Just from a quick look, it looks like Moot is trying to take some of the interactions that grew organically out of 4chan and build them into Canvas, then making it easy for the non-technical person. From personal experience, it seems like whenever you try to parameterize and enforce something that was organic, you run the risk of killing it.
Something I think to keep in mind is, that making it easy for the non-artist and non-technical person to create and publish content removes a giant filter that would keep out a lot of trash. The effort "cost" of producing a remix of content is much lower now, so there's going to be more people with half-baked ideas creating garbage, and everyone will shit on them for posting it...bad experiences all around. Meanwhile, those people that would've still created and published good content (had the effort-cost been higher) may view Canvas as being too canned and immature for their time.
That's just my $0.02. Best of luck Moot, wish you had returned my emails :)
> making it easy for the non-artist and non-technical person to create and publish content removes a giant filter that would keep out a lot of trash.
To me, the biggest part of the fun of internet image culture all over the web is that it's mostly generated and appreciated by people who aren't really artists. If you look at the lively amusing stuff popular on 4chan/Reddit/Tumblr over the past few years - rage comics, dogfort comics, advice animals, complex reaction images referring to six different memes all at once in a humorous way, and a zillion other innovations that are only fresh for a week each - a lot of this stuff is made with MS Paint, copy-and-paste, GIF makers, and rudimentary Photoshop skills. The culture is very much enriched by people who know what they're doing with a drawing tablet, but overall it's folk art for everyone on the web who has time on their hands, art that is messy and wild and funny.
Canvas does something pretty neat: it lowers the barrier to entry even more, which adds even more folk-energy to this primordial soup. But it means that Canvas needs really good organic filters so that the best stuff bubbles up to the top in a readable way, like it does on Reddit and even 4chan (after you learn how to read 4chan). Canvas does some of this already, but I'm hoping for seeing even more, easier, faster ways to have fun browsing it without being already deeply enmeshed in the community (or even if you've been enmeshed in it before but took a break for a few weeks and now feel entirely out of the loop, etc)...I'd be interested in seeing more "entry paths", more blog posts with bits of context/explanation/decoding, and maybe also a lighter-page-weight option for browsing around (since I'm stuck on slow internet connections more often than I'd like).
removing barriers to entry might make it easier to innovate but it also makes it easy to copycat and beat ideas to death. the first rage comic might have been funny but they just get worse and worse with each new iteration.
Something I think to keep in mind is, that making it easy for the non-artist and non-technical person to create and publish content removes a giant filter that would keep out a lot of trash. The effort "cost" of producing a remix of content is much lower now, so there's going to be more people with half-baked ideas creating garbage, and everyone will shit on them for posting it...bad experiences all around. Meanwhile, those people that would've still created and published good content (had the effort-cost been higher) may view Canvas as being too canned and immature for their time.
That's just my $0.02. Best of luck Moot, wish you had returned my emails :)