The evolution is really quite fascinating. At first, the swastika and penis faction was losing since it is easier to erase than draw, but then they figured out that you could make the work of the clean up people harder by stippling their drawings, so the erase tool became less effective. In response, the erasers began to draw over the drawings and were quickly pushed back by the erase tool now used by the villains. Now it's almost balanced with both factions using the stipple technique.
It reminds me of the battles that take place in one of my drawing sites.
You can see the fight in action here (in the room one down and one right from the center, especially the first 30 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIJ3XFPRsSw (a lot of swastikas and penises so beware)
I'm glad that it's somewhat self-moderating but the vandals usually have the upper hand.
> I was pleasantly surprised to go to the public whiteboard and not immediately see it covered with phalluses.
Wikipedia had inclusionist vs deletionist ("this is strictly an online encyclopedia - most research programming languages are not notable - delete!") warfare, because the kludgy early Wikipedia infrastructure couldn't provide multiple views, so both communities couldn't be made happy.
HN is a stew of high-effort insight, and low-effort cruft, because it doesn't provide multiple views, so you can't toggle between expertise and chat.
A public whiteboard could be both without phalluses, and covered in them, toggled by preference. Image recognition, and user profiling, has gotten quite good. But for an absence of multiple views. Or... at least the arms race might become richer.
If user requirements are multimodal, and one's current UI, being monomodal, can't cope with that, well then...
