11 ms·
If You Build It, They Will Come
- sam_lowry_ 3mo agoDo 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.
- NeutralForest 3mo agoWasting Orval is the biggest sin of all.
- fredland 3mo agonot if it was open source
- sam_lowry_ 3mo agoSorry 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.
- m0llusk 3mo agoFriend, I know where there is stored an entire casque of Orval!
- raffael_de 3mo agoThere's a special rung in hell for people who waste good Orval.
- customguy 3mo agoA bit of a tangent, but it's fascinating how often you hear these stories (and I experienced one, myself), of communities "moving to Facebook" and basically dissolving as a community. I would like to see a collection of such anecdotes, but I can see why it doesn't get compiled, because it would essentially just be [description of community] and then [Facebook], with no specifically interesting thing to report other than "it petered out". Same for Amazon, come to think of it. You can describe what used to be, and that it's now longer there, but there isn't really any compelling tale in it.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago> fascinating how often you hear these stories (and I experienced one, myself), of communities "moving to Facebook" and basically dissolving as a community There's an analogy here to suffocating in an anoxic atmosphere. Our bodies don't sense blood oxygen well. Instead, our urge to breathe is mainly driven by dissolved CO2 [1]. So if you're breathing out CO2, and breathing in no O2, your alarm bells stay mostly silent. Your lights go out without your ever being wiser. Analogously, I think our social senses trigger when we've been away from people we care for. We get that "I haven't seen so and so in a while" urge, which in turn drives reaching out. The problem is that sense seems almost like a proximity timer. If we've interacted in any way with so and so, it resets. A threshold which appears to be met by e.g. liking a photo on Facebook–empty calories of social interaction. A nitrogen atmosphere giving the perception of normalcy while everything slowly decays. And then, at a moment nobody notices until it's passed, the social rot sets in and a former community is now folks who once knew each other. It petered out. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515048/#b21 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515048/#b21
- positron26 3mo agoWould like to hear the rest of this story. Don't have an X account atm.
- dennis_jeeves2 3mo ago>then everyone left on a whim when Facebook made it easier to hang in one's own echo Personally IMHO I'd rather have a small dedicated bunch of individually do the 'community' thing to each other rather than cater to mass market. I'm selfish and rightfully so.
- mattmaroon 3mo ago“I’ve come to believe that part of today’s problem of social alienation is a problem of too many free riders.” I started planning street festivals a few years ago. It’s now a lucrative and growing business for me. The demand for events at all scales vastly outstrips supply, and I think growing social isolation is part of the reason. The free riders might seem like a problem to someone who just wants there to be events, but it is a huge opportunity to us who throw them.
- jasondigitized 3mo agoWould love to hear more about the impetus for your festivals, the festivals, and the process to get there.
- mattmaroon 3mo agoInteresting. I’ve been debating starting a social media channel teaching people how to do it.
- Skidaddle 3mo agoWhat kind of street festivals are we talking about?
- mattmaroon 3mo agoMine are food-focused.
- dominotw 3mo agowe have tons of street festivals in chicago in summer but now they have lost been outsourced to festival companies and subsequently lost all charm and local feel. They are all copy paste of each other and outright scams. how do you make sure they have some charecter and dont turn into mc-festival
- ryandrake 3mo agoThis 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- crab_galaxy 3mo agoYou 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.
- alwa 3mo agoWhat’s more, it’s precisely that genuine love of the game that makes your thing so appealing to the others. Authenticity’s hard to fake!
- nicbou 3mo agoI fully agree. I have experienced the same thing. It was hard not to take it personally, but I have come to accept that people are busy, tired, shy, and sometimes just not organisers of things. When I feel that way now, I remind myself that to some people, I am the one who does not reciprocate invites, or who rarely has time. I rarely feel anything negative about them; I am just bbusy/tired/shy/not-in-an-organising-mood.
- zeroCalories 3mo agoThat's the cost of doing business. Luckily, you can't go bankrupt from hurt feelings....
- capnjazz 3mo agoAnother thing that makes this hard for me is I’m usually down for whatever. Some people I notice have strong opinions about activities, like (making up examples) thinking bowling is cringe or something in that vein. I don't really have anything I'm that against that I would kill everyones vibe for. I mostly just want to see people, so it feels weird becoming the project manager for a plan I’m completely flexible about.
