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Elite social media
- charlesdm 9y agoBOAWs website doesn't look all that great + their iOS apps haven't been updated in 2+ years. I'm not saying it couldn't be an amazing community, but unless someone jumps in here and tells me they're a user and it's amazing, I'd be suspicious.
- grogenaut 9y agoHopefully this comment is 100% sarcasm otherwise you posting that criticism on hacker news is one of the biggest woosh moments ever
- gumby 9y ago> BOAWs website doesn't look all that great + their iOS apps haven't been updated in 2+ years. I'm not saying it couldn't be an amazing community, but unless someone jumps in here and tells me they're a user and it's amazing, I'd be suspicious. I agree, but consider the Vertu phones: really shitty old Nokias caked in diamonds. Even once modern smartphones came out they continued to sell $20K feature phones -- and some clowns bought them. Personally, whenever I hear the words "prestige" or "luxury" I turn away.
- smacktoward 9y agoThe stereotype has always been that you can tell the nouveau riche by the sheer volume of gaudy "luxury" goods they drape themselves in, while old money prefers pedigree to ostentation.
- gumby 9y agoOr plenty of well of people just don't care (and lack a "pedigree"). But your point is correct. My GF had a visitor from Hollywood during the Super Bowl week end. Said friend was shocked that nobody had bodyguards or drove those fancy looking cars like they have in Hollywood. She was shocked when I introduced her to a couple of billionaires at the sports bar during the game: they were wearing basically the same clothes as everybody else. (I was shocked that they were there too -- I would have no interest in a sports bar during the Super Bowl except for the entertainment of said house guest).
- rmason 9y agoWhen the founder said that he didn't want any more members I took it as a dare for people to apply. Bottom line is that was a desperate call for more members. "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member" - Groucho Marx
- aphextron 9y agoReminds me of the 'I Am Rich' app launched back in '08. It was just an app that says 'I am Rich' and cost $999.99 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich) Moral of the story: rich people will always want to show off that they are rich.
- gumby 9y ago> Moral of the story: rich people will always want to show off that they are rich. I think you mean, "Some rich people are insecure enough that they want to show off that they are rich." Amex caters to this very well: they play the whole "prestige" thing but if you have a "higher-level" card for the benefits (platinum, black) they are happy to issue you an ordinary green one you can use so people won't guess your wealth.
- dsacco 9y agoYou really don't need to be wealthy to get a platinum card. You don't even need to be breaking six figures. You just need a good credit score. That perception is all hype.
- balladeer 9y agoThat's how it is here in India. They tried pushing it like "prestige", didn't work. Now they just give it to anyone with a half decent salary and a willingness to be okay with the annual fee.
- macavity23 9y agoYou don't actually need that good a credit score, since it's a charge card, not credit. You mainly just need the >$500/yr membership fee.
- marssaxman 9y ago>it's a charge card, not credit. What is the difference? I have always believed the terms to be synonyms, and the Wikipedia article for "charge card" does nothing to change that impression.
- Animats 9y agoIf you have a Bloomberg terminal, you get access to a message board much like Craigslist. If you want to rent out your yacht, that's the place to go.
- s_kilk 9y agoI want to believe that board is sub-4chan levels of relentless shitposting.
- Neliquat 9y agoPetition to add /b/ to the bloomberg panel. Might improve things. Or just crash the rare pepe market.
- ucontrol 9y agoIt's so odd to see mentions of Internet memes and casual cyberculture on HN of all places.
- krapp 9y agoIt shouldn't be, it's obvious whenever a story about 4chan or Reddit (or even Voat or 8chan) come up, that there's a significant overlap in the membership. Hacker News doesn't exist in a vacuum. Yes there are a few erudite intellectuals, brilliant greybeards, and SV millionaires knocking about, but there are plenty of scrubs here as well (present company included.)
- arcanus 9y ago> Yes there are a few erudite intellectuals, brilliant greybeards, and SV millionaires knocking about, but there are plenty of scrubs here as well (present company included.) Nor are those categories mutually exclusive...
- Trundle 9y agoGiven the shitposting on /r/wallstreetbets I'm going to say you have a decent chance of being correct.
- RichardHeart 9y agoArticles subheadline: "On the internet, no one can see your Rolex" Perhaps they're on a different internet where pictures and video aren't popular. I met some pretty cool people at the last ASMallWorld event I went to in Gstaad. Like any social event, some people will be interesting, some will be pompous, some both. You need to sort the wheat from the chaff on your own. I'd much rather associate with great minds behind a common goal, than by status of wealth. Wealth isn't that great of a filter by which to group peoples' interests. That being said, success leaves clues, and people who've earned their success financially often have lots of interests stories to tell and lessons to teach. Those that inherit their wealth, it seems, are soon to be parted from it. There's a place for networking, and there's a place for networking with people similar to you. That being said, I think you're better off focusing on your mission, and letting people attract to you, than you are doing the jetset thing. Remember these "clubs" are businesses, and they're there to make money on you.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- spitfire 9y agohalf way through the article the writers let drop that the founder of BOAW's previous attempt was A small world. Which failed as it became commoditized.
- kolbe 9y agoHacker News is the only elite organization I like hanging out at!! All things aside, HN always seems to be so serious in its discussion about content, and I never get the opportunity to say how much I appreciate this place.
- ben_jones 9y agoHave you seen many of the discussions around tools like Javascript, Golang, Django, Docker? Quite often they devolve into tiny opinionated nuances and you have to pull your head out of your laptop and ask yourself "what year is it??"
- dasil003 9y agoWhat does the year have to do with it? Given any geeky subject there are going to be strong opinions, always has been that way and always will be, we just couldn't see the artifacts of it as easily before the internet. Not all the discussion on HN will be useful, but it's the highest signal to noise I've found in 30 years of participating in internet fora, at least for a group of this size.
