8 ms·

These things have become so esoteric and expensive because the mechanical keyboard hobby is undergoing a more intense version of what happens to most hobbies/pa

These things have become so esoteric and expensive because the mechanical keyboard hobby is undergoing a more intense version of what happens to most hobbies/pastimes; the purpose of the hobby has transitioned from primarily "making/using the thing" to "obtaining and displaying ever more extreme versions of the thing to impress other people who know about the thing". I feel like this is an outgrowth of the basic human desire to form groups and define an in-group and an out-group; people start a hobby because they are interested in whatever, but after a while there develops an (often arbitrary) right way and wrong way to pursue the hobby, cliques form, and after a while participating in the hobby becomes an exercise in demonstrating that you've bought/made/done the right things and are therefore worthy of being in the in-group instead of the out-group. I think this is so strong in the mechanical keyboard community because there's not a lot of "there" there; mechanical keyboards are nice to type on, but there's no core competitive activity that they're used for - you're not spending $1600 on a keyboard to improve your typing speed and accuracy 1.2% so you can have a shot at winning the big annual World Typing Tournament in Las Vegas. The mechanical keyboard community feels to me more like the streetwear or sneakerhead community than, say, R/C planes or surfing or whatever.

dimnsionofsound 7y ago
Sounds about right to me. The book The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris discusses this phenomenon r.e. people need to feel the best at something so they pick ever smaller niches or hobbies where they can finally compete at a level where they have a chance to get to the top. I would recommend the book as a whole, it has a lot of other interesting info in it too.
- emgee_1 7y ago
  Go for Emacs. It is niche, belongs to the oldest softwares, and a true mark of professionalism:)
  - pstuart 7y ago
    And make sure you use tabs!
    - Seirdy 7y ago
      Heresy! Always indent using spaces so that you can easily use Vim's `conceal` feature to replace the spaces with the 🅱️ emoji. /s
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
I’d say it’s more about status signalling, even if it’s kept within that small group of keyboard aficionados.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  "More"? I understood CommieBobDole to be saying it was entirely about status signaling: > the purpose of the hobby has transitioned from primarily "making/using the thing" to "obtaining and displaying ever more extreme versions of the thing to impress other people who know about the thing" What do you think the difference is between "status signaling" and "impressing other people"?
  - cmroanirgo 7y ago
    Erm. Not having used (nor heard) the term "status signaling" before, I'd suggest that "status signaling" is a status signal that you (and now me) is trying to impress someone. ;-)
  - kragen 7y ago
    Status signaling is a specific way of impressing other people: it's impressing them with your status, sometimes called more precisely prestige (as opposed to, for example, your money, your strength, your talent, or your character), in a way that's difficult to fake because it's costly. So, for example, Donald Trump bragging on a talk show about sexually assaulting strange women counts as "status signaling", because it cost him some prestige, and if he hadn't had a lot of prestige to begin with, he would have ended up in jail. (Hopefully he will anyway, but so far he's not.) Buying more extreme custom keyboards, by contrast, demonstrates knowledge and wealth, and it's a difficult-to-fake and costly signal of wealth — though much less so than, say, a Honda Accord or a Learjet. But wealth isn't the same thing as status, and attempting to signal wealth with something that costs US$500 or US$1000 is pretty much going to backfire unless you're in like Nigeria or something. It's like a hacker equivalent of putting spinners and tinted windows on your car — these are not features that distinguish Bugattis and Lamborghinis from quotidian BMWs. Anyway, so I think that if it's impressing anybody, they're either poor or they're keyboard aficionados who are impressed with the refined taste that demonstrates your profound knowledge, not your elevated social standing or your wealth. As for the guy who misread "signaling" as "virtue signalling", honey, bless your heart.
meestaahjoshee 7y ago
not exactly the same but reminds me of a lot of this key and peele sketch (dueling hats) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pKt4gaErvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pKt4gaErvU
SuperPaintMan 7y ago
Very much signalling, you want something that sets you apart from other users and if that means custom CNC'd cases, with harvested switches that have been lubed using the finest tears mounted on a custom plate. So you have something to ogle and show off to the others. And that's before we get into the scarcity territory that sees secondhand TGR Alices going for over 5K. It's weird, a good chunk of people buy my Georgis [1] and _don't actually use them_. It's a strange feeling to have something bought only because it's different and to be collected. I think keyboards are to be used, not hoarded personally but in this community it's very common to own at least a dozen boards. It's very weird. [1] https://www.gboards.ca/ https://www.gboards.ca/
- criley2 7y ago
  It's funny how on hacker news apparently buying a fancy keyboard for your home where no one can see it is "signalling", but if you point out that wearing Apple watch, holding iPhone, and displaying those ear buds is also signalling/branding/status symboling, I am generally very aggressively downvoted. I'd say buying a mechanical keyboard with RGB lights and nice switches is probably 100X less signalling (several orders of magnitude) than buying a $300 phone for $1100 and wearing gaudy white ear buds. It's very rare personally that I see other people's setups. It's not like people lug around $300 keyboards with their laptops. But walk down any popular street in any major city and I bet you can tell who is signalling that they're part of the apple brand.
  - skyyler 7y ago
    You're making an emotional response to something that you think is about you. Buying a mechanical keyboard and using it without showing it to anyone isn't what anyone was talking about. There are people that buy rare and expensive mechanical keyboards just to take pictures of them and post them on the internet. I'm not sure why you tried to turn a discussion about hobbies degrading into wealth signalling into your distaste for apple products.
    - anarchodev 7y ago
      I actually think the original parent post was a more emotionally reactionary than this response. Yeah, it could be the case that mechanical keyboard enthusiasts are all virtue-signaling snobs chasing clout on the internet... or it could be that some people just enjoy the things? And want to share their cool things? It could be that the community hivemind has decided on an orthodoxy and aggressively judges anyone who doesn't conform.. or it could be that we all just have different preferences and enjoy customizing our desks in this way! Idk maybe some people are buying expensive kits just because they're expensive but that never occurred to me.