- hsuduebc2 3mo agoOne could argue that it is quite the opposite. Someone potentially complaining about various activities does not make them better suited to organize events. Having strong feelings about an activity simply means they can choose not to join, not that nobody should ever go bowling again. Your flexibility and willingness to do almost anything actually make you very well suited to organizing group events.
- triprjt 3mo agono offence but i dont know what is this article doing on hackernews. looks like a diary entry at best.
- ema 3mo agoPlease have a look at the Hacker News guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nefarious_ends 3mo agoI'm right there with you, pal. The quality and focus of this site has declined significantly. More often than not these days I regret opening the site at all.
- mhluongo 3mo agoPer the article, if you want to fix this... maybe start your own :P
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- _superposition_ 3mo agoShakes fist at cloud
- inigyou 3mo agoAWS or Oracle?
- localappointmnt 2mo ago[flagged]
- alwa 3mo agoSometimes 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.
- sebastianconcpt 3mo agoReminds me of 2013 when I organized a TEDx, gosh so much work for absolute zero return. Also risk, what was I thinking?
- katzgrau 3mo agoPursuit of growth
- slashdave 3mo agoIs the value of a task measured solely by a return?
- charcircuit 3mo agoYes, because there is an opportunity cost. There is a more beneficial thing someone can do for themselves or society with that time.
- Telaneo 3mo agoWhat else is there to measure it by? The return doesn't have to be money or fame. The journey itself can have some value, be that knowledge, wisdom, connections, whatever else. But all that is its return.
- salahadawi 3mo agoThis makes me realize I should show my appreciation to organizers more. It’s easy to take events for granted.
- patcon 3mo ago<3
- pphysch 3mo agoWell, 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.
- qurren 3mo agoDuring my grad school years, back when the world was less competitive, I organized a LOT of events. I liked giving to the community, I had space to do it, and my needs were taken care of. Nowadays I feel like anything I do either needs to be either (a) getting me closer to opportunities to build a living or wealth OR (b) individual recharging time. When my poke bowl costs $24 (yes, it actually did), and my job application acceptance rate has cratered from ~100% to 10% over the past 10 years, I don't really have space to give to the community for free anymore.
- ryandrake 3mo agoI think this is why all the community events and social things in my neighborhood are organized by a few wealthy retirees. The rest of us are too busy spending all our time breaking our backs trying to survive another week so that maybe when we are 80 we’ll be able to get involved with something.
- joveian 3mo agoA quick look at your comments history suggests you are in the US. Of course individual circumstances can vary but overall looking at median disposable income adjusted for purchasing power parity (median equivalised household disposable income), the US is the wealthiest non-tiny country in the world (tecnically this data only covers the OECD and Luxembourg, a country smaller than many US cities, is the wealthiest). https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/06/society-at-a-glance-2024_08001b73/full-report/component-12.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/06/society-at-a-gl...
- rvz 3mo agoIn 2026: - If you build it (and it doesn't take off) then they won't come. - If you build it (and it does takes off) they will come and compete with you to build their own.
- raffael_de 3mo agoare you speaking from experience?
- rvz 3mo agoNo.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago> Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries. I feel like this generally applies a lot in life, and most people generally sees themselves as passive consumers when it comes to most things. You can just do things, even if people look at you weird or say your weird, even in public, and nothing really changes when they say/think those things about you. Just enjoy life as much as you can, in the way you wish, without harming others.
- dghlsakjg 3mo agoPart of growing up for me was realizing how little others care, and how little I care about what others think. It’s liberating. Be weird in public!
- mettamage 3mo agowhoopseedoopsie-whoopsieflaisie I'm a deer and I run crazy! whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop! I also foam a lot, then drink from a rainbow and feel better again. (normally I don't let this part of my inner monologue come out, especially not on HN, but you gave me permission, ha)
- win311fwg 3mo ago> without harming others. That's the problem. It isn't always clear to all people exactly what causes harm to others. For example, it is generally agreed upon that exposing your "nether region" is harmful to others even though all you are really doing is giving something for others to look at. Maybe some of the other weird things they see could be equally harmful? If your weird behaviour is commonly weird then you might have some precedent to look upon, but there is no way to tell what is and isn't harmful to others until it has already happened when you are being uniquely weird.
