Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - Meet your Real Neighbours again - Sign out forever

by MicahWedemeyer • 17 years ago

76 57 17 years ago

That site is incredibly well put together. Makes me jealous that someone else's joke is better looking than my own real sites.

timdorr• 17 years ago

I really have to disagree on that one, as a designer. I see a lot of mistakes:

  - Inconsistent font usage.
  - The page isn't centered properly, it's slightly to the left.
  - Light blue on white text.
  - Improper whitespace usage on the "Faster, Safer, Smarter, Better" section.
  - The social network icons, the monitor, and the trophy are all aliased horribly. Someone used the wrong type of anti-aliasing when resizing them.
  - Pink.

And it's just plain ugly in my opinion :/

pavs• 17 years ago

Listen, a designer spent 1 month painstakingly criticizing and pulling apart smashing magazine (a very famous designer/developer's blog) website's new design: http://www.awayback.com/smashing-magazine-realigned/

Designers are like that. Give them enough time they will find some mistakes in your work and brag about it. As a designer/developer I think I speak for myself and most design community.

Chances are, some designer out there finds your favorite, best work; repulsive and ugly. I can bet on it.

petercooper2• 17 years ago

Wanna meet your real neighbours again?

God no. That's why the Internet is so awesome - we're not limited to the people we unfortunately find ourselves surrounded by in "real life." Still, good joke ;-)

dschobel6• 17 years ago

I know you're speaking with tongue-in-cheek but there's some unsettling truth to what you say.

People can be less involved in their community if they can just escape to like-minded havens on the internet rather than fixing the real issues going on around them (see al3x's post about fleeing to Portland for reference: http://al3x.net/).

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

they can just escape to like-minded havens on the internet rather than fixing the real issues going on around them

For most people, the world just won't stay saved, so they begin to wonder, why keep going to the effort to save it?

steveklabnik• 17 years ago

I've actually been joking about starting a 'move to the internet' movement.

antonovka2• 17 years ago

As a long-time San Francisco resident I found it irksome that Alex was so quick to bemoan the lack of culture to consume without showing any possible interest in creating any.

In my opinion, San Francisco is a beautiful place for creators.

jacoblyles5• 17 years ago

I went to a church on Christmas Eve last year for the carols and I found it invigorating and enlightening to talk to people who weren't 20-something grad students or professors. I worry that we're missing out on something by congregating in social and intellectual monocultures in which we are never challenged by someone that sees the world from a different viewpoint.

jsm386• 17 years ago

You should give http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone a read. Might offer some new perspective:

He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He believes this undermines the active civil engagement a strong democracy required from its citizens.

dschobel6• 17 years ago

There was a story on NPR a few years ago about this exact phenomenon in retirement communities in Florida. Places where there was no one under the age of 55 and no kids around.

The societies quickly degenerate because no one has any incentive to invest in infrastructure beyond what they can use in the next 10-15 years. They care about the functioning of the society to the extent that it affects them directly.

hugh_3• 17 years ago

It's dangerous to get to know your neighbours -- if you don't like them, they're hard to avoid. Better to be socially close to those you can physically avoid, and socially distant from those you can't.

onewland• 17 years ago

You and I have different definitions of dangerous. Risky might be a better word. But the right word for that sentence is probably "unpleasant" or "vexing". Dangerous is getting your hand caught in your disposal. Not being able to talk to a neighbor is like getting a piece of food caught in your disposal.

I'd say it's more dangerous to not know your neighbors. If you're ever in trouble in your neighborhood (where you might logically spend a lot of your time) you can rely upon them. If they don't know you, they might be less willing to help in a situation involving actual danger.

sielskr• 17 years ago

I have found this to be true during my experience living in the Bay Area as an adult for the last 23 years. In particular, although living in the Bay Area has allowed me to meet extremely wonderful people who enrich my life, I have also met many worthless people who seem to drag down everyone who gets mixed up with them. "Dangerous" is probably not the best word for getting mixed up with them: "costly" is probably better. It has been my experience that most of the "costly" relationships I have had are with neighbors and only one of the beneficial relationships I have had has been with a neighbor -- and that relationship was vastly less beneficial than many of the relationships I have has with non-neighbors.

