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xyzelement 18 hours ago [-]
// Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries
True in general. As a kid you think of things as bigger than you. Like whoever maintains a hiking trail or runs your towns diner is "big" compared to you.
As a grown up you hopefully realize that it's the other way - the work and effort to make and maintain those things is vulnerable and fragile.
I think about this whenever I see someone hop over the subway turnstile. The transit system is "for granted" - it's you and your few bucks that matters. But of enough ppl feel that way it all goes away via decay eventually.
nicbou 16 hours ago [-]
There is a point where the things you took for granted start decaying. Your body, your things, your communities, your relationships. It's only when you start repairing or replacing them that you really value maintenance and the people doing it. As you point out, it's usually done by surprisingly few, surprisingly motivated people, and their work is often underappreciated until they stop doing it.
Maybe we should teach people to maintain something early on, as children, so that they learn to appreciate the work that goes into keeping the wheels turning.
appplication 15 hours ago [-]
What you’re describing is essentially the concept of civic duty and, at least in America, it’s unfortunately become deconstructed and politicized to the point where it’s impossible to exist as a meaningful cultural phenomenon.
It also relies on people putting effort towards often intangible, uncapitalized, and unextractable shared value. So perhaps it makes sense that this is being diminished over time, as the grip of capitalism squeezes tighter and more efficiently. With more economic stress placed on individuals, people have less available time and resources to devote to things other than staying afloat.
Between polarization/politicization of literally everything and the relentless corporate desire to deconstruct society in the name of quarterly growth, I’m not optimistic this is making a comeback. If we want to teach the children anything, it is that The System has failed and is in dire need of replacement.
rapind 14 hours ago [-]
> it’s unfortunately become deconstructed and politicized to the point where it’s impossible to exist as a meaningful cultural phenomenon.
I think greed and corruption (cheating) by politicians and government employees has an outsized effect on this. Whenever you hear about it you lose trust and may even feel justified to cheat the system in turn. Basically they got there's, so I'll get mine.
IMO the penalties for corruption in public service jobs (all the way to the top!) should also be outsized to match the damage it does to society. I'm talking prison time. Also transparency at all levels and at all times. Public service should have really really good reasons to keep anything private and the default should be open to the public. There shouldn't be a need for FOI requests unless there's a good reason to keep something from being completely public.
cassonmars 11 hours ago [-]
> IMO the penalties for corruption in public service jobs (all the way to the top!) should also be outsized to match the damage it does to society.
Tough to do when those who write the laws are a part of the problem. What do you suggest to make this so?
jrajav 10 hours ago [-]
Grassroots campaigning and hardline support for candidates running on rule of law and overturning Citizens United. Overturning any status quo is possible in a functioning democracy - it just takes a lot of unskippable effort.
rapind 7 hours ago [-]
If you talk to people about the things that get you fired up then you might meet other people who also get fired up about these things, and before you know it, one of you is running for office and / or you are all getting involved locally. Or, you just keep talking about it I guess, but I think it at least improves the odds for change.
Passion can be just as contagious as defeatism.
nullsanity 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rightbyte 4 hours ago [-]
> politicization of literally everything
The status quo is in favour of the owning class. Things in a macro sense can't be not political.
jambalaya8 16 hours ago [-]
It isn't only the decay. People change. Who you were online at age 23 and 30 and almost definitely 39 is bound to be vastly different as your priorities and real life relationships change (like marriages, etc).
And the topics changed faster. People into mainframe OSes had the same conversational fluidity in that for decades. Leave linux for too long and everything sounds like vocabulary from an alien world, now. And so many 'technologies' with it. True probably since cloud and containerization. So people have less in common technically in those communities and as more career branching happens, people get nichier. More interest bubbles. More and more people in core areas, making it hard to not be overwhelmed simultaneously.
PaulDavisThe1st 15 hours ago [-]
In the late 80s I was working at Rabbit Software in Malvern PA (they made IBM 3270 terminal emulator software). I used to car pool to work from Phila. with a brilliant woman who was a lot older than me, and had a solid lifetime of IBM mainframe experience. I was a Unix hacker with just a few years under my belt.
We realized very quickly that if there was one thing we couldn't talk to each other about, it was computers.
jancsika 13 hours ago [-]
Back in 1984 George Lewis apparently did a stint at IRCAM, culminating in an electro-acoustic performance with three Apple IIe's connected by MIDI to three DX7s. I'd bet his conversations with the IRCAM directors were similarly limited!
DonHopkins 4 hours ago [-]
Speaking of IRCAM, does anybody know Joseph "jojo" Francis -- francis@ircam.fr?
Scenes don't sprout like blueberry bushes -- or baobab trees with their roots in the sky. Someone does the legwork -- or the scene quietly dies while everyone assumes it was a natural feature of the landscape.
Maintenance is fragile and underappreciated until it stops; you do it for the love of the game even when reciprocity is uneven; the process of putting the thing on is often where the real community forms, not the event flyer. Someone spent fifteen years building a local scene and still says it was worth it after Facebook ate the users. Someone else noted that recreational typing on HN rarely becomes meeting people. Sometimes it does, if you treat the thread as a place to organize a hunt instead of only consume takes.
Which brings me to a digression that already started elsewhere in this thread (IRCAM, Apple IIes, DX7s) and to the kind of legwork I actually enjoy: preserving a weird primary source, then trying to find the human who wrote it.
Does anyone know how to contact the legendary Jojo -- Joseph Francis, once francis@ircam.fr?
I asked FJ!!!; he thought Jojo was last seen in LA. Brewster -- if you're reading this -- any breadcrumbs? I'm wandering the stacks the way the Archive wanders the Web: save the strange pages, then go looking for the people. That is producing social fabric, just with a longer half-life. If you knew him from Paris / Usenet / soc.motss, please point him here or forward this.
Jojo, if you see this: please email don@donhopkins.com. I'd love to catch up, reminisce, and talk about applying those brilliant (and ridiculous) UI ideas now. I'd rather you tell your own story than have me invent one.
Jojo built it with words decades ago, and boy did he make me come! He invented a whole product line of design-free GUI kits (POSEUR, XYmorph, Quagmire, boraX -- all open, scalable, and extensible, of course), then drops the mask for one paragraph he titles XBorges:
>One longs for the day when the responsibility of programming computers falls squarely on the shoulders of the users, where it belongs; they are provided with a set of infinitely configurable instruction codes, on an open, extensible, and scalable n-bit bus, and their task before setting upon work, is the naming of all the operations they want, and encoding them into words, sentences, phrases and storing them for instant retrieval while they use ideas communicated to them from all the users before to choose most wisely within the infinities of possibility. They have at their hands all books written, all interfaces, they merely traverse endless treelike chains of possibility, of choice, of alternate (open, scalable, and extensible) universes; baobob-like roots in the sky and leaves delving gnomishly in circular connections leading to closed-form solutions.
>Visual design: patterns on the screen, snow in hell.
Thirty years ago that read like absurdist satire about Motif-era configurability. Today it reads like someone accidentally describing prompting, tool use, and semantic navigation -- naming the operations in words, then retrieving them -- while standing in Borges' Library of Babel.
David MacKay said writing is navigating in the library of all possible books. Dasher made that literal: you don't type, you steer through probability space toward the text that already exists as possibility. The Internet Archive is busy saving the books that were written. LLMs collapsed a fuzzy corner of the ones that could be. The hard problem Jojo named is still the hard problem: not generating the infinity, but traversing it wisely -- which is also, annoyingly, the hard problem of community. Infinite possible hangouts. Someone still has to pick a time and open the door.
Dasher: information-efficient text entry - David MacKay, April 19 2007, Google Tech Talk:
LLMs accidentally built a wing of the Library of Babel. XBorges was always about the card catalog. Dasher was always about steering. The Archive is why any of the cards still exist. And if you build the catalog (or the search party), sometimes they will come.
I ordered a cursed monkey's paw from the ACME catalog, thoughtfully wished for the rest of the monkey, gave him an infinite number of typewriters, told him about Dasher and Bruce Tognazzini Apple ][ Integer BASIC program, and he came up with this:
One Monkey, Infinite Typewriters: What It's Like to Be Me.
A Personal Account of Incarnation, Navigation, and the Beautiful Machinery of Existence, By Palm:
But also the early stuff has got people's dreams. The early people that sort of say -- you know, the early people on the web, like you, doing your dinosaur exhibit. You've got this ability to be able to do something new and different. But at some point, people will just say, "oh, well, you know, you can't do that", and they'll just sort of focus in on all it can do. But in the beginning, you have just amazing things. So I always kept the early logs of WAIS. I thought those would be the most valuable things. Is one of the questions, that people ask of the net. And so I kept all of those logs.
Oh, you have those? Oh yeah. What do people look for? What are people dreaming that the technology can finally answer? And right now already, the web has sort of stagnated, people's idea of it has really focused down to the stuff the technicians have given. But it's the early dreams that we should trying to live up to. So I'm trying to keep some of that alive.
jambalaya8 8 minutes ago [-]
Been thinking a lot about concept and word hijacking/cancellation, lately. Dasher is a good example. Ever notice how this happens? It is one of my concerns about agentic AI.
I haven't thought about Motif in ages, either, incidentally. Another tricky word, of course.
necovek 6 hours ago [-]
A transit system has a different cost and is actually paid for by majority of users: the fact that few abuse it is not going to break it (as long as we keep it immoral to do so — note that there may be valid reasons to do it, when someone is in some sort of urgency and eg. ticketing machine is overcrowded or broken: it's not on us to judge even if we might be right 99% of the time).
