seems like a cool idea, and the creator is pretty responsive on Twitter. I offered to assist with the infrastructure as a way of supporting the project.
For the record, firefoxd's static assets were offloaded to another server for an additional $10/month. $15/month is still not bad, but I feel like this comment is a bit misleading.
Yes, I'm just editorial (and until recently design). Ken is our sysadmin and, as it happens, got txt.fyi back on its feet today when HN blew it down! He's brilliant!
Hi, nice idea! It went down though so I was thinking maybe you could build it strong but on the cheap too without needing a database and very little coding.
There is an approach I've used for years and my site never goes down with high traffic and I didn't use load balancers or anything fancy. Its very cheap to run and maintain.
1) Use Amazon S3 and Cloud Front for all your web pages, including your web app as well along with storing anything such as file uploads, etc.
2) Have a simple cheap $5 Digital Ocean Droplet (Node or Go) used only as an API.
3) JavaScript is hosted on your website front end that upon save for content then hits your API server just once to get a Just-In-Time signing request that authorizes the web browser to make an upload directly to S3 temporarily and signed to a specific namespace/bucket. This type of traffic happens very less than say viewing a web page along with it taking up very little processing and bandwidth so you really don't need to scale this.
4) The web browser's javascript literally creates the entire html page and uploads it directly to S3.
You can easily do image uploads as well or video too using this method and use the just-in-time signing method for those too.
Yes it is not secure if there is no signup etc but you can do crypto.generateRandom to put people in specific namespace path then show their URL after, controlling limited permissions and the location of where things are saved from your cheap API server.
Sure you could. The funny thing is, I've had this product on the market using this very concept of JIT signing, using the browser (and apps) to do all the work, didn't really put any effort into, only used for my clients as a CMS-as-a-service or CMSSAAS WTF? called kitgui.com, been on some department store brands using it for ecommece sites that i've put as a consequence of needing this on multiple backend platforms. Any hoo, never goes down, never had to do jack shit scaling or worry about it but I've completely neglected it so it looks like 2010 crap themes and diy web standards. Anybody want to partner up on it and make a bad-ass json cms that spreads to all devices? I'll gladly divvy % on current revenue.
I'd imagine for the time being you could use DO's resizing features to vertically scale your droplet to handle the load. Then at a later point, horizontally scale.
Too many publishing platforms sunrise and sunset. To use one that's not self-hosted, I really think one either needs to (1) charge money, and/or (2) offer guarantees like Posthaven or Svbtle, if you want users to publish good content on your platform.
Well, yes. But it has already proven staying power that puts it in rather a different class to "somebody's neat side project" in terms of expectation of survival.
> and know the form of your voice is out there forever.
Lots of these types of sites usually have some limit. That is, if the page hasn't been visited in 6 months - out it goes. Curious what the time limits are.
Also, unable to test (site under heavy load) but is there an edit link that's made available after making a post? From the comments, that doesn't appear to be the case. So if I wanted to use it as a knowledge base for something, I wouldn't be able to keep updating it. I think this is the missing (basic) feature.
That's really the point, to be as minimalistic as possible. The less features something has the less points of failure are possible. If you need a certain feature, use something else.
195 comments
[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] threadWhat languages are the site written in?
Looks like C# possibly since ASP.NET popped up.
https://txt.fyi/+/3c5c8a2b/
It makes the page unstyled
For me the monospace text is difficult to read for longer text because I can't chunk as effectively.
Where is the data being stored then? Some kind of key value store or filesystem maybe?
You POST your uploaded doc to 'do.php', which renders into an html file and puts it on disk, which is served by Apache. That's about as simple as you can get. Let the web server do what it does best (serve files).
For text files?! Get outta town ;)
>> Black on white? How often do you see that kind of contrast in real life?
I mean where these people live? Don't they read anything on paper? Don't they look ad ads on the road, ads on TV. God, is this a plot on our eyes?.
The paper color of good books isn't glaring white, either, but has a slight yellowish tint. FWIW, I think the background color of HN might be a nod to that.
So good. For the record I'm a programmer, not a hipster. ;)
(Features: markdown preview and password for editing)
I say this not to be mean -- I understand where you're coming from, I myself have written a "pure plain text" service in the past and thought it would be revolutionary due to its simplicity.
Pretty cool nonetheless.
Try applying this logic to politicians or bankers or whatever class you don't like.
https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/834582107569655810
Hopefully it can become a good contribution to the independent web: a place to put words without any fuss or fury.
https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/834599500039729164
Seeing how something this simple reacts to such events would be interesting. I'll be as transparent and open as I can
(the latter is a reply to a post to the platform about difficulties running a similar service)
As someone also building and running a "plain text" service, I know there's a lot you can do with such a simple product, if you care to. [0][1] It's great to have more services like this -- it's what the web is all about.
[0]: https://write.as/apps
[1]: https://read.write.as
Just in the field of text-sharing, there are tons of problems which are not being solved by these pure plain text services, while these are not new problems and other services are already trying to solve them in multiple different ways.
Text is communication. Anything else is an increase of human efficiency at a cost of data. I wouldn't say the web's about text...but I would say that it's about communication, and that services like this clear away the extra frills to get to the essence and remind us all.
And certain services (like Write.as) keep track of all the posts you've written, and they can optionally can be tied to a pseudonym. I don't think that an assurance on who wrote what is always necessary. If the writing is good, the author doesn't necessarily matter. And anecdotally I think people who abuse anonymity online are in the minority -- most people use anonymity to share more candidly where they otherwise feel repressed.