The reason it turned out this way is not hard to explain: unless you are a landlord or are buying a house and participate in a "cohousing" venture, there is almost no way in American to choose your neigbhors, and it is difficult and expensive to put distance between yourself and a neighbor (because moving is difficult and expensive).

Note that a large part of human communication is "signalling" by which I mean making oneself appear as virtuous as possible and making oneself appear to have the character traits that people want in a friend or a coworker.

And note that the way I would signal virtue or good character traits in this conversational thread is to say that I always get along with everyone and that I love all my neighbors.

But I did not do that. Instead, I intentionally chose to risk leaving the (false, IMHO) impression that I might be hard to get along with in order to counteract what I see as the overly rosy picture painted by our society about the value of warm relationships with one's neighbors (relative to warm relationships with non-neighbors) -- and in order to give some of the younger people reading this the benefit of my life experience. (I am 49.)

It is of course often extremely beneficial to live with someone who loves you, I should add -- and that is worth going for because it is much less expensive to choose your housemates or apartment mates than to choose your neighbors.

bg4• 17 years ago

Good concept but, personally, I find the overdone suicide logos and graphics unsettling.

mechanical_fish2• 17 years ago

Perhaps there are people in the world who don't think this site is utterly tone-deaf. I'm not one of them.

Matters of taste aside, here's a factual prediction: This site will disappear in a flurry of bad press and (perhaps) legal action the first time an actual suicidal person couples the use of the site with an actual suicide attempt.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I'll make another prediction: My first prediction probably won't come to pass, because it would require the site to actually have a statistically significant number of users. And I doubt the effectiveness of the apparent marketing plan. The stench of death doesn't sell very well. Especially when the second step of your viral loop is "encourage your customers to cut off casual contact with any other potential customers". ;)

jordyhoyt• 17 years ago

Very unsettling. I don't understand how this topic is a punchline to so many people.

Utterly tactless, but I'm not sure how much you'd be able to muster with a url like that.

est• 17 years ago

Here's the quickest way to delete your account in China (only if your account has absolutely no link with your real identity):

Use a proxy, and post anti-government stuff.

ahi• 17 years ago

not a bad way to get your irl account "deleted" too.

dschobel6• 17 years ago

I can't tell if you're kidding, but I don't see what legal compulsion FB, MySpace, et al can receive from the Chinese gov to kill accounts.

pie• 17 years ago

Reminds me of this, which also surfaced recently:

http://www.seppukoo.com/

Also strangely well-designed for a simple novelty site.

Morieris• 17 years ago

I was going to try it, but it looks like too many people are killing their myspaces alread.

"Myspace service currently unavailable, due to massive requests!!"

suicidespam• 17 years ago

We need the reverse ... spam your social networks with your real-world suicide, as explored at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=831537.

bena• 17 years ago

The people who feel the need to do this have missed the point of the sites in the first place.

I have an account on all three services. All of my friends on there are people I have physically met and like as people (or in the case of LinkedIn, business contacts). The only site I'd probably be fine with losing is MySpace, as it was fine before Facebook went public, but after that all of my friends moved to Facebook, making MySpace redundant.

I think the real issue is people who treat it like some soft of demented game of Pokemon. You don't have to "catch 'em all" and get everyone on the site to "friend" you. You don't win.

jyothi• 17 years ago

Their busy message with - consider suicide at a later moment - is quite hilarious

"It seems like that all of our machines are currently busy!

Please consider suicide at a later moment and accept our apologies!"

Psyonic2• 17 years ago

Your real neighbors are all on the internet, too busy to talk to you anyway.

tungstenfurnace• 17 years ago

My neighbours in opinion space are more interesting than my neighbours in physical space.

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - Meet your Real Neighbours again - Sign out forever

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