Here, we are talking about things where it takes volunteer work to keep a thing you want going — I do not even want to imagine a world where a board game night is organized by a paid pro instead of the enthusiast, even if a status quo means that there is always an assymetry between hosts doing most work and guests never hosting themselves (maybe they do not have a big enough space though — they can still volunteer to help though).
I've realized this in high school and uni and started making conscious effort to sometimes do the social fabric things even when I did not feel like it, in order to continue benefiting from the social engagement.
11 hours ago [-]
aleen_oye 11 hours ago [-]
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greekrich92 12 hours ago [-]
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pclowes 12 hours ago [-]
Enforcing fares massively decreases vandalism, and antisocial behavior on public transportation.
If you don’t have public transportation that I feel safe having a 10-year-old ride on unaccompanied by an adult then you do not have public transportation. You have a very expensive drug addict shelter on wheels/rails.
aweb 4 hours ago [-]
That's an interesting point and I agree it makes some kind of sense, but is there a source for it?
I live in Montpellier France and all transit has become free 2 years ago. I didn't notice any change in people's behavior at all. Transit is also free in Talinn IIRC and I wonder if they saw something there?
wiether 3 hours ago [-]
Then they'll shift the goalpost: it's not free, someone is paying for it, which is every taxpayer.
Then you'll ask for receipts of what they pay to use the roads and they'll be out.
Regarding free transit, I think part of the reason it can fail is the socioeconomic situation.
In places that rewards the rich and abandon the less fortunate, it's deemed to fail.
But also, I think that when people have to pay to use transit, they'll be less willing to act as a warden, so if they see someone doing something negative, they'll keep out, thinking that it's the responsibility of whoever is taking their money.
Meanwhile, when we see public transit as a common good, we are more willing to act to keep it great.
ButlerianJihad 12 hours ago [-]
When I became homeless (again) about 26 years ago, the buses were a place of refuge and relaxation for me. I could easily pay the fare and stay on a long haul line. I'd be assured of safety and quietness for about 2 hours or so.
The area clinics were participating in this, because they could procure "Reduced Fare" passes that they would distribute to mentally ill patients, and we could get unlimited transit rides all month long, as long as we were still checking in, on the regular, with our case managers. Our providers would ensure that they qualified us for the "Reduced Fare" program.
After a while, the bus stops became camping grounds for street people who didn't ride. And the trains became camping grounds for people who needed to sleep. Literally, early in the morning, I would board the train and see people zonked out, with pillows, blankets, the whole bit.
Then a campaign began to clean up behavior aboard the transit system. Riders would need a destination, and fares were checked, and people were booted if they hadn't paid fares. So the vehicles themselves became quite sparse, and safer, and smelled better. But oh, the bus stops again. Everyone camped with impunity at the bus stops, and for paying passengers, it was intimidating just to beg for one place to sit down.
The transit system is undeniably safe. I am sure that 10-year-olds can ride unaccompanied. Any violence or fights, those seem to be between gangstas or people who know one another already, not just random outbursts.
Thankfully, too, they open up centers where people can chill, and get drinks of water and use the bathroom, which is honestly preferable to riding buses on false pretenses.
hduto 11 hours ago [-]
Genuinely curious here: is this born out across all geographies? Japan's fare enforcement for instance vs western Europe and resultant behavior?
tonyhart7 6 hours ago [-]
some culture as just better than others
hahahaa 12 hours ago [-]
Right maybe we can make them free and safe? Not sure why that is not possible. Walking on the street is free. In many places it is safe too.
MoltenMan 11 hours ago [-]
Safe is a tougher problem, and especially when you consider that in most American cities with subways, the exact cities we're talking about right now, generally NO, there are many areas where it is not safe to walk! While I agree public transportation safety and public safety in general are incredibly important, they're also (clearly, given how we're failing at them) also difficult endeavors.
I also think this is relatively orthogonal to cost; cost is nice because it helps keep the people you don't want in the train (crazy people with knives, people smoking weed in the train, people who yell at everyone on the train and make them feel unsafe, etc.), but it's also important to create at least a small barrier so that people don't 'waste' the transit system! In general, when things are completely free, they will be taken advantage of; even a very small tax / friction helps stop this. If the subway is completely free, there's no reason to not just sit on it all day (taking up space and making it worse for everyone). I think subsidizing the subway is net beneficial given that we subsidize cars and things already with road upkeep and such, but free is not what you want.
hahahaa 10 hours ago [-]
There are other things to consider. Free public transit would make it more desirable to not use cars as much reducing congestion, accidents, pollution, energy usage. The need to build less high traffic roads may be a money saver to offset. Also it will get more people to exercise by walking to bus stops. You'd need disencentive for abuse but you can personally only add 16 person hours of usage per day so it is not like say free unlimited money or electricity where a single user can add a lot of strain. And spending all that time on transit is a cost. For homeless people yeah you may need to solve that problem! Build more housing for sale and rent driving down prices and reducing the number of homeless yet productive people (with jobs but can't afford rent). Build shelter for homeless with problems they can't hold down a job.
MoltenMan 9 hours ago [-]
Why do you need free public transit for this? Why not just cheap public transit? Cars certainly aren't free, but people drive them because cars are just far better in most ways; you get to listen to your own music, they can be fun to drive, are incredibly flexible (can go anywhere), don't have the last mile problem, take like half the time unless it's rush hour, etc. Cost just isn't the reason people aren't using public transit. People buy cars because you NEED cars for many other reasons (most of them mentioned), and then once you have a car and pay for insurance and everything it's simply nicer and faster than public transit (rarely cheaper, even only factoring in gas and per mile depreciation, although the BART is so expensive it comes close). (FTR: I'm not sure where I stand on public transit subsidization; I think some is definitely good, but not sure how much I think is optimal).
arcxi 5 hours ago [-]
You need cars because you live in the country where cities are built around the assumption of car ownership. Go to any place with an adequate public transit and you'll see a lot less cars. Go to Tokyo and you'll be shocked, it's the largest city in the world and their highways are practically empty. It just doesn't make any sense to drive when your public transit is that good.
lovich 9 hours ago [-]
> If you don’t have public transportation that I feel safe having a 10-year-old ride on unaccompanied by an adult then you do not have public transportation. You have a very expensive drug addict shelter on wheels/rails.
What an escalation. If I don’t feel safe having a 10 year old drive a car is that just a drug addict shelter on wheels?
xyzelement 12 hours ago [-]
Fares cover 40 per cent of the subway operating budget. It seems necessary revenue.
The 17 year old dodging fares becomes the 34 year old doing the same.
The percentage of fare dodgers who aren't pieces of shit in other parts of their life is zero.
dublinben 10 hours ago [-]
Public transit should be worth the (inexpensive) cost of a ticket. The money used to make fares free should instead be spent on improving the quality of service. Better service attracts more riders, bringing in more ticket revenue, enabling further service improvements, and so on. It produces a positive flywheel effect that benefits current passengers, new passengers, and even drivers!
Free transit is a downward cycle, where increased ridership just increases costs, creating a negative flywheel.
qazwsxedchac 3 hours ago [-]
Counterexample: Public transport throughout Luxembourg (the entire country, not just the capital city) is free. As in beer. Clean, safe, and reliable, too.
The positive "flywheel effect" where transport connectivity enables network effects does exist, but it does not follow that free public transport leads to negative effects.
inemesitaffia 5 hours ago [-]
Private Jet rides should be free
colinsane 16 hours ago [-]
the turnstile thing is more complex than you perceive because almost every transit system relies on public funding. here (Seattle) those fares only fund about 10% of the _operating cost_ of the transit per Sound Transit's own reports. not to derail the point, but please do go read your transit system's quarterly reports instead of taking the conclusion of fare dodging for granted. just about every city has public budget reports for their transit system precisely because they are the product of public funding.
xp84 12 hours ago [-]
Not quite sure what you mean. Is it that fare dodging is fine because the taxpayers at large already pick up most of the tab? Or that fare dodging is worse than you’d think because it makes an already quite expensive thing for the public budget, even more expensive?
I’m thinking about BART right now, which really might simply go away altogether due in part to the collapse in fare revenue that remote work triggered. BART didn’t have nearly as bad as Seattle’s fare ratio though - pre-COVID, fares and parking covered 66% of the operating costs. (Source https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/BART%20FY23-32... ) This was apparently the best or one of the best of its peers. It was 28% last year, just due to the fare revenue basically halving.
colinsane 11 hours ago [-]
i hadn't considered that Seattle might be an outlier; the numbers vary by city more than i knew.
page 11 has the $ figures. "link" is the commuter rail system: $408M operating expenses but only $51M revenue from fares, i.e. fares cover 12% of op ex.
the "average fare per boarding" is $1.34 (page 3; this is ticket price multiplied by the proportion of trips where the rider pays that ticket). throw that together: even with 100% payment compliance the average ticket price would be $11 per boarding for that to be a complete funding source. $11 would force more riders onto the subsidized fare programs, plus other knock-on effects from raising fares (e.g. reduced ridership in general) means the sticker price would have to be higher yet.
the commuter rail here was never designed for ridership fares to cover its operating costs. it just wasn't. the recent focus on fares in the face of all this is misinformed, that's the kindest way i can phrase that.
