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Avoid Humans: Your temporary respite from the masses
- stevewilhelm 11y agokerning!
- simlevesque 11y agoThey avoided kerning.
- acbabis 11y agoI hate how the word "kerning" has an "n" after an "r"
- pavel_lishin 11y agoKeming! http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_term.html http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_term...
- miander 11y agoHow frustrating that I can't manually enter a location.
- alanh 11y agoHa, this is basically saying to go to the bar during business hours.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- incongruity 11y agoAmusing and provocative concept, but pragmatically challenged as the majority of people don't use apps like Foursquare or other check-in services. Moreover, those that do are likely not a representative sample of the broader population... so, as a proxy for crowdedness, the data feeds from apps/online services fail in most cases/places, IMHO.
- dmd 11y agoSo apparently, to avoid humans in my low density suburb I should - rather than, say, go to a park or trail - go to (1) Dunkin Donuts; (2) the local pizza place (3) the supermarket.
- ubersync 11y agoExactly. I thought it would give me a list of resorts in remote areas, away from cities, close to wilderness etc. But it just uses Foursquare and Instagram check ins. Who uses Foursquare anymore?
- oldmanjay 11y agoAsking for my location when I don't have any idea what is going on is a pretty quick way to get me to close the tab.
- collyw 11y agoYou could always say no as I did. though its not loaded in the time I have taken to write this.
- jessriedel 11y agoYea, would be nice to give an option to enter a zipcode.
- gsharma 11y ago...or even better IP -> ZIP with an editable zip.
- DrScump 11y agoexactly. it should accept a street address, or if they don't want to use external mapping services, latitude and longitude.
- neogodless 11y agoThis is neat - however every location near me is considered GREEN (low population). Maybe that's true, but any time I've been to Wegman's... it's been packed. Of course, maybe Foursquare just isn't popular enough around here.
- neogodless 11y agoWawa also showing "few humans." - Perhaps what this needs is a way to adjust the scale. What might be "few humans" in LA or NYC can be very different in other parts of the country.
- dibujante 11y agoSame for me, and I'm currently standing in a skyscraper along the Vancouver waterfront. Maybe the zombie apocalypse happened and I missed it?
- james33 11y agoCool idea, though quite a few of the listed places are currently closed, so I didn't need the app to know there's nobody there.
- andrewsomething 11y agoJust break in! No other humans inside.
- collyw 11y agoIf you can deal wih maybe 20 people, a rafting trip on the Tamur in Nepal is the closest I have come to absolutely "no one else here". No wifi. No electricity. A couple of nights with only the group and a large bonfire.
- randallsquared 11y agoI can avoid social interaction with good connectivity and a thousand people around, or with only a few, but ten or twenty people (and nothing to distract me or them from having to talk!) seems like it would make that impossible without actually being antisocial...
- bradleyjg 11y agoEvery few years my uncle takes a fishing trip in Alaska. He and two or three others are dropped off by plane and raft down a river for a week. Once a day the plane flies overhead to check up on them and at the end of the week picks them up. Other than that they never see another person.
- whyaduck 11y agoI'm curious - wouldn't it be cheaper to check in with a sat phone daily, rather than having a bush pilot do a flyover?
- hugh4 11y agoDealing with twenty people doesn't sound like solitude. Plenty of places in the world you can get in a car, drive out somewhere, and be completely alone.
- randallsquared 11y agoAround half of the suggestions near me are vandalism. This desperately needs a way to flag such.
- oberstein 11y agoTo test this manually, go to google maps and paste the lat/long into this site. e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6205099,-122.3493306,19.75z https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6205099,-122.3493306,19.75z --> http://avoidhumans.com/list.php?lat=47.6205099&lng=-122.3493306 http://avoidhumans.com/list.php?lat=47.6205099&lng=-122.3493... Is their data purely comprised of people who use this app? No wonder everything is green everywhere...
- nordic_nomad 11y agoNo, it's based on foursquare and other location based app check ins.
- swayvil 11y agoI avoid humans by going to restaurants and bars? I don't get it.
- nostrademons 11y agoPretty inaccurate for Sunnyvale CA. Among its list of local empty spots is a restaurant that's packed every time I go to it and a park that's always filled with parents with young children, senior citizens out walking, and impromptu pickup games of soccer & volleyball. I think this is more like "Avoid Foursquare and Instagram users", which may have some value to it anyway.
- dionidium 11y agoI check-in with Swarm at most places I visit. I'm usually the only person checked-in, even if it's fairly busy (which is to say that you're almost certainly right).
- marblar 11y agoIt’s not great in San Francisco either. I looked for parks nearby and it recommended Union Square.
- tbomb 11y agoI feel like something is broken on here. There isn't a single red or yellow icon, where I live, in LA either.
- jayhuang 11y agoI'm in Vancouver and it's recommending Anton's Pasta Bar, which is pretty much the one place most famous for the impossibly long lines.
- sgustard 11y agoIt recommended a nearby elementary school which at 10pm is a reasonable suggestion for me to avoid other people, if possibly creepy.
