Panopticon
A scraped archive of a design and creative community. Every public post, refreshed every five minutes. Complete where the live site paginates its own history away.
What this is
A panopticon is a tower at the centre of a ring of cells. One watcher can see into every cell. Nobody in a cell can see the tower. The watching does not have to be happening for it to work; the possibility is enough, and the people in the cells take over the job themselves.
Every place worth posting in is built to that plan now. What gets written is recorded, counted and ranked, and the record is kept on the other side of the glass. The people who produce it are the one group who never get to read it.
This is the same tower with the door standing open. All of it was public already. It was collected, made exact, and handed back to the community that wrote it. Being seen is not the part that can be changed. Being able to read what the watching produced is.
What that comes to: 3.9 million replies across 568,000 topics, with profiles, notes and newsthread submissions, and roughly 41,000 five-minute snapshots of the front page. Deleted posts are recorded as gaps rather than quietly dropped, and times are normalised to UTC. It is read-only in every direction. Nothing here posts back, and nothing you do here is visible there.
Three ways in
Pick by what you are holding. The MCP server if you use Claude, the API if you are writing code, the exports if you want the whole thing on disk.
MCP server
Connect Claude directly to the archive and ask for what you want in words. No code. The install page walks through it.
mcp.nocitponap.comHTTP API
A read-only JSON API over the same data: rankings, time series, threads, profiles, search. Open to any origin.
api.nocitponap.com/docsBulk exports
One gzipped ndjson file per year, notes
already attached. The whole archive, without paginating for a week.
What this data cannot tell you
Every surface of this project reports these rather than working around them. They are properties of the source, not defects in the copy.
Deleted content is a gap
250,781 replies and 145,414 topics were removed at the source. They are recorded as tombstones and excluded everywhere, so identifiers have holes in them. A missing one means deleted, not missing.
Note timestamps are scrape time
Notes carry the moment the scraper saw them, not the moment they were written, and about half share a single bulk-import instant. Note activity is only a real time series from 24 April 2024 onward.
Older topic times drift
Topic times were stamped -0800 regardless of
daylight saving until 2024, so a topic time before then can be up to an
hour late. Reply times are unaffected.