Can the Internet crowdsource stories? A story of losing some hope, regaining it, then losing it all
One chilly, Michigan evening, I was bundled up in jackets with my friends and decided to check on an online game I had launched a few days back. My frozen hands struggled to hold my phone while I typed in its URL. While expecting one or two users online best, there were over 20 furiously active on the site! A smile took over my face as I put my phone back and ran to catch up with my friends.
A few hours later, I shut the website down indefinitely.
Sure, I had gotten semi-viral. But I had created a monster, and one that I could not manage littered with harassment and trolls. I had to kill it.
How did we get here?
Earlier this year, I developed a website called WeWord built around crowdsourced storytelling. In this platform, anyone on the Internet could anonymously add words to stories. My hope was that the collective brainpower of the internet could create something beautiful if everyone put their mind to it.
**dramatic foreshadowing – it kinda worked!**
It seemed awesome. I played it as a kid with all of my friends. I played it with some of my college friends before. Other people I chatted with seemed to like the idea. I had struck gold with something people liked.
To test the concept out, I added some of my friends to GroupMes with ~10 people and told them to only text one word at a time and make a story. To my surprise, some of the stories were actually coherent, ranging from giraffe eyelashes to Oprah Winfrey traveling in Paris. They were straight up hilarious.
After the successful alpha test, I had everyone fill out a Google Form to get some feedback. Some of my initial ideas, like restricting it to one word at a time, were proven wrong while others were proven right. I spent the next couple months designing mockups and coding a web app that could handle basic, basic functionality. After some testing, a week of frustration at Docker and GCP, and one really, really late night of nginx, everything was ready.
The entire point of WeWord was to see if random strangers on the Internet could successfully write stories together. I wanted to post it on Reddit, Product Hunt, Twitter, get it featured in publications, etc. I wanted thousands of random people to write content together. But since my site was kind of janky, I decided on a smaller beta test with just my friends, though – with no Reddit and hopefully no trolls.
I posted it on my personal Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, GroupMes, etc. The only way for people to stay interested in WeWord was to see other people adding words in real-time. To get as many people on as possible, there was no login, no required usernames.
And no filters. Cuz’ the Internet’s nice, right?
Three anonymous writers got online (including me, of course) and wrote some great content under “Procrastinating on Finals”
One day , there was an extremely hard computer science final , instead of studying I went on producthunt and I am . Procrastinating !
– noah, Guest, Guest
Unfortunately, it took around 10 minutes for an anonymous user to discover my lack of a swear filter and soon multiple racial slurs were written. Other writers online acted in disgust, adding words like “uhhhhhhh” and “yikes”. I quickly turned a bad word filter on.
That seemed to be good enough. The creativity continued flowing!
How does one Hi . How does someone low five someone flirtatiously? Interestingly enough , you cannot .
– RJ, zach simpson, Guest
Knock knock, who is there ? It , ‘ s orange Orangewho ? The hair man knocks the bean bag chair Salad
– zach simpson, Guest
I got around one thousand words that first day, but things began going dark fast when people figured out how to get around this swear filter.
But alas I decided to not each too much a s s
– Guest, Guest, Guest
Seex Secks Sext Sexie Seqs
– Sex
However, my tipping point was when my platform literally turned into a form of harassment. One of my friends added some words, and after she left the page another writer came on and began making lewd sentences. Someone else began adding general hate speech at 3am. Someone else began posting graphic conspiracy theories.
While there were around 300 writers on the first day, a half-dozen bad cookies was enough to give me extreme discomfort in my new platform. Sure, I had created a community and many stories people wrote were hilarious, but just a few anonymous people was all it took to ruin them all.
I also fell into the uncomfortable position of being the sole moderator of this content, as well as having to answer a lot of tricky ethical questions and grey areas. When was something worthy of me removing? Should I be removing this free speech? Am I responsible for whatever words, no matter how offensive, are written on my application? Do I automatically endorse whatever people write?
I didn’t want to focus on answering these questions. The second day I reset the entire database and added a dictionary filter. Sure, it got rid of most of the bad words and just about no trolls came on the day after the drop. But, I still had a lingering sense of discomfort that someone would figure out a way around it and use my platform for hate speech. I held off on my plans to post to Reddit and make a big marketing push.
A month passed. Then two. $50 of free credits disappeared from Google Cloud. @weword_co’s Tweets weren’t getting likes.
I had dinner with a friend and WeWord came up. He was shocked when I mentioned I hadn’t posted it on Reddit.
“Wasn’t the point of WeWord to put it on Reddit in the first place? Have the Internet crowdsource a story? What could go wrong?”
Honestly, what could? Sure, it could become a platform for hate speech, but after that first wave of traffic and trolls, adding a dictionary helped a ton. And I now knew how to quickly delete words, ban users, and take the website down fast if something went wrong.
