My playful gradient.horse project went viral - but exploded in different online communities at different moments. And this gives us the unique (and, frankly, useless) opportunity to explore how people coming from those communities draw horses.
The horses were selected more or less randomly, with non-horses, empty doodles, and transgressive drawings removed. Around 4% of all drawing turn out to be drawings of penises - but that too differs strongly between the online communities.
It all started with a post on metafilter.com:
metafilter.com
a collective blog from the US.
5200 visitors, peak on 17 January 2026
4.2% of drawings are drawings of dicks
typical horse drawings from Metafilter:
To better see the drawings you can disable the leg movement:
thompsonblog.co.uk
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/
A right wing political blog from the UK.
Somehow the spark went from a left wing US website to a right wing UK one.
2200 visitors, peak on 23 January 2026
8.6% of drawings are drawings of dicks
typical horse drawings:
tumblr
Is known as a place where people who can draw hang out.
73000 visitors, peak on 8 February 2026
0.6 % of drawings are drawings of dicks
typical horse drawings:
bluesky
41000 visitors, peak on 10 February 2026
4.0 % of drawings are drawings of dicks
typical horse drawings:
hacker news
30000 visitors, peak on 14 February 2026
8.1 % of drawings are drawings of dicks
1.6 % are drawings of swastikas and / or racial slurs
typical horse drawings:
The New York Times
49000 visitors, peak on 19 March 2026
1.1 % of drawings are drawings of dicks
typical horse drawings:
This is of course not a scientific research. It is not controlled for age, gender or ownership drawing device like a tablet with a pencil. But it does show some visible difference in aesthetic sensibilities and drawing ability.
A lot of tumblr users know how to draw, enjoy drawing and draw playfully. Obviously, to be playful, you have to master the medium somewhat - and this is my current theory on why the communities with the least skillful sketch artists also draw the most dicks. If the last time you drew something was in school, your drawing vocabulary may remain rooted in that age too.
What is more alarming is that Hacker News visitors created by far the most amount of swastikas, racial slurs and things like KKK hooded horses - while all the other visitors hardly produced any. Not sure if that’s just testing the moderation, following the “move fast and break things” doctrine, carelessness, edginess or just the pure old racism, but it’s been surprising and disappointing to see. The automatic moderation system does not indicate to the user if their drawing was filtered - otherwise it would turn into a “trick the system” game - a whole different genre. So the visitor always gets the satisfaction of seeing their penis or otherwise offensive drawing galloping towards the horizon, even if it will never be shown to other viewers. Still, many if not most swastika and penis artists then continue to add more and more transgressive drawings. So it seems to be more of a taboo breaking behaviour, the same kind of phase that children go through aged 8-10. Coming from Hacker News, they might feel like a hacker, a rebel breaking the system. And maybe that’s fine - after all there are not many opportunities in a society where you can feel this way and not hurt anyone.
Or you could just draw a horse.