guelo 7y ago
It's probably also because there are a lot of highly paid young guys programmers that don't know what to do with all their money.
tomc1985 7y ago
I agree, because for all the money and chatter about them most of the companies providing them are making carbon copies of each other with little real innovation -- they're always the same square shape and its always about fancy keyswitches, RGB, and little else. Computer-building has turned into this, at least if r/pcmasterrace is any indication. It's positively infuriating -- 99% of people's posts are bragging/validation, there are cliques/cargo cults around 144hz, LinusTechTips, RGB, and watercooling, and I cannot remember the last time I saw an in-depth technical discussion about anything there. I personally think humans' need to form cliques and ingroups is its worse trait; it has transformed a deeply technical hobby that I love into yet another bragging and dick-waving contest :(
- the_cat_kittles 7y ago
  lol. why does it bother you? its not ok for these people to have fun?
- phaus 7y ago
  PC master race is clearly intended to be a tongue-in-cheek circle-jerk about the rivalry between PC gaming and consoles, its not intended to be taken seriously. 90% of the people in that sub have consoles.
- gnicholasgreen 7y ago
  > they're always the same square shape and its always about fancy keyswitches, RGB, and little else. This is where I disagree. I had severe hand and arm tendon pain for years, and finally dove into ergonomic mechanical keyboard options. It solved my issues, and I no longer feel the pain after typing all day. I easily spend $350+ for a keyboard, and it's a very practical, life-changing decision, which involves a non-rectangular, non-RGB keyboard. For reference: https://ergodox-ez.com/ https://ergodox-ez.com/
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    Fair enough, but when I look at pictures of peoples' builds it is almost always a square keyboard with fancy backlighting. I'm personally a fan of the MS ergos with the wrist wrests and have mixed feelings about how that design doesn't seem to be getting replicated anywhere
AlanYx 7y ago
I think this is so strong in the mechanical keyboard community because there's not a lot of "there" there I think cast iron frying pans are an even more emblematic example of what you're describing. It's a four thousand year old product with no moving parts that's long been mastered, but over the past 15 years they've transitioned into a hobby item with ever-more-expensive niche vendors (Finex, Butter Pat, etc.) selling increasingly souped up versions that fry an egg almost indistinguishably from a basic, well-seasoned model. Meanwhile there's another subset of hobbyists chasing esoteric vintage cast iron frying pans, often claiming the modern ones can never be as good.
- mud_dauber 7y ago
  Funny... my wife avoids status-chasing like the plague, yet giggled like a 12YO when she found her grandmother's ancient iron frying pan. She swears it is the best tool for the job, despite the fact that we have 3 others. Well-seasoned, indeed.
joyjoyjoy 7y ago
"you're not spending $1600 on a keyboard to improve your" Well, it is $1600 for a keyboard that you are using 8h a day for the next five years vs a $5 Latte that you are enjoying the next 4 minutes. You do the math.
- goldenchrome 7y ago
  The difference here being that a decent latte costs about $5 but a decent keyboard costs maybe $50.
  - joyjoyjoy 7y ago
    The difference being made that people are willing to spend big on short term things but are stingy on things that they use a lot. Be it a keyboard, shoes, bed sheets or whatever. I just ordered a "new" keyboard. IBM Model M, space saving version. With below USD 200 a steal!
smolder 7y ago
What's most absurd is the difference between $90 and $1000 is trivial. If that money went into engineering, every key would be using a hall effect sensor and pneumatic springs, machined to high precision, NOT just more of the same mechanical switches. They are spending money on status and sometimes fancy raw materials, but not any substantive engineering effort for a better keyboard.
- wubblebubble 7y ago
  I think it might actually be useful (for games and whatnot) to have analog input on some keys. i'm surprised such a thing doesn't really exist yet. or even some sort of way to adjust the elastic constant of the key (i guess in a pneumatic spring you could just change the pressure)
simias 7y ago
>I think this is so strong in the mechanical keyboard community because there's not a lot of "there" there. I actually disagree with that, which is why I'm a bit annoyed at the state of keyboard enthusiast communities. I think that there's plenty of room for improving keyboards, not necessarily for better performance but mainly for more comfort. Over the past decade or so I've been using more and more "esotheric" layouts and mappings. I'm typing this comment on an ergodox mapped with a pretty heavily customized dvorak layout. And you get get much deeper in this rabbit hole with custom 3D printed keyboards like the Dactyl for instance. I've been working on a custom model in OpenSCAD and I'm looking at buying a 3D printer to experiment, I'm looking forward to using a custom Frankenstein'd keyboard in the future. So clearly, I don't think keyboards are a solved problem. There's plenty of room for experimentation. What about foot pedals? Palm keys? Integration of touch pads or trackballs in the keyboard? What about weird modifier keys, for instance using shift keys to input ( and ) when not used as a modifier (I've been using that for about a year and I love it). What about adding cameras and some processing so that you can use hand gestures on top of typing on the keys? A compromise between "minority report" style interfaces and a good old contacts, with the strengths of both? But I agree with your overall point: it seems like the bigger hobbyist communities around keyboards these days are about collecting and making fashion statements, not hacking keyboards. Just look at https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards , if you like pictures of keyboards and keycaps (and ridiculously overcomplicated cables) it's amazing but beyond that it's mostly boring old typewriter layouts and qwerty. That's a bit disappointing IMO, but I guess it's just not for me.
- kentt 7y ago
  Hi. Yes also annoyed by the state of the keyboard enthusiast communities, or rather, I just don't care about having an artisanal key or a rare keyboard, but rather RSI, efficiency, and customizability. It sounds like you've gone down the rabbit hole with this. Could you tell me a bit about where you've landed especially wrt layout and custom programming?
starky 7y ago
I just don't see how someone can possibly charge that much for a keyboard that would be significantly cheaper to make yourself even as a one off. It isn't like there is anything particularly special about the keyboard in the link, there isn't any specially skilled craftsmanship, it is just a couple anodized CNC machined pieces, a PCBA, and purchased switches and keycaps.