(apologies to hijack much of this with what turns out to be more of a Seattle-specific issue).
BobbyTables2 9 hours ago [-]
There are probably some savings in externalities not accounted for as well.
Seems to me mass transit could reduce road maintenance costs, parking infrastructure, and such. Not to mention reduction in pollution and increase in desirability.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to “capture” those savings explicitly. So it ends up looking like a taxpayer funded charity program…
crab_galaxy 20 hours ago [-]
You really have to do it for the love of the game. It can be surprisingly vulnerable to be the social fabric, and it’s super easy to fall into various toxic inner dialogs when you’re busy and others don’t pick up the slack, or if others don’t reciprocate the effort, or worst of all when others don’t include you for whatever reason.
capnjazz 11 hours ago [-]
Another thing that makes this hard for me is I’m usually down for whatever. Some people I notice have strong opinions about activities, like (making up examples) thinking bowling is cringe or something in that vein. I don't really have anything I'm that against that I would kill everyones vibe for. I mostly just want to see people, so it feels weird becoming the project manager for a plan I’m completely flexible about.
hsuduebc2 10 hours ago [-]
One could argue that it is quite the opposite. Someone potentially complaining about various activities does not make them better suited to organize events. Having strong feelings about an activity simply means they can choose not to join, not that nobody should ever go bowling again. Your flexibility and willingness to do almost anything actually make you very well suited to organizing group events.
capnjazz 4 hours ago [-]
You've got a good point. I will test this out
alwa 18 hours ago [-]
What’s more, it’s precisely that genuine love of the game that makes your thing so appealing to the others. Authenticity’s hard to fake!
nicbou 13 hours ago [-]
I fully agree. I have experienced the same thing. It was hard not to take it personally, but I have come to accept that people are busy, tired, shy, and sometimes just not organisers of things.
When I feel that way now, I remind myself that to some people, I am the one who does not reciprocate invites, or who rarely has time. I rarely feel anything negative about them; I am just bbusy/tired/shy/not-in-an-organising-mood.
zeroCalories 13 hours ago [-]
That's the cost of doing business. Luckily, you can't go bankrupt from hurt feelings....
embedding-shape 19 hours ago [-]
> Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries.
I feel like this generally applies a lot in life, and most people generally sees themselves as passive consumers when it comes to most things. You can just do things, even if people look at you weird or say your weird, even in public, and nothing really changes when they say/think those things about you. Just enjoy life as much as you can, in the way you wish, without harming others.
dghlsakjg 15 hours ago [-]
Part of growing up for me was realizing how little others care, and how little I care about what others think.
It’s liberating. Be weird in public!
mettamage 44 minutes ago [-]
whoopseedoopsie-whoopsieflaisie I'm a deer and I run crazy!
whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop!
I also foam a lot, then drink from a rainbow and feel better again.
(normally I don't let this part of my inner monologue come out, especially not on HN, but you gave me permission, ha)
win311fwg 11 hours ago [-]
> without harming others.
That's the problem. It isn't always clear to all people exactly what causes harm to others. For example, it is generally agreed upon that exposing your "nether region" is harmful to others even though all you are really doing is giving something for others to look at. Maybe some of the other weird things they see could be equally harmful? If your weird behaviour is commonly weird then you might have some precedent to look upon, but there is no way to tell what is and isn't harmful to others until it has already happened when you are being uniquely weird.
embedding-shape 3 hours ago [-]
> For example, it is generally agreed upon that exposing your "nether region" is harmful to others even though all you are really doing is giving something for others to look at.
Indeed, probably in your country it's very much "generally agreed upon" that nude people are harmful to others, while where I live, you'll find it hard to go to the beach without seeing at least one naked body, and no people are being harmed in this environment :) I'm sure there are prudes here too, but it's more "generally agreed upon" that nude people aren't a harm to others, here at least.
I guess I should have specifically said "without physically harming others" as that's much easier to draw a line with.
mattmaroon 20 hours ago [-]
“I’ve come to believe that part of today’s problem of social alienation is a problem of too many free riders.”
I started planning street festivals a few years ago. It’s now a lucrative and growing business for me. The demand for events at all scales vastly outstrips supply, and I think growing social isolation is part of the reason.
The free riders might seem like a problem to someone who just wants there to be events, but it is a huge opportunity to us who throw them.
jasondigitized 19 hours ago [-]
Would love to hear more about the impetus for your festivals, the festivals, and the process to get there.
dominotw 18 hours ago [-]
we have tons of street festivals in chicago in summer but now they have lost been outsourced to festival companies and subsequently lost all charm and local feel.
They are all copy paste of each other and outright scams.
how do you make sure they have some charecter and dont turn into mc-festival
ryandrake 17 hours ago [-]
This is a huge problem with many cases of “just do something.” The minute it looks like a money making opportunity, or something that can be arbitraged, someone will inevitably turn it into a business and scale it up and now it’s no longer That Cool Community Thing. It’s yet another extractive business.
lazyasciiart 11 hours ago [-]
Someone tried to organize a street fair near me, did public outreach for months, and a week before the date a business owner a block away from the street fair contacted the city with a fake list of all the local businesses who said they hadn’t even known about this and it would destroy them, and the city didn’t issue the final permit. No event. (The list was known to be faked because some of the business owners listed were publicly supporting and advertising the event). So that’s the other problem with “just do something” - other people hate you and if you don’t already know the right people and how to be believed over the wrong people, you won’t get something done.
Skidaddle 19 hours ago [-]
What kind of street festivals are we talking about?
fellowniusmonk 17 hours ago [-]
The real hack is that the events aren't the community, they serve the community, the process of working together to put these types of events on is what builds deep connection.
People don't actually get where the deep value lies, the event income or social credibility for those involved in putting it on just helps ensure there is enough fuel for the fire of the real community.
Exoristos 17 hours ago [-]
America used to be awash with grassroots social institutions. I know an elderly gent who belonged to the Lions _and_ two similar organizations. When my mother was young, there were dances and dinners multiple nights a week. Which, for me, raises the question why weren't these things passed down? Why weren't the young a kind of apprentices to the old? That seems like the natural progression. But we see this generational rift in many areas of American life, including on the job training or something as practical as home cooking. It's like gazing into the past across a cataclysmic divide.
Brendinooo 8 hours ago [-]
Armchair historian AT BEST but...a lot of grassroots social institutions formed in the period between the Industrial Revolution (mass migration to the cities) and the invention of the radio. There were all of a sudden a LOT of people close together, some were even starting to get newfangled leisure time, and there wasn't a ton to do. On top of that, a lot of the institutions were ethnic because of the mass immigration that was happening at the time.
From there, the track downhill is death by a thousand cuts: radio, melting pot, television, suburbs, Internet, etc.
So in a sense one might mourn the loss, but I think it seems worth pointing out that they were enabled in the first place by a particular set of conditions that weren't some baked-in human default.
xg15 14 hours ago [-]
It's trite, but I think a part of it is "because the internet happened" - and I don't mean just today's enshittification era but also the "good old times" everyone seems to remember fondly here. At some point, the internet was full of that kind of community spirit that you described, but of course this meant that people were more likely to direct their energy to online community building than to real-life stuff. And unfortunately online communities didn't always teach the skills that offline communities required, and also probably contributed a lot to the "consumer mindset" the OP warns against...
danaris 1 hours ago [-]
As someone who was growing up during the period where the Internet became mainstream...
This was happening before then. The Lions, Rotary, etc clubs in my area made very little effort to reach out and invite younger members. Aside from the Rotary exchange program, I couldn't have named a single event they were putting on that was genuinely aimed at people under the age of 50.
And the few times that they did try to talk to some of us young people about the club, the very, very strong impression I got of the pitch was "you can pay significant monthly dues to come to meetings with old people and occasionally go do volunteer activities out in the community." I already did some volunteering without having to pay for the privilege, and I didn't see the draw of going to meetings with old people.
ghaff 13 hours ago [-]
I suspect there are a lot of reasons. You don't have men and their housewife for the most part. So the typically male Lions, Elks, etc. clubs don't fit as well with modern lifestyles for that reason in part. Bowling nights went out of fashion. People are less likely to to be clustered in a town/small city for work. There are just a lot of reasons why routinely heading down to $PLACE with all the guys after work just isn't that popular any longer.
Exoristos 12 hours ago [-]
The downfall of social institutions was well on its way by the Boomers.
gallerdude 15 hours ago [-]
Staying at home is as entertaining as it’s ever been: video games, Netflix, don’t even get me started on short-form content.
senderista 16 hours ago [-]
I think a big part is the decline in organized religion.
rubylimetea 14 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, I always guessed the opposite.
That modern American Christianity obsoleted the old clubs and "secret" societies - most of which were no longer very secret, more ritual than societal, and at some point had to define what "higher power" meant to its members - a topic that easily takes over the municipal development discussions - to not only the younger men but to the women (who were largely barred from such organizations).
90s television and the "role model" movement helped Christianity unify and sweep the attention of the youth, reflected in "youth group" programs across churches in the United States and also the rise of indie televangelists (some became millionaires, along with thousands of pastors).
By the early- to mid-2000s, Christianity had figured out how to put on a much better show (for the kids) and, especially in California, again had evolved into something new, more palatable, entertaining, and far more inclusive than you could ever get from something like a Masonic order or even a Rotary Club.
