Paint the Earth on a live, interactive globe (collaborative art.)
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Earth.tattoo divides the earth into 510 million 16x16 pixel "tiles" that you can own and paint as you like. You can claim one free tile per hour.
HN · launched Jul 6, 2026 · 20 upvotes (top 28%) · 0 views
Niche: interactive mapping platforms · 191 launches, 16 in the last 7 days ▲ +7% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 191 launches in interactive mapping platforms →
Could you build this?
Partial The 3D globe visualization and tile selection UI is straightforward, but managing real-time collaborative pixel painting across 510 million persistent tiles requires high-throughput spatial indexing and efficient streaming infrastructure.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires a 3D frontend (Three.js/Cesium) coupled with a scalable spatial database (e.g., PostGIS or custom quadtree storage) to handle 510 million tiles. Real-time updates demand an optimized WebSocket or Redis pub/sub layer along with dynamic raster/vector tile generation pipeline to avoid collapsing under simultaneous user writes.
Discussion
14 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Million Dollar Homepage, Reddit Place variant, wplace.live, Free drawing sites
Concerns raised: Vandalism and griefing without pricing protection, Misuse with forbidden symbols/problematic content moderation, World too large, hard to find where to draw, Blocks are too small, Unclear if people will pay for tiles
Feature requests: Undo shortcuts (ctrl+z) for pixel-level changes, Wayback/historical mode to view unmodified art, Heatmap showing activity hotspots in past 24 hours, Start with geolocation-based focus on user's local area, Minimum price proportional to tile contiguity value
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 215 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #72 of 216 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 250 days after the earliest competitor.
- The Masterpiece Mosaic · ph · 2026-11-05 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- InkAge · ph · 2026-11-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Pixel Space Canvas · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Cellionaire · ph · 2026-11-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Earth Stats · ph · 2026-11-06 · 60 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- MaterialCalc — How Much Do You Need? · ph · 2026-10-01 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Message to Mars · ph · 2026-09-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- The Last Website · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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