And I think "worth" is best decided by the reader, and a human touch continues to be superior to any technical solutions we've come up with. Platforms who try to uniformly enforce some standard of "worth," in my opinion, risk alienating a large amount of people, and usually miss the entire standard they were going for in the first place.
But what other problems do you think exist with text publishing services? Or what do you think needs to change? How do we solve those things?
I'm not saying it is always necessary, but that it is a recurring problem that occur but txt.fyi doesn't care about.
> most people use anonymity to share more candidly where they otherwise feel repressed.
It doesn't matter if you share something anonymously in txt.fyi if nobody is ever going to find it.
> And I think "worth" is best decided by the reader, and a human touch continues to be superior to any technical solutions we've come up with.
You're proposing that we go read everything on the internet to pass our judgments on what is worth. That was the problem in first place. Categorization, ratings and reputation are some of the solutions already tried. I don't know if they've solved everything or if there is room for better solutions. What I know is that txt.fyi doesn't care about this problem.
> But what other problems do you think exist with text publishing services? Or what do you think needs to change? How do we solve those things?
I don't know. I just imagine that there are many problems we know of (such as the ones I listed) and the author of txt.fyi is not trying to solve any of these. Other problems may exist or come into existence, and it is up to platform developers to try to solve them too. There is of course room for pure plain text published anonymously, but the supply is already immense there. I don't think we should incentive new developers to write one more of these services (and worse: keep running it an improving it technically for a long time).
Overall this strikes me as a project borne of a sweet domain name, but I still dig it.
https://txt.fyi/+/39c4f224/
Also, a way to make ninja edits with a cookie for 24 hrs.
And then I see others have requested AMAs too.
pastebin is, after all, the #1 site. And you did (more or less) say you stopped running it due to stress/"interestingness" :)
Like another commentator said, you would've gotten one of everything.
So please do consider it. :)
Edit: It seems some of them were trying to damage competitor's SEO ranking by posting irregular links. SEO is wild west.
Some will just scribble whatever, where-ever possible.
I wrote some heuristics to delete spam pastes, and only about 1,000 pastes were left, about half of which were spam still :(
I don't even know why they do this. They just do it.
That's been my policy when running this kind of thing in the past - maybe I've been living behind CloudFlare and OVH for too long.
Do you have any comments ?
Of course we had pastebin very much in mind - not as a model to follow but as an analogous service in some ways. Our message is limited to 4096 characters so it isn't quite as useful for large docs ... but it's much easier to pass around the "code" chalked on the street ...
[1] https://0x.co
Wouldn't this be fun? No auth, no rules, no permanent database, just plain text that hangs out for a while (though people could reply to it - ours was more like a forum). The ones with replies jump to the top, everything else slowly falls off into the abyss where it can never be found again.
Literally had people posting ASCII-rendered child pornography within 24 hours
Also, did you keep the code? Might be a fun startpoint for others to springboard off of.
"Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" :)
Nah the code is gone. Wrote it in <24 hours, and it wasn't really worth keeping.
Edit: I see you're behind whoisguard but hosted in Bulgaria, which is probably uninterested enough in chasing you.
What sorcery is this??! Page size is not even 1mb and there's no React front-end component :)
The server at txt.fyi is taking too long to respond.
Oh, I'm sure the internet archive guys will honor that request.
/facepalm
Ex: http://web.archive.org/web/20070103112847/http://www.infocep...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
I wanted to make a publishing widget so minimal it would operate without fuss on a $5 digitalocean plan, and I think I almost succeeded!
What's the CPU utilization like with this level of usage?
What's the back-end stack?
What's the normal latency like?
I'm just wondering why it would go down due to heavy traffic, when all it serves is basic text?
My server purred with hn traffic.
[1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/handling-1-million-web-request
No need for modesty.
It starts with this premise: https://aws.amazon.com/articles/1434/
There is an approach I've used for years and my site never goes down with high traffic and I didn't use load balancers or anything fancy. Its very cheap to run and maintain.
1) Use Amazon S3 and Cloud Front for all your web pages, including your web app as well along with storing anything such as file uploads, etc.
2) Have a simple cheap $5 Digital Ocean Droplet (Node or Go) used only as an API.
3) JavaScript is hosted on your website front end that upon save for content then hits your API server just once to get a Just-In-Time signing request that authorizes the web browser to make an upload directly to S3 temporarily and signed to a specific namespace/bucket. This type of traffic happens very less than say viewing a web page along with it taking up very little processing and bandwidth so you really don't need to scale this.
4) The web browser's javascript literally creates the entire html page and uploads it directly to S3.
You can easily do image uploads as well or video too using this method and use the just-in-time signing method for those too.
Yes it is not secure if there is no signup etc but you can do crypto.generateRandom to put people in specific namespace path then show their URL after, controlling limited permissions and the location of where things are saved from your cheap API server.
Here's my little repo for signing to demonstrate this -> https://github.com/sebringj/siggy
Just a thought.
http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/23/14712352/txt-fyi-minimalis...
Live for how long though?
Too many publishing platforms sunrise and sunset. To use one that's not self-hosted, I really think one either needs to (1) charge money, and/or (2) offer guarantees like Posthaven or Svbtle, if you want users to publish good content on your platform.
I'd worry that's an abuse of archive.org except apparently their policy is basically "the crap is important too".
[1]: https://archive.org/donate/
Lots of these types of sites usually have some limit. That is, if the page hasn't been visited in 6 months - out it goes. Curious what the time limits are.
Also, unable to test (site under heavy load) but is there an edit link that's made available after making a post? From the comments, that doesn't appear to be the case. So if I wanted to use it as a knowledge base for something, I wouldn't be able to keep updating it. I think this is the missing (basic) feature.