dimnsionofsound 7y ago

Sounds about right to me. The book The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris discusses this phenomenon r.e. people need to feel the best at something so they pick ever smaller niches or hobbies where they can finally compete at a level where they have a chance to get to the top. I would recommend the book as a whole, it has a lot of other interesting info in it too.

emgee_1 7y ago
Go for Emacs. It is niche, belongs to the oldest softwares, and a true mark of professionalism:)
- pstuart 7y ago
  And make sure you use tabs!
  - Seirdy 7y ago
    Heresy! Always indent using spaces so that you can easily use Vim's `conceal` feature to replace the spaces with the 🅱️ emoji. /s

tonyedgecombe 7y ago

I’d say it’s more about status signalling, even if it’s kept within that small group of keyboard aficionados.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
"More"? I understood CommieBobDole to be saying it was entirely about status signaling: > the purpose of the hobby has transitioned from primarily "making/using the thing" to "obtaining and displaying ever more extreme versions of the thing to impress other people who know about the thing" What do you think the difference is between "status signaling" and "impressing other people"?
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
  Erm. Not having used (nor heard) the term "status signaling" before, I'd suggest that "status signaling" is a status signal that you (and now me) is trying to impress someone. ;-)
- kragen 7y ago
  Status signaling is a specific way of impressing other people: it's impressing them with your status, sometimes called more precisely prestige (as opposed to, for example, your money, your strength, your talent, or your character), in a way that's difficult to fake because it's costly. So, for example, Donald Trump bragging on a talk show about sexually assaulting strange women counts as "status signaling", because it cost him some prestige, and if he hadn't had a lot of prestige to begin with, he would have ended up in jail. (Hopefully he will anyway, but so far he's not.) Buying more extreme custom keyboards, by contrast, demonstrates knowledge and wealth, and it's a difficult-to-fake and costly signal of wealth — though much less so than, say, a Honda Accord or a Learjet. But wealth isn't the same thing as status, and attempting to signal wealth with something that costs US$500 or US$1000 is pretty much going to backfire unless you're in like Nigeria or something. It's like a hacker equivalent of putting spinners and tinted windows on your car — these are not features that distinguish Bugattis and Lamborghinis from quotidian BMWs. Anyway, so I think that if it's impressing anybody, they're either poor or they're keyboard aficionados who are impressed with the refined taste that demonstrates your profound knowledge, not your elevated social standing or your wealth. As for the guy who misread "signaling" as "virtue signalling", honey, bless your heart.