- rhubarbquid 11y agoTerrible recommendations for my neighborhood in Oakland... the top 3 recommended places are the 3 of the most popular and crowded restaurants and bars in the area. The top one being the restaurant that's so busy it's generally hard to walk past on the sidewalk because there are so many people waiting out front.
- kevinskii 11y agoI recently asked a friend in Manhattan how people there cope with the lack of personal space. She told me that whenever she needs a break from social interaction she just eats in a restaurant by herself. There may be hundreds of others around but they'll generally sense that you don't want to be bothered.
- pconner 11y agoThat's something I like about cities. If you do that in small towns, people might be more likely to approach you.
- hugh4 11y agoThat's a fairly Manhattanite-level concept of personal space.
- griffinmb 11y agoI like late-night park walks. Very relaxing, very few people.
- keithpeter 11y agoUK Midlands: Early mornings on Saturday or Sunday. My route over to a nice inner city area with coffee shops that do good eggs is through some small parks and a light industrial area. Canal towpaths for part of the route. No people visible, but people in some of the factories and the very occasional jogger on the towpaths so not total isolation.
- jaysonelliot 11y agoI just left New York after 12 years. One day, while I still lived there, I decided to see if there was anywhere I could be in Manhattan without seeing another human being in my field of vision. It took me several weeks of exploring possibilities, none of which were successful. Even Central Park didn't work, there was always someone wandering by, no matter how remote the spot. I finally found the only spot where I could be for 30 minutes at a time, in total isolation. The New York Marble Cemetery on 2nd Avenue, in the East Village. It's a small patch of land, hidden down a narrow alleyway, behind a gate, open to the public just one day a month. It looks like nothing but a lawn surrounded by stone walls, because there are no headstones. It became my favorite day of the month, that one Sunday when I could go sit on a lawn in silence and solitude.
- recursive 11y agoIt's just a list of every business, all rated green.
- JamilD 11y agoThis probably only works for maybe New York and San Francisco. I'm in Toronto -- where few people use Foursquare/Swarm -- and it's basically just a list of every location near me.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- enraged_camel 11y agoMine points to a McDonald's nearby. Hmm...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sotojuan 11y agoLiving in NYC, the only place where I can be alone is the special classroom students in my program have access through with a key. It's open 24/7. Among the results I get I see Lincoln Center Plaza, which has tourists, Juilliard students, musicians and people that see those musicians. I also see Columbus Circle, which has one of the busiest subway stations and a mall. I'll give some of the other places a try. This is a great idea for an app.
- jamespcole2 11y agoNeeds Kilometres, Miles are meaningless to me
- echlebek 11y agoCanadian here. You just multiply by 1.6.
- greggman 11y agoAnswer for my location: 渋谷 ハチ公前広場 Plaza 0.32 Miles 道玄坂2-1 That's one of the most crowed places in the world. Fail
- autarch 11y agoGoogled the name and realized it's one of the most famous spots in Tokyo.
- escherplex 11y agoShibuya Hachiko square with the bronze dog (犬 # 8) ね? ... that was the subject of a Richard Gere movie plus it is perpetually crowded. If you really want to avoid the masses using this app try accessing it via a VPN. App responds with 'could not find location' meaning you are now invisible which obviates the need for privacy.
- teen 11y agoIt recommends the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica for me XD
- agentcoops 11y agoSeems like a more reliable metric would be take all nearby Yelp listings with no reviews and then remove any of those remaining that have any Foursquare/Instagram check-ins at all...
- alistairSH 11y agoI don't get it? It lists a nonexistent pub in the middle of my subdivision (the street name contains the word "Tavern", maybe it got confused), the local pool, and my HOA's mailing address as places to go to avoid people. And when I click on any of those not-quite-real places, the map is in a seemingly random place. Tennessee, across the Potomac from me, or the west coast.
- svec 11y agoWorld class nerd sniping.
- cgriswald 11y agoThis seems very useful to me as a way to find places I haven't heard about through social media. Finding new places when you're a non-native can be difficult. Especially because my primary activity during finding new places is dating and I don't want to ask my date for some new place. :) I think they should just rebrand their site to match the content.
- ocfx 11y agoIt just listed every place to eat near me.
- codingdave 11y agoVery inaccurate. It is listing the cookie cutter suburban neighborhood north of me as a farm, and someone's online retail store running from their home as a restaurant.
- krallja 11y agoAt SFO airport, it recommends I go to any of the nearby shops. That's not even close to useful.
- lukeforehand 11y agoIf the app ever became popular the least frequented places would "flap" to become the most frequented places. :-) They would have to effectively load balance by displaying different location results to different users.
- jpindar 11y agoIn addition to all the most popular bars and restaurants, it lists "beer tent", a thing which only exists one weekend of the year when my town holds it's annual seafood festival. The rest of the year that location is the middle of a main street (which gets closed off for the festival). I think that makes it clear that this is listing places that people have previously mentioned on social media.
- esolyt 11y agoIt lists closed places. Isn't it possible to pull working hours data from Google Maps or even Foursquare?
- urs2102 11y agoAny way to make this open source so one could create the same service in reverse (maybe with Google popularity data if possible)? Use case: finding a popular bar in a new town.