- 3mo ago
- Felger 3mo agoThought it would be about feds breaking in because you built a nuclear reactor in your basement while exposing your neighbors to some radiation.
- cynicalsecurity 3mo agoThat was a Rorschach test.
- samxli 3mo ago[dead]
- xyzelement 3mo ago// Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries True in general. As a kid you think of things as bigger than you. Like whoever maintains a hiking trail or runs your towns diner is "big" compared to you. As a grown up you hopefully realize that it's the other way - the work and effort to make and maintain those things is vulnerable and fragile. I think about this whenever I see someone hop over the subway turnstile. The transit system is "for granted" - it's you and your few bucks that matters. But of enough ppl feel that way it all goes away via decay eventually.
- nicbou 3mo agoThere is a point where the things you took for granted start decaying. Your body, your things, your communities, your relationships. It's only when you start repairing or replacing them that you really value maintenance and the people doing it. As you point out, it's usually done by surprisingly few, surprisingly motivated people, and their work is often underappreciated until they stop doing it. Maybe we should teach people to maintain something early on, as children, so that they learn to appreciate the work that goes into keeping the wheels turning.
- appplication 3mo agoWhat 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.
- fellowniusmonk 3mo agoThis 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.
- Exoristos 3mo agoAmerica 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.
- senderista 3mo agoI think a big part is the decline in organized religion.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago[dead]
- intended 3mo agoAll organized things started going down in participation no?
- Exoristos 3mo agoIn the United States tradition that arose in the early nineteenth century, religious bodies were spiritual families with "brothers" and "sisters" that assisted in each other's lives outside of services. Descriptions of just how involved in daily life churches were can be found in e.g. Boles's 'Religion in Antebellum Kentucky.' Much unofficial societal organization flowed from there. Granted this was not the case, or not as much the case, in churches that predate that period, say, urban Episcopalians.
- intended 3mo agoWhile 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?
- grandimam 3mo ago[dead]
- brap 3mo agoThis 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.
- wxw 3mo agoAgreed. 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Dig1t 3mo agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
- t0mpr1c3 3mo agoI don't believe it either. This advice has probably never been less true. Perhaps there is just a certain kind of Substack journalist who chooses some dubious piece of conventional wisdom every Sunday to sermonize about.
- PeterHolzwarth 3mo agoI don't know that I would characterize the typical Substack writer as a "journalist." It's just opinion blogging.
- t0mpr1c3 3mo agoThey get paid. That's why they write it on Substack not Blogger or Wix.
- PeterHolzwarth 3mo agoStill not journalism. Just paid opinion blogging.
- biscuits1 3mo ago". . . but our social scripts telling people to produce social fabric . . ." The author of the article may benefit from reading "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam. Although it's now in a class of books on American history, it explores this topic in depth. afaik, a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric." Of course, the Internet (or technology), by its nature, is actually collating society while keeping many comfortable through its economics, and thus the script is to keep isolated. I also believe Jim Morrison, the lead of The Doors, made the prediction of technological music collation some 60 years ago.
- PeterHolzwarth 3mo ago"a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric."" Good point - the linked article, and the article it itself links to, essentially, but without realizing it, indicates the American experience of WWII. The entire country suddenly and powerfully altered to support total war. Every fit man under 40, pretty much, shipped off to be in the military (you can see hints of this in late-war films, where each male actor has a line explaining why they are in an American setting vs being in foreign lands ("I'll be shipping in out in two months, so I have time to solve this murder mystery til then")). All industry shifted to produce the massive needs of the war, vast swathes of the female populace brought in from being a housewife to become factory workers creating the materiel for combat at a truly astonishing scale. All of this jarring shock to the entire country creating the novel collective experience of total war that temporarily upended and transformed the society. All this creating that "collective crisis."
- low_earth_orbit 3mo agoThat's an interesting take - although there was literally a global pandemic just a few years ago. Granted, the nature of surviving that pandemic involved reinforcing several isolating habits on a societal scale. I'm curious as to what situations would actually result in more fabric produced on a large scale.