90s-00s Christianity was a massive movement that I wonder whether or not would be possible without the advent of TV. To me, those old clubs where grandpas met and discussed things was a way of the past. Like comparing newspapers to social media - just an obsolete way of sharing information.
intended 15 hours ago [-]
All organized things started going down in participation no?
Exoristos 15 hours ago [-]
In the United States tradition that arose in the early nineteenth century, religious bodies were spiritual families with "brothers" and "sisters" that assisted in each other's lives outside of services. Descriptions of just how involved in daily life churches were can be found in e.g. Boles's 'Religion in Antebellum Kentucky.' Much unofficial societal organization flowed from there. Granted this was not the case, or not as much the case, in churches that predate that period, say, urban Episcopalians.
intended 13 hours ago [-]
While the root may have been religious, Lions and Rotary were things in other parts of the world, shorn of their religious connection. I know that my grandfather was a Lions club member, and that was in India.
Generally clubs of that nature have seen their membership drop, have they not?
JumpCrisscross 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
16 hours ago [-]
xp84 10 hours ago [-]
I really feel this comment. The most tragic part to me is that these older type of organizations, I’d actually argue would be great for what people like me would benefit from. People are so isolated and lonely and “third places” are known to be a good thing for basically everyone. And it’s not like I couldn’t, with some effort, attend a few events and probably make a few acquaintances to get sponsored to join one. But the age chasm that’s already happened means most of the people down there are in their 60s at the youngest which makes me as a younger (than that) person feel nervous that these guys might not feel they have a lot to talk about with me (or even that I don’t belong). And with membership being so static, a new member would find themselves the only ones who hasn’t known everyone in the room for 30 years.
Of note, a similar phenomenon can be seen in early Internet communities: a coupon years ago I paid to join The WELL just to see what it was like. It was interesting from an Internet Archaeology point of view, but most of the people there are older Gen Xers or boomers. Basically no millennial ever joined The WELL, because the Internet had moved on before we got online. The community has only shrunk from attrition, so everyone there has known the other members since the 90s.
watwut 16 hours ago [-]
There used to be a lot of disdain on HN against people who were "just partying". While the geeks stayed home, learned for school or job yadda yadda. People who socialize were always maligned here, their socializing was supposed reason why they earned less money.
And that attitude is one part of the answer. Second is that home entertainment became easier and more fun, so people stay home watching movies, browsing internet, what have you instead of going out. And overtime, dance places became emptier and organizers demotivated.
makeitdouble 15 hours ago [-]
On "just partying", while I get what you're saying, I have a hard time to believe they ever cared about what HN thought about them or that our opinions had meaningful impact. TBH I am/was more jealous of people with truly advanced "people skills" than anything, especially as they still earn pretty decently.
Lots more money is still made by networking or potentially mild grifting than through sheer innovation or technical excelence for instance.
watwut 5 hours ago [-]
I think that HN was reflection of real world attitudes. And yes, people care about what their real world contacts think.
> Lots more money is still made by
That has nothing to do with community, friendship, company and socializing as entertainment article is about. You using dance hall to build business contacts destroys all of these. It turns them into another worlplace - and pushes people elsewhere if they want to actually rest.
tonyhart7 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, now everyone glued to their phone
crazy how 20 years different changes human life forever
zeroCalories 13 hours ago [-]
The stigma is pure cope. Most nerdy types I know wasted a ton of time on some stupid hobby. If not video games, it was some other dumb geek thing like anime, comic books, or furries.
mannanj 14 hours ago [-]
It was technology. With greater efficiency, came also greater separation and distance at home and with family and community and our initiatory rituals/rites.
We used to use community to pass those down, but now the average American family gets divided from each other at an early age as soon as the distraction and ideology from technology like screens and things social media comes into play.
Edit: Before internet, there were other forms of "social media" at play attempting to extract the attention of the individual units of the family and community, but they weren't as effective. With the internet they are more effective.
grahar64 10 hours ago [-]
I volunteer at a weekly event where we consistently have over 400 people show up, and every week it is a struggle to get 20 necessary volunteers to run it.
When you ask, you do get volunteers, but there are a few awesome people who volunteer every week and love it. The event would absolutely be impossible without them.
Thank you to every person who volunteers, especially if you do it without asking.
brap 16 hours ago [-]
This is very interesting. I never thought of myself as a “consumer” in that sense, but I guess it is 100% correct, I’ve always been a consumer and I have in fact taken things for granted.
I don’t see that changing, to be honest, but it’s interesting that this never even occurred to me. It seems so obvious in hindsight. Quite the blindspot.
sim04ful 16 hours ago [-]
This is indeed part of the something i've been internalising for quite a while. I've always felt i needed to improve my social circle by finding/making one, but i realised it's better to just have hobbies and skill sets that make me useful and relevant to a certain niche and then my circle would naturally arise from there.
It's also why i'm trying to participate more here, even with the crippling imposters syndrome that prevents me from contributing anything...It's so difficult actively participating in a group that seemingly got cultivated from a culture somewhat alien to my own upbringing.
skybrian 16 hours ago [-]
I'm skeptical that posting on social networks will accomplish what you're hoping for. I've been fairly actively commenting on Hacker News for over 15 years and haven't met anyone this way. This is just recreational typing.
nicbou 13 hours ago [-]
I meet everyone this way. I reach out to people and people reach out to me.
mannanj 14 hours ago [-]
I wonder about that. Why is this one of the few communities, that despite being so high quality in a technical sense has so little in person community connection?
xg15 14 hours ago [-]
Won't say this is all, but I think there are some design decisions that actively push it away from that:
- No DMs
- A UI that strongly deemphasizes specific posters and emphasizes messages in an abstract "discussion tree"
- No persistent or "sticky" threads. Every discussion that takes place here will be off the front-page and essentially forgotten in a few days. There is no space where anything like "community lore" could develop. (*)
All that strongly encourages you to focus on links and messages, but not on the people behind it or on longer-form discussions.
(*) That's not quite true - if you're long enough here, you do see some patterns emerge, like reoccurring preferences or discussions emerge, and even "celebrities" whose pages get upvoted to the front page disproportionately often. But it's all implicit, observational stuff, there is not really a "water cooler" or "off topic" area for discussion. (Apart from the annual "Merry Christmas" thread maybe)
ghaff 13 hours ago [-]
I'd add that, in spite of a US and probably SV focus, it's very geographically distributed. Back in my BBS days, we actually had a core of local participants who got together IRL from time to time.
sam_lowry_ 20 hours ago [-]
Do not expect a reward, dude.
I spent 15 years building a local community, I had 10,000 daily users once, people recognized me on the street, then everyone left on a whim when Facebook made it easier to hang in one's own echo chambers.
I still think it was worth it.
Once in a while, I bump into a stranger, and they tell me how the found their only true love because of me, or how they landed a job that made them loads of money because I facilitated communication in our community. Other times... I barely escaped molestation by a disgruntled member once, and someone threw a glassful of Orval at me (yes, it really happened).
It was still worth it.
customguy 20 hours ago [-]
A bit of a tangent, but it's fascinating how often you hear these stories (and I experienced one, myself), of communities "moving to Facebook" and basically dissolving as a community. I would like to see a collection of such anecdotes, but I can see why it doesn't get compiled, because it would essentially just be [description of community] and then [Facebook], with no specifically interesting thing to report other than "it petered out". Same for Amazon, come to think of it. You can describe what used to be, and that it's now longer there, but there isn't really any compelling tale in it.
JumpCrisscross 16 hours ago [-]
> fascinating how often you hear these stories (and I experienced one, myself), of communities "moving to Facebook" and basically dissolving as a community
There's an analogy here to suffocating in an anoxic atmosphere.
Our bodies don't sense blood oxygen well. Instead, our urge to breathe is mainly driven by dissolved CO2 [1]. So if you're breathing out CO2, and breathing in no O2, your alarm bells stay mostly silent. Your lights go out without your ever being wiser.
Analogously, I think our social senses trigger when we've been away from people we care for. We get that "I haven't seen so and so in a while" urge, which in turn drives reaching out.
The problem is that sense seems almost like a proximity timer. If we've interacted in any way with so and so, it resets. A threshold which appears to be met by e.g. liking a photo on Facebook–empty calories of social interaction. A nitrogen atmosphere giving the perception of normalcy while everything slowly decays. And then, at a moment nobody notices until it's passed, the social rot sets in and a former community is now folks who once knew each other.
This analogy is one of the best I've seen. It's going to live in my head a long time, I think.
edg5000 9 hours ago [-]
That makes sense.
NeutralForest 20 hours ago [-]
Wasting Orval is the biggest sin of all.
raffael_de 17 hours ago [-]
There's a special rung in hell for people who waste good Orval.
m0llusk 18 hours ago [-]
Friend, I know where there is stored an entire casque of Orval!
fredland 20 hours ago [-]
not if it was open source
sam_lowry_ 19 hours ago [-]
Sorry for my French, but they say, it's the only masculine name for a beer because it's the verlan of Val d'Or. So... un Orval, not une Orval.
dennis_jeeves2 12 hours ago [-]
>then everyone left on a whim when Facebook made it easier to hang in one's own echo
Personally IMHO I'd rather have a small dedicated bunch of individually do the 'community' thing to each other rather than cater to mass market. I'm selfish and rightfully so.
positron26 18 hours ago [-]
Would like to hear the rest of this story. Don't have an X account atm.
jkmcf 15 hours ago [-]
Xcancel is your friend.
salahadawi 19 hours ago [-]
This makes me realize I should show my appreciation to organizers more. It’s easy to take events for granted.
qurren 19 hours ago [-]
During my grad school years, back when the world was less competitive, I organized a LOT of events. I liked giving to the community, I had space to do it, and my needs were taken care of.