- ben_jones 9y agoI meant it in the sense of "oh god I just spent 40 minutes reading a circular argument".
- koja86 9y agoAll things accounted I still find HN the best discussion venue. I force myself to avoid reading discussions I suspect might not be interesting and apart from well known controversial topics signal to noise ration is usually high. Genuinely curious question - do you know about place where these controversial technologies would be discussed in a "better" way?
- ThomPete 9y agoI agree. In fact I realized how good a community HN is when I did a Ask HN a while back. I even ended up writing an essay about it: https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-47ee63bb3511 https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4... Compared to the responses at Reddit, Quora and other places the diversity of HN is astounding.
- ThomPete 9y agoI am a member of Erik Wachtmeister first company A Small World I haven't logged in for ages heard they now charge. This sounds exactly the same and will probably fail for exactly the same issues. A lot of the people aren't really "1 percenters" at all but rather people who live of the "1 percenters" and so the benefits one ends up getting unless they are trying to make money on these people are easy to overlook. A much better example of a 1 percenter community is Angellist's syndicates. I got a lot of connections that way.
- joelrunyon 9y agoAh - interesting. I was a part of A Small World. The unique-ness of it was a draw at first, but it fizzled pretty quickly. Don't know anyone early on who stuck it out...
- badpenny 9y agoSmooth humblebrag.
- Buge 9y agoAre 1%ers really that rare or special? There are 3 million of them in the US.
- ThomPete 9y agoWell that depends whether you think 1% is rare or not.
- dingaling 9y agoIt's not quite 'elite' but The Well is a fairly exclusive and well-connected social network, which has been running online for over 30 years now: https://www.well.com/join.html https://www.well.com/join.html I dabbled in it a couple of decades ago when there was a special-offer for a month's membership, it was certainly highbrow compared to Usenet at the time. $150 is a fair chunk of cash for a year's membership, but does keep the rabble out whilst not being much of a road-bump to those who are keen.
- ThomPete 9y agoYeah I used to be a member there too, was an amazing community. Jaron Lanier used to hang out there plus a bunch of other cool people. It had a very interesting commenting system which was non threaded. Instead you referenced the number of the post you were responding to. It gave some very interesting dynamics in the conversation, something I have never experienced since and I have often thought about doing some exploration around the non-threaded discussion forum.
- SamReidHughes 9y agoNon-threaded as in there being exactly one global stream of comments? Or were there separate threads, each of which was a linear stream within which comments reference each other by number? 4chan and such have the latter.
- ThomPete 9y agoSeparate threads and channels. But it also had some other interesting features in the HTML version based on picospan the underlying discussion forum software.
- hammock 9y agoWhat do you get out of it? What type of people?
- pmoriarty 9y agoAnother great one was c2.[1] I've found a lot of really interesting programming-related discussions on there. There's also Lambda the Ultimate (LtU)[2], which had about the deepest language development related discussions I've seen anywhere. Yet another interesting one, quite different from the above two and from most anything else out there, was everything2.[3] It was kind of like Wikipedia, but not limited in subject matter to "encyclopedic" entiries, nor to "neutral point of view", so it has a lot of really opinionated, creative, and funny entries. Most people don't know about it, and it's been pretty inactive for many years now, but it does still exist and still has a ton of great content. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2.com [2] - http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ [3] - https://www.everything2.com/ https://www.everything2.com/
- Geekette 9y agoI belong to some of the services listed, including ASW and BOAW and haven't logged on in forever because they're boring. Despite all the hype, these services are ultimately no different from other social clubs and most people have sufficient avenues for socializing with and keeping in touch with people on diverse bases (interest/activity, work, school, family, etc). They proclaim exclusivity but are often trying to grow their user base (including stealth advertising via article mentions/placement) and monetize. When they focus on the latter is when they realize that their service isn't that useful because their members clearly aren't interested in paying. Exclusivity or not, a network is useless without X critical mass of users and Y minimum activity level.
- dsacco 9y ago>including stealth advertising via article mentions Yes, like the convenient timing of this Verge article coming out mere weeks before BOAW releases a new iOS app, and the founder's availability for multiple comments despite their focus on discretion...
- elleferrer 9y ago> a network is useless without X critical mass of users and Y minimum activity level. indeed.
- andrewclunn 9y agoI've wanted a social network where the means of connecting would require close physical proximity to intentionally keep individual's circles small. Granted, that's a different from of exclusivity.
- downandout 9y agoI wonder how much of the ticket-selling success of the Fyre Festival debacle was attributable to postings on these networks. I had never heard about it until it fell apart.
- OJFord 9y agoPoor, poor Sartre.
- Kalium 9y agoI had a brush with Ivy.com at one point. It was an art show. It was an interesting experience, but mostly it was full of the kind of socialite-types I am not particularly interested in associating with. The problem with elite social events is that they're full of the kind of people who value being at elite social events.
- rixed 9y agoIs my memory corrupted, or didn't Facebook also pretend to be reserved for the "elite" in its infancy? I remember several newspaper articles describing Facebook as the "secret" website where "important" people stays in touch with each others, with some celebrity names listed as reputed users.
- closeparen 9y agoIt started out requiring an @harvard.edu address, then expanded to other elite .edu addresses, before opening membership to the public.
- calvano915 9y agoI joined pretty early when it was still invite only and mostly university population. Perhaps it was described that way because of being invite only but the membership has always been normal, non-elite people (like me).
- oneweekwonder 9y ago> mostly "Ivy League" university population. From wikipedia: > The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students; however, later they expanded it to higher education institutions in the Boston area, the Ivy League schools, and Stanford University. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook