The mistake they made was allowing visitors to trigger the generation of articles via visiting any arbitrary URL.

A more resilient concept would have been, have a few "seed" articles in place, and then only allow for the creation of new articles by clicking a link in an existing article.

It was so refreshing and fun for a few hours!

That would be a play on six degrees of kevin bacon [0], which spawned at least six degrees of wikipedia [1] and wikirace [2].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon 1. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/ 2. https://www.wikirace.io/

Yeah...I clicked on the "Stumble" link and it was right in my face.

As the co-author of the project: the whole reason was to allow everybody to hallucinate what they want. If it was their will to research such things on there, then it shall be. But yes, it is kinda sad.

You could keep this ability, but not save the titles of such articles anywhere.

The readers of Hacker News are almost certainly responsible. I found these pages within a minute of browsing randomly.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Looks like someone scripted `curl` in a loop and generated thousands of permutations of hate content.

Just in the comments, right? That is where I see it. If I were the site owner I would just turn comments off. It was a cute idea when someone on HN suggested it, but without moderation open commenting becomes a cesspool in a hurry.

Took me two clicks of the "Stumble" functionality to hit unsavory stuff that someone clearly made on purpose.

Try clicking "Stumble" a few times...

Yeah I see that now. Also clicking on the all entries list shows pages of garbage. Just takes a few sucky people to ruin things.

Mind all the funny, creative articles. A few suffice to ruin it for all.