Worst-case scenario would be trolls taking over the website. If that happened, I would shut it down or ban users quickly. I could put WeWord to rest once and for all.
But best-case scenario, I’d finally be able to put the mystery of the question I set out to answer – could the Internet actually crowdsource stories? And I thought that whatever content would be written had the potential to be great.
I posted on /r/writing, /r/onewordeach, and most dangerously /r/webgames.
It went viral. And these stories were absolutely hilarious.
A few thousand individual users wrote tens of thousands of words, some stories having five writers on at once. People were actually respectful, trolls were buried with positivity and couldn’t figure out ways past my spam filter.
People were sending me messages about how much fun they were having. Strangers were writing books for hours at a time. I had made a community and it felt great. Maybe it could stay this way forever
> One day some guys on the internet found themselves writing a cooperative story. It was not just any random story . This was a story with no point at all.
– Cereal, pam, Guest
> Meanwhile a drunk man ate corn and looked on . It was me. Not surprisingly.
– John, jamesdude, Guest
> Men suck at life especially you because you can’t eat cereal
– ant, G-Dawg, Guest
There were not one, but two stories, called “Potato” which banned every letter except for the ones in the word “potato” and only allowed words to be 6 letters long. Each had over 50 words from dozen of writers.
But things got nasty a few days in. One user started threatening another. Some writers discovered that the bad word filter library left out plurals of common swear words. One story started becoming pretty homophobic. Many others got extremely sexual.
Sure, it was hilarious, but things started taking a turn and I chose to ignore it for just a bit longer. Little did I know I was sitting on a ticking time bomb.
It was a cold Saturday night, the Michigan winter chills were freezing my hands holding my phone. I didn’t have much time to read the stories as I had to stay with my friends, but one gained 6,000 words in a single hour. Nearly 20 users being online made me overjoyed.
I wondered where the traffic was coming from. I did a quick Google search for WeWord. Turns out I was more popular than a European consulting firm by the same name, a massive success. But then I found the source of the traffic.
Yes, it got anonymously posted to 4chan. Four times, to be precise.
Yikes.
For context, 4chan, according to UrbanDictionary, is “The source of all that is evil and wrong on the Internet.” It consists of totally anonymous users who lurk on this dark corner of the internet. One thing they love doing is “raids,” where they collectively come together to destroy a website.
WeWord, a website with words that can’t be undone, was the perfect target.
They figured out an outstanding number of ways to be offensive, add swears, post racial slurs I didn’t even know existed, and so much more. It was the worst case scenario.
But I wasn’t freaking out. I don’t know why, but I knew what 4chan’s intentions were. I knew that their legacy is built around posting racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic content on the Internet. And I didn’t take the stuff they wrote personally.
I was happy that somehow, I had brought this group of trolls together. They were posting on the thread discoveries they found in the spam filter in their thousand-word novels “It’s Big Boss and his phantom,” “vidya gaems,” and “The Story of /biz/”. But their stories had recurring motifs, characters, and plot elements. To be honest, they were kind of addicted to my platform. And that put a nice smile to my face
Unfortunately, I didn’t want my parents or friends reading stories about Hitler, unpopular opinions on trans rights (well, a little worse than that), and highly descriptive crowdsourced shockingly graphic fan fictions. So I shut it down.
So, what’s next?
Firstly, I made a pull request to my bad word library adding a LOT of new swear words that 4chan discovered. Honestly, I was impressed!
For now, all stories at weword.co have been reset before the 4chan raid, but no one can add any more words or stories. I’m still spooked by the 5–10 daily strangers who still come to the website despite being archived.
While I do miss seeing people creatively add words and write genius twists, I got all the ups and downs I needed. It was still a pain to run the app, monitor all the stories, and make sure no one was doing anything naughty with my code. The fame was fun for a few days but I didn’t really have time to answer these ethical questions with school going on at the same time. Turning it off was a relief.
But what about things that can’t be turned off? Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and literally any social media platform constantly runs into the same issues that I’m running into. They have the same ethical, big-brother questions that I decided to “procrastinate” answering. In the real world, CEOs cannot simply ignore these questions. After WeWord, I got a whole lot more appreciation for how each social media company uniquely addresses their ethical issues. Some I agree with, others I don’t.
I’m grateful that I could turn off WeWord and continue on with my life without thinking about difficult ethical questions, but there are a lot of people who work hard to answer these. I got a great taste into the world of the viral Internet and while it was fun, I realized there was a whole lot more to it that I did not have the time to figure out.
One day, I hope to reopen WeWord. But my excitement for new, different, and hopefully viral projects is far from dormant.