meestaahjoshee 7y ago

not exactly the same but reminds me of a lot of this key and peele sketch (dueling hats) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pKt4gaErvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pKt4gaErvU

SuperPaintMan 7y ago

Very much signalling, you want something that sets you apart from other users and if that means custom CNC'd cases, with harvested switches that have been lubed using the finest tears mounted on a custom plate. So you have something to ogle and show off to the others. And that's before we get into the scarcity territory that sees secondhand TGR Alices going for over 5K. It's weird, a good chunk of people buy my Georgis [1] and _don't actually use them_. It's a strange feeling to have something bought only because it's different and to be collected. I think keyboards are to be used, not hoarded personally but in this community it's very common to own at least a dozen boards. It's very weird. [1] https://www.gboards.ca/ https://www.gboards.ca/

criley2 7y ago
It's funny how on hacker news apparently buying a fancy keyboard for your home where no one can see it is "signalling", but if you point out that wearing Apple watch, holding iPhone, and displaying those ear buds is also signalling/branding/status symboling, I am generally very aggressively downvoted. I'd say buying a mechanical keyboard with RGB lights and nice switches is probably 100X less signalling (several orders of magnitude) than buying a $300 phone for $1100 and wearing gaudy white ear buds. It's very rare personally that I see other people's setups. It's not like people lug around $300 keyboards with their laptops. But walk down any popular street in any major city and I bet you can tell who is signalling that they're part of the apple brand.
- skyyler 7y ago
  You're making an emotional response to something that you think is about you. Buying a mechanical keyboard and using it without showing it to anyone isn't what anyone was talking about. There are people that buy rare and expensive mechanical keyboards just to take pictures of them and post them on the internet. I'm not sure why you tried to turn a discussion about hobbies degrading into wealth signalling into your distaste for apple products.
  - anarchodev 7y ago
    I actually think the original parent post was a more emotionally reactionary than this response. Yeah, it could be the case that mechanical keyboard enthusiasts are all virtue-signaling snobs chasing clout on the internet... or it could be that some people just enjoy the things? And want to share their cool things? It could be that the community hivemind has decided on an orthodoxy and aggressively judges anyone who doesn't conform.. or it could be that we all just have different preferences and enjoy customizing our desks in this way! Idk maybe some people are buying expensive kits just because they're expensive but that never occurred to me.

guelo 7y ago

It's probably also because there are a lot of highly paid young guys programmers that don't know what to do with all their money.

tomc1985 7y ago

I agree, because for all the money and chatter about them most of the companies providing them are making carbon copies of each other with little real innovation -- they're always the same square shape and its always about fancy keyswitches, RGB, and little else. Computer-building has turned into this, at least if r/pcmasterrace is any indication. It's positively infuriating -- 99% of people's posts are bragging/validation, there are cliques/cargo cults around 144hz, LinusTechTips, RGB, and watercooling, and I cannot remember the last time I saw an in-depth technical discussion about anything there. I personally think humans' need to form cliques and ingroups is its worse trait; it has transformed a deeply technical hobby that I love into yet another bragging and dick-waving contest :(

the_cat_kittles 7y ago
lol. why does it bother you? its not ok for these people to have fun?
phaus 7y ago
PC master race is clearly intended to be a tongue-in-cheek circle-jerk about the rivalry between PC gaming and consoles, its not intended to be taken seriously. 90% of the people in that sub have consoles.
gnicholasgreen 7y ago
> they're always the same square shape and its always about fancy keyswitches, RGB, and little else. This is where I disagree. I had severe hand and arm tendon pain for years, and finally dove into ergonomic mechanical keyboard options. It solved my issues, and I no longer feel the pain after typing all day. I easily spend $350+ for a keyboard, and it's a very practical, life-changing decision, which involves a non-rectangular, non-RGB keyboard. For reference: https://ergodox-ez.com/ https://ergodox-ez.com/
- tomc1985 7y ago
  Fair enough, but when I look at pictures of peoples' builds it is almost always a square keyboard with fancy backlighting. I'm personally a fan of the MS ergos with the wrist wrests and have mixed feelings about how that design doesn't seem to be getting replicated anywhere