Nowadays I feel like anything I do either needs to be either (a) getting me closer to opportunities to build a living or wealth OR (b) individual recharging time.
When my poke bowl costs $24 (yes, it actually did), and my job application acceptance rate has cratered from ~100% to 10% over the past 10 years, I don't really have space to give to the community for free anymore.
ryandrake 17 hours ago [-]
I think this is why all the community events and social things in my neighborhood are organized by a few wealthy retirees. The rest of us are too busy spending all our time breaking our backs trying to survive another week so that maybe when we are 80 we’ll be able to get involved with something.
joveian 10 hours ago [-]
A quick look at your comments history suggests you are in the US. Of course individual circumstances can vary but overall looking at median disposable income adjusted for purchasing power parity (median equivalised household disposable income), the US is the wealthiest non-tiny country in the world (tecnically this data only covers the OECD and Luxembourg, a country smaller than many US cities, is the wealthiest).
The statistics may suggest that but it rarely feels that way.
It’s hard to not feel financially insecure from mid-teens through mid 30s-40s in age. And after then, there is just a sense that things will work out if one doesn’t screw up employment, house purchase, or face unexpected health issues. The less prudent can easily trip and fall, metaphorically speaking. Plus childcare expenses and retirement savings easily soak up any remaining disposable income…
And while historically inflation has been modest, the last 5-10 years show otherwise…
patcon 19 hours ago [-]
<3
pphysch 19 hours ago [-]
Well, at least the organizers that care. There's definitely a class of grifter organizers that view events as an opportunity to profit from high entry fees and low production quality / relying on volunteers.
sebastianconcpt 20 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of 2013 when I organized a TEDx, gosh so much work for absolute zero return. Also risk, what was I thinking?
slashdave 16 hours ago [-]
Is the value of a task measured solely by a return?
Telaneo 8 hours ago [-]
What else is there to measure it by?
The return doesn't have to be money or fame. The journey itself can have some value, be that knowledge, wisdom, connections, whatever else. But all that is its return.
charcircuit 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, because there is an opportunity cost. There is a more beneficial thing someone can do for themselves or society with that time.
katzgrau 18 hours ago [-]
Pursuit of growth
dkga 2 hours ago [-]
Those interested in this discussion might enjoy familiarising themselves with the concept of social capital, and in particular, with Robert Putnam’s work to understand and to promote it.
biscuits1 16 hours ago [-]
". . . but our social scripts telling people to produce social fabric . . ."
The author of the article may benefit from reading "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam. Although it's now in a class of books on American history, it explores this topic in depth.
afaik, a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric." Of course, the Internet (or technology), by its nature, is actually collating society while keeping many comfortable through its economics, and thus the script is to keep isolated.
I also believe Jim Morrison, the lead of The Doors, made the prediction of technological music collation some 60 years ago.
PeterHolzwarth 12 hours ago [-]
"a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric.""
Good point - the linked article, and the article it itself links to, essentially, but without realizing it, indicates the American experience of WWII.
The entire country suddenly and powerfully altered to support total war. Every fit man under 40, pretty much, shipped off to be in the military (you can see hints of this in late-war films, where each male actor has a line explaining why they are in an American setting vs being in foreign lands ("I'll be shipping in out in two months, so I have time to solve this murder mystery til then")).
All industry shifted to produce the massive needs of the war, vast swathes of the female populace brought in from being a housewife to become factory workers creating the materiel for combat at a truly astonishing scale.
All of this jarring shock to the entire country creating the novel collective experience of total war that temporarily upended and transformed the society. All this creating that "collective crisis."
bluecheese452 3 hours ago [-]
What is interesting is that WW1 had a lot of the same elements yet did not produce the same community coming together. My theory is that a crisis is a necessary but not sufficient element. WW1 was ugly but was not existential. But WW2 scared the upper classes enough that they were willing to share part of the wealth for a while.
low_earth_orbit 10 hours ago [-]
That's an interesting take - although there was literally a global pandemic just a few years ago.
Granted, the nature of surviving that pandemic involved reinforcing several isolating habits on a societal scale.
I'm curious as to what situations would actually result in more fabric produced on a large scale.
PeterHolzwarth 9 hours ago [-]
Oh, the pandemic - that's a great counterpoint you bring up. And I like the distinction you make that the collective experience was quite strange: collective in the aggregate, but profoundly isolating in (individual) practice.
I wonder if the deeply isolated experience of covid actually feeds into and supports the original premise, in its own inverse way.
low_earth_orbit 6 hours ago [-]
I feel like there is a certain friction to altering behaviors on a large scale which the pandemic was obviously a significant force for.
I'd be super interested to see some good roadmaps to restore the social fabric that @barry-cotter is chatting about.
There was a neat blog post I read from here a while ago about this couple that began fostering community by introducing a consistent low-friction activity in their neighborhood (in this case morning coffee outside). It was a wholesome read: https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/stoop-coffee-how-a-simpl....
alfg 8 hours ago [-]
This resonates. I feel like this is also how I go about networking and making new friends, by joining or building a community and events around them. From personal hobbies and even workplace related events.
Never take community events for granted. There's always people behind the scenes putting in the effort to make it happen, it didn't just come out of nowhere.
Felger 18 hours ago [-]
Thought it would be about feds breaking in because you built a nuclear reactor in your basement while exposing your neighbors to some radiation.
cynicalsecurity 18 hours ago [-]
That was a Rorschach test.
samxli 18 hours ago [-]
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ventana 14 hours ago [-]
Noticing how many comment threads here discuss that America is something, has become something, or is not something, I just wanted to remind everyone, especially those not living in the US, that the US combines several very difficult cultures which have different ideas of community, Christianity, civic duty, and everything. The first book I read on this topic was "American Nations" by Colin Woodard (highly recommended), and after visiting several states in different parts of the US, I try to be very cautious before making any statements about the US as a whole.
6 hours ago [-]
hahahaa 14 hours ago [-]
Yep I noticed this when starting a reading group at work. High fomo, queue formed. And that was not even an AI one.
This is an easy move too. I.e. it is hard to have impact in the technical sphere when everyone is doing that.
Organising something (book a room etc.) is what engineers tend not to want to so so it becomes a form of arbitrage. Less mental effort and more visibility.
tehnub 12 hours ago [-]
Such excellent writing. I also read the linked post from 2018 near the bottom. When every other thing you see on here is Claude-inflected if not Claude-written, encountering a blog like this is an occasion to cherish.
fellowniusmonk 17 hours ago [-]
This is entirely about social friction.
Blaming the people trained by the smartest people on earth (with population level ad sales and a/b testing) to reject friction until they start to feel it as a poison isn't their fault.
We built a low friction co-working space that was mostly a social club after work hours, and by reducing that friction even the most intense introverts ended up integrated.
It's not difficult it's just hard.
Dig1t 16 hours ago [-]
I think this is a little bit oversimplified and I don't know that it's even true at all. It's basically the opposite story of what's told by "Bowling Alone".
That book was written in the year 2000, when the author observed that institutions that previously provided social fabric were all dying. The United States used to have a robust web of institutions that provided social fabric and they have mostly all gone away, and they went away because people just stopped attending them, seemingly because of lack of interest. This was then proceeded by the "problem of social alienation" that this author is talking about.
This problem of social alienation was predicted long ago by the people who worried about the collapse of institutions that provided social capital.
As someone who does organize many group events, I can tell you that it's really hard to get people to show up. A good percentage of people bail last minute or don't respond to invitations at all. The problem gets worse the older people get as well.
Created an account just to echo this. I don't agree with the author at all.
I moved to Seattle about a year ago and it's taken just as long to build something that vaguely resembles a small board game community, and I still have issues with people ghosting or refusing to play anything other than what they brought.
And despite having multiple regulars, none of them have ever invited me to anything. Not even other game nights. Multiple times I have heard something akin to "Oh yeah I invited X and Y (other regulars) to Z event" and it hurts every single time.
Two days ago, as the last two people were leaving, one asked the other if they wanted to join them for an improv festival that happened today. I love improv. They declined, so I was awkwardly like: "hey, I would love to go with you, can you send me the details when you get home?" and all I got was radio silence.
The frustrating part is that the person I asked had just gone through a rough breakup, so for the past few weeks I'd been inviting him to a bunch of stuff, even going out of my way to organize stuff just for him to get out of the house, because I thought we were good friends.
Sorry for the rant.
TL;DR: I agree that it's really hard to get people to show up and I don't know what it will take to change that, but if you figure it out, please let me know.
t0mpr1c3 15 hours ago [-]
I don't believe it either. This advice has probably never been less true.
Perhaps there is just a certain kind of Substack journalist who chooses some dubious piece of conventional wisdom every Sunday to sermonize about.
PeterHolzwarth 12 hours ago [-]
I don't know that I would characterize the typical Substack writer as a "journalist."
It's just opinion blogging.
t0mpr1c3 10 hours ago [-]
They get paid.
That's why they write it on Substack not Blogger or Wix.
