// 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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 ho got together IRL from time to time.
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).
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
". . . 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
// 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
That's the cost of doing business. Luckily, you can't go bankrupt from hurt feelings....
> 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.
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!
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.
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...
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.
Staying at home is as entertaining as it’s ever been: video games, Netflix, don’t even get me started on short-form content.
I think a big part is the decline in organized religion.
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.
All organized things started going down in participation no?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Would love to hear more about the impetus for your festivals, the festivals, and the process to get there.
What kind of street festivals are we talking about?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I meet everyone this way. I reach out to people and people reach out to me.
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?
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)
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 ho got together IRL from time to time.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
It petered out.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515048/#b21
This analogy is one of the best I've seen. It's going to live in my head a long time, I think.
Wasting Orval is the biggest sin of all.
There's a special rung in hell for people who waste good Orval.
Friend, I know where there is stored an entire casque of Orval!
not if it was open source
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.
Would like to hear the rest of this story. Don't have an X account atm.
Xcancel is your friend.
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.
". . . 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.
Reminds me of 2013 when I organized a TEDx, gosh so much work for absolute zero return. Also risk, what was I thinking?
Is the value of a task measured solely by a return?
Yes, because there is an opportunity cost. There is a more beneficial thing someone can do for themselves or society with that time.
Pursuit of growth
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.
This makes me realize I should show my appreciation to organizers more. It’s easy to take events for granted.
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.
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.
<3
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.
Thought it would be about feds breaking in because you built a nuclear reactor in your basement while exposing your neighbors to some radiation.
That was a Rorschach test.
No, if you build it, they won't come. Most such projects never see adoption by users.
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.
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.
This sounds very American (in a good way to be clear). I wonder how this applies internationally.
I think it does. It sounds generally human to me. And I am not an American FWIW.
Good Toastmasters clubs are a good example of this.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
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.
>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.
So many cool things were built and forgotten, or didn't get the attention or popularity they "deserved"
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.
are you speaking from experience?
No.
no offence but i dont know what is this article doing on hackernews. looks like a diary entry at best.
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.
YMMV, Chesterton’s Fence, etc.
Please have a look at the Hacker News guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Idk seems like it fits the bill still. Maybe not for everyone
Shakes fist at cloud
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.
Per the article, if you want to fix this... maybe start your own :P