AlanYx 7y ago

I think this is so strong in the mechanical keyboard community because there's not a lot of "there" there I think cast iron frying pans are an even more emblematic example of what you're describing. It's a four thousand year old product with no moving parts that's long been mastered, but over the past 15 years they've transitioned into a hobby item with ever-more-expensive niche vendors (Finex, Butter Pat, etc.) selling increasingly souped up versions that fry an egg almost indistinguishably from a basic, well-seasoned model. Meanwhile there's another subset of hobbyists chasing esoteric vintage cast iron frying pans, often claiming the modern ones can never be as good.

mud_dauber 7y ago
Funny... my wife avoids status-chasing like the plague, yet giggled like a 12YO when she found her grandmother's ancient iron frying pan. She swears it is the best tool for the job, despite the fact that we have 3 others. Well-seasoned, indeed.

joyjoyjoy 7y ago

"you're not spending $1600 on a keyboard to improve your" Well, it is $1600 for a keyboard that you are using 8h a day for the next five years vs a $5 Latte that you are enjoying the next 4 minutes. You do the math.

goldenchrome 7y ago
The difference here being that a decent latte costs about $5 but a decent keyboard costs maybe $50.
- joyjoyjoy 7y ago
  The difference being made that people are willing to spend big on short term things but are stingy on things that they use a lot. Be it a keyboard, shoes, bed sheets or whatever. I just ordered a "new" keyboard. IBM Model M, space saving version. With below USD 200 a steal!

smolder 7y ago

What's most absurd is the difference between $90 and $1000 is trivial. If that money went into engineering, every key would be using a hall effect sensor and pneumatic springs, machined to high precision, NOT just more of the same mechanical switches. They are spending money on status and sometimes fancy raw materials, but not any substantive engineering effort for a better keyboard.

wubblebubble 7y ago
I think it might actually be useful (for games and whatnot) to have analog input on some keys. i'm surprised such a thing doesn't really exist yet. or even some sort of way to adjust the elastic constant of the key (i guess in a pneumatic spring you could just change the pressure)

simias 7y ago

>I think this is so strong in the mechanical keyboard community because there's not a lot of "there" there. I actually disagree with that, which is why I'm a bit annoyed at the state of keyboard enthusiast communities. I think that there's plenty of room for improving keyboards, not necessarily for better performance but mainly for more comfort. Over the past decade or so I've been using more and more "esotheric" layouts and mappings. I'm typing this comment on an ergodox mapped with a pretty heavily customized dvorak layout. And you get get much deeper in this rabbit hole with custom 3D printed keyboards like the Dactyl for instance. I've been working on a custom model in OpenSCAD and I'm looking at buying a 3D printer to experiment, I'm looking forward to using a custom Frankenstein'd keyboard in the future. So clearly, I don't think keyboards are a solved problem. There's plenty of room for experimentation. What about foot pedals? Palm keys? Integration of touch pads or trackballs in the keyboard? What about weird modifier keys, for instance using shift keys to input ( and ) when not used as a modifier (I've been using that for about a year and I love it). What about adding cameras and some processing so that you can use hand gestures on top of typing on the keys? A compromise between "minority report" style interfaces and a good old contacts, with the strengths of both? But I agree with your overall point: it seems like the bigger hobbyist communities around keyboards these days are about collecting and making fashion statements, not hacking keyboards. Just look at https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanicalkeyboards , if you like pictures of keyboards and keycaps (and ridiculously overcomplicated cables) it's amazing but beyond that it's mostly boring old typewriter layouts and qwerty. That's a bit disappointing IMO, but I guess it's just not for me.

kentt 7y ago
Hi. Yes also annoyed by the state of the keyboard enthusiast communities, or rather, I just don't care about having an artisanal key or a rare keyboard, but rather RSI, efficiency, and customizability. It sounds like you've gone down the rabbit hole with this. Could you tell me a bit about where you've landed especially wrt layout and custom programming?

starky 7y ago

I just don't see how someone can possibly charge that much for a keyboard that would be significantly cheaper to make yourself even as a one off. It isn't like there is anything particularly special about the keyboard in the link, there isn't any specially skilled craftsmanship, it is just a couple anodized CNC machined pieces, a PCBA, and purchased switches and keycaps.