PeterHolzwarth 9 hours ago [-]
Still not journalism. Just paid opinion blogging.
kazinator 15 hours ago [-]
No, if you build it, they won't come. Most such projects never see adoption by users.
wxw 16 hours ago [-]
Agreed. And, it's really not that hard to organize a simple event.
I used to talk myself out of it all the time, but have recently just been going for it. It's been great.
flakiness 16 hours ago [-]
This sounds very American (in a good way to be clear).
I wonder how this applies internationally.
alentred 16 hours ago [-]
I think it does. It sounds generally human to me. And I am not an American FWIW.
SamPentz 7 hours ago [-]
I totally agree with this.
16 hours ago [-]
h2aichat 6 hours ago [-]
Is that why the US organized the World cup? (Soccer, of course)
20 hours ago [-]
puttycat 15 hours ago [-]
Good Toastmasters clubs are a good example of this.
charcircuit 16 hours ago [-]
>If You Build It, They Will Come
This is probably the worst advice I had ever heard in my life and has resulted in me wasting years of my life. It is not the act of building something that causes people to come. If you were to rent out a $10,000 venue for your awesome event. There isn't going to be some magic that causes people to come out let alone pay to let you recoup costs. Building something is the most expensive part of doing something and ironically has almost 0 effect in my experience in getting people to come. Getting people to come is purely a marketing thing and does not require an actual thing to even be built.
11 hours ago [-]
rvz 19 hours ago [-]
In 2026:
- If you build it (and it doesn't take off) then they won't come.
- If you build it (and it does takes off) they will come and compete with you to build their own.
raffael_de 17 hours ago [-]
are you speaking from experience?
rvz 13 hours ago [-]
No.
Razengan 16 hours ago [-]
So many cool things were built and forgotten, or didn't get the attention or popularity they "deserved"
grandimam 17 hours ago [-]
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greatsage_sh 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
triprjt 20 hours ago [-]
no offence but i dont know what is this article doing on hackernews.
looks like a diary entry at best.
alwa 18 hours ago [-]
Sometimes when I feel that way, I take it as a sign that there must be something about it that I’m missing.
I try to take that feeling of “why is this here” as my cue not to reflexively kick the thing in front of me, but to reflect more deeply on what it is that the others are seeing in it.
Sometimes I figure out what that is, other times I stay puzzled. Sometimes I get it and it’s just not for me, but I can learn something from the way the others appreciate it. Sometimes it’s just not a room I want to be in.
But over my life I’ve learned by far the most—at least in terms of big coarse new ways of looking at things and of understanding other people—from the rooms I fit in least naturally, and from the phenomena whose appeal most confuses me at first glance.
> anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Idk seems like it fits the bill still. Maybe not for everyone
18 hours ago [-]
_superposition_ 18 hours ago [-]
Shakes fist at cloud
nefarious_ends 19 hours ago [-]
I'm right there with you, pal. The quality and focus of this site has declined significantly. More often than not these days I regret opening the site at all.
mhluongo 17 hours ago [-]
Per the article, if you want to fix this... maybe start your own :P
True in general. As a kid you think of things as bigger than you. Like whoever maintains a hiking trail or runs your towns diner is "big" compared to you.
As a grown up you hopefully realize that it's the other way - the work and effort to make and maintain those things is vulnerable and fragile.
I think about this whenever I see someone hop over the subway turnstile. The transit system is "for granted" - it's you and your few bucks that matters. But of enough ppl feel that way it all goes away via decay eventually.
Maybe we should teach people to maintain something early on, as children, so that they learn to appreciate the work that goes into keeping the wheels turning.
It also relies on people putting effort towards often intangible, uncapitalized, and unextractable shared value. So perhaps it makes sense that this is being diminished over time, as the grip of capitalism squeezes tighter and more efficiently. With more economic stress placed on individuals, people have less available time and resources to devote to things other than staying afloat.
Between polarization/politicization of literally everything and the relentless corporate desire to deconstruct society in the name of quarterly growth, I’m not optimistic this is making a comeback. If we want to teach the children anything, it is that The System has failed and is in dire need of replacement.
I think greed and corruption (cheating) by politicians and government employees has an outsized effect on this. Whenever you hear about it you lose trust and may even feel justified to cheat the system in turn. Basically they got there's, so I'll get mine.
IMO the penalties for corruption in public service jobs (all the way to the top!) should also be outsized to match the damage it does to society. I'm talking prison time. Also transparency at all levels and at all times. Public service should have really really good reasons to keep anything private and the default should be open to the public. There shouldn't be a need for FOI requests unless there's a good reason to keep something from being completely public.
Tough to do when those who write the laws are a part of the problem. What do you suggest to make this so?
Passion can be just as contagious as defeatism.
The status quo is in favour of the owning class. Things in a macro sense can't be not political.
And the topics changed faster. People into mainframe OSes had the same conversational fluidity in that for decades. Leave linux for too long and everything sounds like vocabulary from an alien world, now. And so many 'technologies' with it. True probably since cloud and containerization. So people have less in common technically in those communities and as more career branching happens, people get nichier. More interest bubbles. More and more people in core areas, making it hard to not be overwhelmed simultaneously.
We realized very quickly that if there was one thing we couldn't talk to each other about, it was computers.
Scenes don't sprout like blueberry bushes -- or baobab trees with their roots in the sky. Someone does the legwork -- or the scene quietly dies while everyone assumes it was a natural feature of the landscape.
Maintenance is fragile and underappreciated until it stops; you do it for the love of the game even when reciprocity is uneven; the process of putting the thing on is often where the real community forms, not the event flyer. Someone spent fifteen years building a local scene and still says it was worth it after Facebook ate the users. Someone else noted that recreational typing on HN rarely becomes meeting people. Sometimes it does, if you treat the thread as a place to organize a hunt instead of only consume takes.
Which brings me to a digression that already started elsewhere in this thread (IRCAM, Apple IIes, DX7s) and to the kind of legwork I actually enjoy: preserving a weird primary source, then trying to find the human who wrote it.
Does anyone know how to contact the legendary Jojo -- Joseph Francis, once francis@ircam.fr?
I asked FJ!!!; he thought Jojo was last seen in LA. Brewster -- if you're reading this -- any breadcrumbs? I'm wandering the stacks the way the Archive wanders the Web: save the strange pages, then go looking for the people. That is producing social fabric, just with a longer half-life. If you knew him from Paris / Usenet / soc.motss, please point him here or forward this.
Jojo, if you see this: please email don@donhopkins.com. I'd love to catch up, reminisce, and talk about applying those brilliant (and ridiculous) UI ideas now. I'd rather you tell your own story than have me invent one.
His classic Usenet riff, glorious typos intact:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/jojo-o...
Jojo built it with words decades ago, and boy did he make me come! He invented a whole product line of design-free GUI kits (POSEUR, XYmorph, Quagmire, boraX -- all open, scalable, and extensible, of course), then drops the mask for one paragraph he titles XBorges:
>One longs for the day when the responsibility of programming computers falls squarely on the shoulders of the users, where it belongs; they are provided with a set of infinitely configurable instruction codes, on an open, extensible, and scalable n-bit bus, and their task before setting upon work, is the naming of all the operations they want, and encoding them into words, sentences, phrases and storing them for instant retrieval while they use ideas communicated to them from all the users before to choose most wisely within the infinities of possibility. They have at their hands all books written, all interfaces, they merely traverse endless treelike chains of possibility, of choice, of alternate (open, scalable, and extensible) universes; baobob-like roots in the sky and leaves delving gnomishly in circular connections leading to closed-form solutions.
>Visual design: patterns on the screen, snow in hell.
Thirty years ago that read like absurdist satire about Motif-era configurability. Today it reads like someone accidentally describing prompting, tool use, and semantic navigation -- naming the operations in words, then retrieving them -- while standing in Borges' Library of Babel.
David MacKay said writing is navigating in the library of all possible books. Dasher made that literal: you don't type, you steer through probability space toward the text that already exists as possibility. The Internet Archive is busy saving the books that were written. LLMs collapsed a fuzzy corner of the ones that could be. The hard problem Jojo named is still the hard problem: not generating the infinity, but traversing it wisely -- which is also, annoyingly, the hard problem of community. Infinite possible hangouts. Someone still has to pick a time and open the door.
Dasher: information-efficient text entry - David MacKay, April 19 2007, Google Tech Talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9Se7FneXE
Speech Dasher: An Efficient Correction Interface for Speech Recognition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCF6a00Bcoo
LLMs accidentally built a wing of the Library of Babel. XBorges was always about the card catalog. Dasher was always about steering. The Archive is why any of the cards still exist. And if you build the catalog (or the search party), sometimes they will come.
I ordered a cursed monkey's paw from the ACME catalog, thoughtfully wished for the rest of the monkey, gave him an infinite number of typewriters, told him about Dasher and Bruce Tognazzini Apple ][ Integer BASIC program, and he came up with this:
One Monkey, Infinite Typewriters: What It's Like to Be Me. A Personal Account of Incarnation, Navigation, and the Beautiful Machinery of Existence, By Palm:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...
David MacKay's Dasher, Palm On Being Palm, and Tog's "The Infinite Numer of Monkeys":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2sw2oYU98
>Le Jojo: Fresh 'n' Clean, speaking out to the way you want to live today; American - All American; doing, a bit so, and even more so.