- PeterHolzwarth 3mo ago
- flakiness 3mo agoThis sounds very American (in a good way to be clear). I wonder how this applies internationally.
- alentred 3mo agoI think it does. It sounds generally human to me. And I am not an American FWIW.
- sim04ful 3mo agoThis is indeed part of the something i've been internalising for quite a while. I've always felt i needed to improve my social circle by finding/making one, but i realised it's better to just have hobbies and skill sets that make me useful and relevant to a certain niche and then my circle would naturally arise from there. It's also why i'm trying to participate more here, even with the crippling imposters syndrome that prevents me from contributing anything...It's so difficult actively participating in a group that seemingly got cultivated from a culture somewhat alien to my own upbringing.
- skybrian 3mo agoI'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.
- mannanj 3mo agoI wonder about that. Why is this one of the few communities, that despite being so high quality in a technical sense has so little in person community connection?
- xg15 3mo agoWon'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)
- Razengan 3mo agoSo many cool things were built and forgotten, or didn't get the attention or popularity they "deserved"
- charcircuit 3mo ago>If You Build It, They Will Come This is probably the worst advice I had ever heard in my life and has resulted in me wasting years of my life. It is not the act of building something that causes people to come. If you were to rent out a $10,000 venue for your awesome event. There isn't going to be some magic that causes people to come out let alone pay to let you recoup costs. Building something is the most expensive part of doing something and ironically has almost 0 effect in my experience in getting people to come. Getting people to come is purely a marketing thing and does not require an actual thing to even be built.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- puttycat 3mo agoGood Toastmasters clubs are a good example of this.
- kazinator 3mo agoNo, if you build it, they won't come. Most such projects never see adoption by users.
- hahahaa 3mo agoYep 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.
- ventana 3mo agoNoticing 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.
- tehnub 3mo agoSuch 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.
- greatsage_sh 3mo ago[flagged]
- grahar64 3mo agoI volunteer at a weekly event where we consistently have over 400 people show up, and every week it is a struggle to get 20 necessary volunteers to run it. When you ask, you do get volunteers, but there are a few awesome people who volunteer every week and love it. The event would absolutely be impossible without them. Thank you to every person who volunteers, especially if you do it without asking.
- inigyou 3mo agoFusion Festival offers a free guaranteed ticket and free meals to anyone who's willing to sacrifice 3x7 hours of their time across the 6-day event doing menial work. Despite this they still apparently get fewer volunteers than they'd like.
- alfg 3mo agoThis resonates. I feel like this is also how I go about networking and making new friends, by joining or building a community and events around them. From personal hobbies and even workplace related events. Never take community events for granted. There's always people behind the scenes putting in the effort to make it happen, it didn't just come out of nowhere.
- SamPentz 3mo agoI totally agree with this.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- h2aichat 3mo agoIs that why the US organized the World cup? (Soccer, of course)
- dkga 3mo agoThose interested in this discussion might enjoy familiarising themselves with the concept of social capital, and in particular, with Robert Putnam’s work to understand and to promote it.
- inigyou 3mo agoThis is very relevant to FOSS. Why isn't there a good FOSS foobar? Because you didn't build one.
- m3047 3mo agoI'm coming to the conclusion that this is the wrong attitude about FOSS. The "model" is: make it possible for people to obtain the product with as little friction as possible. That serves the platforms hosting the product, but how does that serve me as the Maker? I want feedback, I want community (they're not the same the former is users the latter is other Makers). "But the users will suffer frustration and anxiety and leave if there's friction..." Oh yeah? I think they must suffer some friction and anxiety anyway, since they're not participating. What are they doing? Abandoning their search for something which solves a problem or answers a difficult question, to doom scroll on social media? See that doesn't make sense. As with Stack Overflow, AI is simply revealing the underlying flaw. We still need something to replace it. We need a better mental model.
- adrianwaj 3mo ago"If You Build It, They Will Come" How about: "If You Buy It, They Will Stay" I think a great social fabric for today should be about purchases. Of course, a wise person can learn from everyone, but why not create social groups around common purchases? Imagine meeting your doppelganger in consumer taste? "Make something people want." >> "Meet people who have the same things!"