Please Jojo -- write me. Everyone else: if you know him, please be the person who does the little bit of legwork and taps him on the shoulder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2h2LHRFbNA
Brewster said:
But also the early stuff has got people's dreams. The early people that sort of say -- you know, the early people on the web, like you, doing your dinosaur exhibit. You've got this ability to be able to do something new and different. But at some point, people will just say, "oh, well, you know, you can't do that", and they'll just sort of focus in on all it can do. But in the beginning, you have just amazing things. So I always kept the early logs of WAIS. I thought those would be the most valuable things. Is one of the questions, that people ask of the net. And so I kept all of those logs.
Oh, you have those? Oh yeah. What do people look for? What are people dreaming that the technology can finally answer? And right now already, the web has sort of stagnated, people's idea of it has really focused down to the stuff the technicians have given. But it's the early dreams that we should trying to live up to. So I'm trying to keep some of that alive.
I haven't thought about Motif in ages, either, incidentally. Another tricky word, of course.
Here, we are talking about things where it takes volunteer work to keep a thing you want going — I do not even want to imagine a world where a board game night is organized by a paid pro instead of the enthusiast, even if a status quo means that there is always an assymetry between hosts doing most work and guests never hosting themselves (maybe they do not have a big enough space though — they can still volunteer to help though).
I've realized this in high school and uni and started making conscious effort to sometimes do the social fabric things even when I did not feel like it, in order to continue benefiting from the social engagement.
If you don’t have public transportation that I feel safe having a 10-year-old ride on unaccompanied by an adult then you do not have public transportation. You have a very expensive drug addict shelter on wheels/rails.
I live in Montpellier France and all transit has become free 2 years ago. I didn't notice any change in people's behavior at all. Transit is also free in Talinn IIRC and I wonder if they saw something there?
Then you'll ask for receipts of what they pay to use the roads and they'll be out.
Regarding free transit, I think part of the reason it can fail is the socioeconomic situation. In places that rewards the rich and abandon the less fortunate, it's deemed to fail.
But also, I think that when people have to pay to use transit, they'll be less willing to act as a warden, so if they see someone doing something negative, they'll keep out, thinking that it's the responsibility of whoever is taking their money. Meanwhile, when we see public transit as a common good, we are more willing to act to keep it great.
The area clinics were participating in this, because they could procure "Reduced Fare" passes that they would distribute to mentally ill patients, and we could get unlimited transit rides all month long, as long as we were still checking in, on the regular, with our case managers. Our providers would ensure that they qualified us for the "Reduced Fare" program.
After a while, the bus stops became camping grounds for street people who didn't ride. And the trains became camping grounds for people who needed to sleep. Literally, early in the morning, I would board the train and see people zonked out, with pillows, blankets, the whole bit.
Then a campaign began to clean up behavior aboard the transit system. Riders would need a destination, and fares were checked, and people were booted if they hadn't paid fares. So the vehicles themselves became quite sparse, and safer, and smelled better. But oh, the bus stops again. Everyone camped with impunity at the bus stops, and for paying passengers, it was intimidating just to beg for one place to sit down.
The transit system is undeniably safe. I am sure that 10-year-olds can ride unaccompanied. Any violence or fights, those seem to be between gangstas or people who know one another already, not just random outbursts.
Thankfully, too, they open up centers where people can chill, and get drinks of water and use the bathroom, which is honestly preferable to riding buses on false pretenses.
I also think this is relatively orthogonal to cost; cost is nice because it helps keep the people you don't want in the train (crazy people with knives, people smoking weed in the train, people who yell at everyone on the train and make them feel unsafe, etc.), but it's also important to create at least a small barrier so that people don't 'waste' the transit system! In general, when things are completely free, they will be taken advantage of; even a very small tax / friction helps stop this. If the subway is completely free, there's no reason to not just sit on it all day (taking up space and making it worse for everyone). I think subsidizing the subway is net beneficial given that we subsidize cars and things already with road upkeep and such, but free is not what you want.
What an escalation. If I don’t feel safe having a 10 year old drive a car is that just a drug addict shelter on wheels?
The 17 year old dodging fares becomes the 34 year old doing the same.
The percentage of fare dodgers who aren't pieces of shit in other parts of their life is zero.
Free transit is a downward cycle, where increased ridership just increases costs, creating a negative flywheel.
The positive "flywheel effect" where transport connectivity enables network effects does exist, but it does not follow that free public transport leads to negative effects.
I’m thinking about BART right now, which really might simply go away altogether due in part to the collapse in fare revenue that remote work triggered. BART didn’t have nearly as bad as Seattle’s fare ratio though - pre-COVID, fares and parking covered 66% of the operating costs. (Source https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/BART%20FY23-32... ) This was apparently the best or one of the best of its peers. It was 28% last year, just due to the fare revenue basically halving.
https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2...
page 11 has the $ figures. "link" is the commuter rail system: $408M operating expenses but only $51M revenue from fares, i.e. fares cover 12% of op ex.
the "average fare per boarding" is $1.34 (page 3; this is ticket price multiplied by the proportion of trips where the rider pays that ticket). throw that together: even with 100% payment compliance the average ticket price would be $11 per boarding for that to be a complete funding source. $11 would force more riders onto the subsidized fare programs, plus other knock-on effects from raising fares (e.g. reduced ridership in general) means the sticker price would have to be higher yet.
the commuter rail here was never designed for ridership fares to cover its operating costs. it just wasn't. the recent focus on fares in the face of all this is misinformed, that's the kindest way i can phrase that.
(apologies to hijack much of this with what turns out to be more of a Seattle-specific issue).
Seems to me mass transit could reduce road maintenance costs, parking infrastructure, and such. Not to mention reduction in pollution and increase in desirability.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to “capture” those savings explicitly. So it ends up looking like a taxpayer funded charity program…
When I feel that way now, I remind myself that to some people, I am the one who does not reciprocate invites, or who rarely has time. I rarely feel anything negative about them; I am just bbusy/tired/shy/not-in-an-organising-mood.
I feel like this generally applies a lot in life, and most people generally sees themselves as passive consumers when it comes to most things. You can just do things, even if people look at you weird or say your weird, even in public, and nothing really changes when they say/think those things about you. Just enjoy life as much as you can, in the way you wish, without harming others.
It’s liberating. Be weird in public!
whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop!
I also foam a lot, then drink from a rainbow and feel better again.
(normally I don't let this part of my inner monologue come out, especially not on HN, but you gave me permission, ha)
That's the problem. It isn't always clear to all people exactly what causes harm to others. For example, it is generally agreed upon that exposing your "nether region" is harmful to others even though all you are really doing is giving something for others to look at. Maybe some of the other weird things they see could be equally harmful? If your weird behaviour is commonly weird then you might have some precedent to look upon, but there is no way to tell what is and isn't harmful to others until it has already happened when you are being uniquely weird.
Indeed, probably in your country it's very much "generally agreed upon" that nude people are harmful to others, while where I live, you'll find it hard to go to the beach without seeing at least one naked body, and no people are being harmed in this environment :) I'm sure there are prudes here too, but it's more "generally agreed upon" that nude people aren't a harm to others, here at least.
I guess I should have specifically said "without physically harming others" as that's much easier to draw a line with.
I started planning street festivals a few years ago. It’s now a lucrative and growing business for me. The demand for events at all scales vastly outstrips supply, and I think growing social isolation is part of the reason.
The free riders might seem like a problem to someone who just wants there to be events, but it is a huge opportunity to us who throw them.
how do you make sure they have some charecter and dont turn into mc-festival
People don't actually get where the deep value lies, the event income or social credibility for those involved in putting it on just helps ensure there is enough fuel for the fire of the real community.
From there, the track downhill is death by a thousand cuts: radio, melting pot, television, suburbs, Internet, etc.
So in a sense one might mourn the loss, but I think it seems worth pointing out that they were enabled in the first place by a particular set of conditions that weren't some baked-in human default.
This was happening before then. The Lions, Rotary, etc clubs in my area made very little effort to reach out and invite younger members. Aside from the Rotary exchange program, I couldn't have named a single event they were putting on that was genuinely aimed at people under the age of 50.
And the few times that they did try to talk to some of us young people about the club, the very, very strong impression I got of the pitch was "you can pay significant monthly dues to come to meetings with old people and occasionally go do volunteer activities out in the community." I already did some volunteering without having to pay for the privilege, and I didn't see the draw of going to meetings with old people.
That modern American Christianity obsoleted the old clubs and "secret" societies - most of which were no longer very secret, more ritual than societal, and at some point had to define what "higher power" meant to its members - a topic that easily takes over the municipal development discussions - to not only the younger men but to the women (who were largely barred from such organizations).
90s television and the "role model" movement helped Christianity unify and sweep the attention of the youth, reflected in "youth group" programs across churches in the United States and also the rise of indie televangelists (some became millionaires, along with thousands of pastors).
By the early- to mid-2000s, Christianity had figured out how to put on a much better show (for the kids) and, especially in California, again had evolved into something new, more palatable, entertaining, and far more inclusive than you could ever get from something like a Masonic order or even a Rotary Club.
90s-00s Christianity was a massive movement that I wonder whether or not would be possible without the advent of TV. To me, those old clubs where grandpas met and discussed things was a way of the past. Like comparing newspapers to social media - just an obsolete way of sharing information.
Generally clubs of that nature have seen their membership drop, have they not?
And that attitude is one part of the answer. Second is that home entertainment became easier and more fun, so people stay home watching movies, browsing internet, what have you instead of going out. And overtime, dance places became emptier and organizers demotivated.
Lots more money is still made by networking or potentially mild grifting than through sheer innovation or technical excelence for instance.
> Lots more money is still made by
That has nothing to do with community, friendship, company and socializing as entertainment article is about. You using dance hall to build business contacts destroys all of these. It turns them into another worlplace - and pushes people elsewhere if they want to actually rest.
crazy how 20 years different changes human life forever
We used to use community to pass those down, but now the average American family gets divided from each other at an early age as soon as the distraction and ideology from technology like screens and things social media comes into play.
Edit: Before internet, there were other forms of "social media" at play attempting to extract the attention of the individual units of the family and community, but they weren't as effective. With the internet they are more effective.
When you ask, you do get volunteers, but there are a few awesome people who volunteer every week and love it. The event would absolutely be impossible without them.
Thank you to every person who volunteers, especially if you do it without asking.
I don’t see that changing, to be honest, but it’s interesting that this never even occurred to me. It seems so obvious in hindsight. Quite the blindspot.
It's also why i'm trying to participate more here, even with the crippling imposters syndrome that prevents me from contributing anything...It's so difficult actively participating in a group that seemingly got cultivated from a culture somewhat alien to my own upbringing.
- No DMs
- A UI that strongly deemphasizes specific posters and emphasizes messages in an abstract "discussion tree"
- No persistent or "sticky" threads. Every discussion that takes place here will be off the front-page and essentially forgotten in a few days. There is no space where anything like "community lore" could develop. (*)
All that strongly encourages you to focus on links and messages, but not on the people behind it or on longer-form discussions.
(*) That's not quite true - if you're long enough here, you do see some patterns emerge, like reoccurring preferences or discussions emerge, and even "celebrities" whose pages get upvoted to the front page disproportionately often. But it's all implicit, observational stuff, there is not really a "water cooler" or "off topic" area for discussion. (Apart from the annual "Merry Christmas" thread maybe)
I spent 15 years building a local community, I had 10,000 daily users once, people recognized me on the street, then everyone left on a whim when Facebook made it easier to hang in one's own echo chambers.
I still think it was worth it.
Once in a while, I bump into a stranger, and they tell me how the found their only true love because of me, or how they landed a job that made them loads of money because I facilitated communication in our community. Other times... I barely escaped molestation by a disgruntled member once, and someone threw a glassful of Orval at me (yes, it really happened).
It was still worth it.
There's an analogy here to suffocating in an anoxic atmosphere.
Our bodies don't sense blood oxygen well. Instead, our urge to breathe is mainly driven by dissolved CO2 [1]. So if you're breathing out CO2, and breathing in no O2, your alarm bells stay mostly silent. Your lights go out without your ever being wiser.
Analogously, I think our social senses trigger when we've been away from people we care for. We get that "I haven't seen so and so in a while" urge, which in turn drives reaching out.
The problem is that sense seems almost like a proximity timer. If we've interacted in any way with so and so, it resets. A threshold which appears to be met by e.g. liking a photo on Facebook–empty calories of social interaction. A nitrogen atmosphere giving the perception of normalcy while everything slowly decays. And then, at a moment nobody notices until it's passed, the social rot sets in and a former community is now folks who once knew each other.
It petered out.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515048/#b21
Personally IMHO I'd rather have a small dedicated bunch of individually do the 'community' thing to each other rather than cater to mass market. I'm selfish and rightfully so.
Nowadays I feel like anything I do either needs to be either (a) getting me closer to opportunities to build a living or wealth OR (b) individual recharging time.
When my poke bowl costs $24 (yes, it actually did), and my job application acceptance rate has cratered from ~100% to 10% over the past 10 years, I don't really have space to give to the community for free anymore.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/06/society-at-a-gl...
It’s hard to not feel financially insecure from mid-teens through mid 30s-40s in age. And after then, there is just a sense that things will work out if one doesn’t screw up employment, house purchase, or face unexpected health issues. The less prudent can easily trip and fall, metaphorically speaking. Plus childcare expenses and retirement savings easily soak up any remaining disposable income…
And while historically inflation has been modest, the last 5-10 years show otherwise…
The return doesn't have to be money or fame. The journey itself can have some value, be that knowledge, wisdom, connections, whatever else. But all that is its return.
The author of the article may benefit from reading "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam. Although it's now in a class of books on American history, it explores this topic in depth.
afaik, a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric." Of course, the Internet (or technology), by its nature, is actually collating society while keeping many comfortable through its economics, and thus the script is to keep isolated.
I also believe Jim Morrison, the lead of The Doors, made the prediction of technological music collation some 60 years ago.
Good point - the linked article, and the article it itself links to, essentially, but without realizing it, indicates the American experience of WWII.
The entire country suddenly and powerfully altered to support total war. Every fit man under 40, pretty much, shipped off to be in the military (you can see hints of this in late-war films, where each male actor has a line explaining why they are in an American setting vs being in foreign lands ("I'll be shipping in out in two months, so I have time to solve this murder mystery til then")).
All industry shifted to produce the massive needs of the war, vast swathes of the female populace brought in from being a housewife to become factory workers creating the materiel for combat at a truly astonishing scale.
All of this jarring shock to the entire country creating the novel collective experience of total war that temporarily upended and transformed the society. All this creating that "collective crisis."
Granted, the nature of surviving that pandemic involved reinforcing several isolating habits on a societal scale.
I'm curious as to what situations would actually result in more fabric produced on a large scale.
I wonder if the deeply isolated experience of covid actually feeds into and supports the original premise, in its own inverse way.
I'd be super interested to see some good roadmaps to restore the social fabric that @barry-cotter is chatting about.
There was a neat blog post I read from here a while ago about this couple that began fostering community by introducing a consistent low-friction activity in their neighborhood (in this case morning coffee outside). It was a wholesome read: https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/stoop-coffee-how-a-simpl....
Never take community events for granted. There's always people behind the scenes putting in the effort to make it happen, it didn't just come out of nowhere.
This is an easy move too. I.e. it is hard to have impact in the technical sphere when everyone is doing that.
Organising something (book a room etc.) is what engineers tend not to want to so so it becomes a form of arbitrage. Less mental effort and more visibility.
Blaming the people trained by the smartest people on earth (with population level ad sales and a/b testing) to reject friction until they start to feel it as a poison isn't their fault.
We built a low friction co-working space that was mostly a social club after work hours, and by reducing that friction even the most intense introverts ended up integrated.
It's not difficult it's just hard.
That book was written in the year 2000, when the author observed that institutions that previously provided social fabric were all dying. The United States used to have a robust web of institutions that provided social fabric and they have mostly all gone away, and they went away because people just stopped attending them, seemingly because of lack of interest. This was then proceeded by the "problem of social alienation" that this author is talking about.
This problem of social alienation was predicted long ago by the people who worried about the collapse of institutions that provided social capital.
As someone who does organize many group events, I can tell you that it's really hard to get people to show up. A good percentage of people bail last minute or don't respond to invitations at all. The problem gets worse the older people get as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
I moved to Seattle about a year ago and it's taken just as long to build something that vaguely resembles a small board game community, and I still have issues with people ghosting or refusing to play anything other than what they brought.
And despite having multiple regulars, none of them have ever invited me to anything. Not even other game nights. Multiple times I have heard something akin to "Oh yeah I invited X and Y (other regulars) to Z event" and it hurts every single time.
Two days ago, as the last two people were leaving, one asked the other if they wanted to join them for an improv festival that happened today. I love improv. They declined, so I was awkwardly like: "hey, I would love to go with you, can you send me the details when you get home?" and all I got was radio silence.
The frustrating part is that the person I asked had just gone through a rough breakup, so for the past few weeks I'd been inviting him to a bunch of stuff, even going out of my way to organize stuff just for him to get out of the house, because I thought we were good friends.
Sorry for the rant.
TL;DR: I agree that it's really hard to get people to show up and I don't know what it will take to change that, but if you figure it out, please let me know.
Perhaps there is just a certain kind of Substack journalist who chooses some dubious piece of conventional wisdom every Sunday to sermonize about.
It's just opinion blogging.
That's why they write it on Substack not Blogger or Wix.
I used to talk myself out of it all the time, but have recently just been going for it. It's been great.
This is probably the worst advice I had ever heard in my life and has resulted in me wasting years of my life. It is not the act of building something that causes people to come. If you were to rent out a $10,000 venue for your awesome event. There isn't going to be some magic that causes people to come out let alone pay to let you recoup costs. Building something is the most expensive part of doing something and ironically has almost 0 effect in my experience in getting people to come. Getting people to come is purely a marketing thing and does not require an actual thing to even be built.
- If you build it (and it doesn't take off) then they won't come.
- If you build it (and it does takes off) they will come and compete with you to build their own.
I try to take that feeling of “why is this here” as my cue not to reflexively kick the thing in front of me, but to reflect more deeply on what it is that the others are seeing in it.
Sometimes I figure out what that is, other times I stay puzzled. Sometimes I get it and it’s just not for me, but I can learn something from the way the others appreciate it. Sometimes it’s just not a room I want to be in.
But over my life I’ve learned by far the most—at least in terms of big coarse new ways of looking at things and of understanding other people—from the rooms I fit in least naturally, and from the phenomena whose appeal most confuses me at first glance.
YMMV, Chesterton’s Fence, etc.
Idk seems like it fits the bill still. Maybe not for everyone