If You Build It, They Will Come

https://www.benlandautaylor.com/p/if-you-build-it-they-will-come

by barry-cotter • 4 days ago

470 198 4 days ago

sam_lowry_2• 4 days ago

Do 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• 4 days ago

Wasting Orval is the biggest sin of all.

fredland• 4 days ago

not if it was open source

m0llusk• 4 days ago

Friend, I know where there is stored an entire casque of Orval!

raffael_de2• 4 days ago

There's a special rung in hell for people who waste good Orval.

customguy• 4 days ago

A 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• 4 days 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

positron26• 4 days ago

Would like to hear the rest of this story. Don't have an X account atm.

jkmcf• 4 days ago

Xcancel is your friend.

dennis_jeeves2• 4 days 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.

mattmaroon5• 4 days 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• 4 days ago

Would love to hear more about the impetus for your festivals, the festivals, and the process to get there.

mattmaroon5• 3 days ago

Interesting. I’ve been debating starting a social media channel teaching people how to do it.

Skidaddle• 4 days ago

What kind of street festivals are we talking about?

mattmaroon5• 3 days ago

Mine are food-focused.

dominotw• 4 days ago

we 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

ryandrake2• 4 days ago

This 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.

mattmaroon5• 3 days ago

Well, I don’t think I’ve gotten to mc-festival scale yet so I don’t know. I’ve got a few festivals in the 25k attendee range, which is big but I have vended at some that are and order of magnitude bigger. The biggest fest I do, Circleville Pumpkin Show, gets 400,000 people, is so old it had to skip a year for WWI, and is very much the opposite of a corporate festival.

But I’ve also done the MLB all-star game, and subcontracted through a few major f&b firms and those started off as corporate as they come.

I don’t think I’ve yet been involved in one that became corporate after starting off small but I’ll let you know if I get there.

fellowniusmonk2• 4 days ago

The real hack is that the events aren't the community, they serve the community, the process of working together to put these types of events on is what builds deep connection.

People don't actually get where the deep value lies, the event income or social credibility for those involved in putting it on just helps ensure there is enough fuel for the fire of the real community.

crab_galaxy• 4 days ago

You 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.

alwa2• 4 days ago

What’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!

nicbou3• 4 days ago

I 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.

zeroCalories2• 4 days ago

That's the cost of doing business. Luckily, you can't go bankrupt from hurt feelings....

capnjazz2• 4 days ago

Another 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• 4 days ago

One 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• 4 days ago

no offence but i dont know what is this article doing on hackernews. looks like a diary entry at best.

ema• 4 days ago

Please have a look at the Hacker News guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

nefarious_ends• 4 days ago

I'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• 4 days ago

Per the article, if you want to fix this... maybe start your own :P

_superposition_• 4 days ago

Shakes fist at cloud

inigyou25• 3 days ago

AWS or Oracle?

alwa2• 4 days ago

Sometimes 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.

geophph• 4 days ago

anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Idk seems like it fits the bill still. Maybe not for everyone

sebastianconcpt• 4 days ago

Reminds me of 2013 when I organized a TEDx, gosh so much work for absolute zero return. Also risk, what was I thinking?

katzgrau• 4 days ago

Pursuit of growth

slashdave• 4 days ago

Is the value of a task measured solely by a return?

charcircuit2• 4 days ago

Yes, because there is an opportunity cost. There is a more beneficial thing someone can do for themselves or society with that time.

Telaneo• 4 days ago

What 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• 4 days ago

This makes me realize I should show my appreciation to organizers more. It’s easy to take events for granted.

pphysch• 4 days ago

Well, 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• 4 days ago

During 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.

ryandrake2• 4 days ago

I 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.

inigyou25• 3 days ago

Capitalism. It's like kudzu. It sees (metaphorically) a strong, healthy tree. It grows all over the surface of that tree, using it for support. It grows so much it blocks the sunlight and kills the tree. Then it dies too, but not before spreading to the next tree.

Who the hell thought it was a good idea to make kudzu the bedrock of society? I get why there's some of it - variety is good and all - why did we decide to worship it instead of keeping it in check?

patcon• 4 days ago

rvz2• 4 days ago

In 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_de2• 4 days ago

are you speaking from experience?

rvz2• 4 days ago

No.

embedding-shape2• 4 days 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• 4 days ago

Part 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• 4 days ago

whoopseedoopsie-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• 4 days 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.

embedding-shape2• 4 days ago

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.

Indeed, probably in your country it's very much "generally agreed upon" that nude people are harmful to others, while where I live, you'll find it hard to go to the beach without seeing at least one naked body, and no people are being harmed in this environment :) I'm sure there are prudes here too, but it's more "generally agreed upon" that nude people aren't a harm to others, here at least.

I guess I should have specifically said "without physically harming others" as that's much easier to draw a line with.

Felger• 4 days ago

Thought it would be about feds breaking in because you built a nuclear reactor in your basement while exposing your neighbors to some radiation.

cynicalsecurity• 4 days ago

That was a Rorschach test.

xyzelement2• 4 days 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.

nicbou3• 4 days ago

There 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• 4 days ago

What 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.

jambalaya82• 4 days ago

It isn't only the decay. People change. Who you were online at age 23 and 30 and almost definitely 39 is bound to be vastly different as your priorities and real life relationships change (like marriages, etc).

And the topics changed faster. People into mainframe OSes had the same conversational fluidity in that for decades. Leave linux for too long and everything sounds like vocabulary from an alien world, now. And so many 'technologies' with it. True probably since cloud and containerization. So people have less in common technically in those communities and as more career branching happens, people get nichier. More interest bubbles. More and more people in core areas, making it hard to not be overwhelmed simultaneously.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 4 days ago

In the late 80s I was working at Rabbit Software in Malvern PA (they made IBM 3270 terminal emulator software). I used to car pool to work from Phila. with a brilliant woman who was a lot older than me, and had a solid lifetime of IBM mainframe experience. I was a Unix hacker with just a few years under my belt.

We realized very quickly that if there was one thing we couldn't talk to each other about, it was computers.

colinsane2• 4 days ago

the turnstile thing is more complex than you perceive because almost every transit system relies on public funding. here (Seattle) those fares only fund about 10% of the _operating cost_ of the transit per Sound Transit's own reports. not to derail the point, but please do go read your transit system's quarterly reports instead of taking the conclusion of fare dodging for granted. just about every city has public budget reports for their transit system precisely because they are the product of public funding.

xp842• 4 days ago

Not quite sure what you mean. Is it that fare dodging is fine because the taxpayers at large already pick up most of the tab? Or that fare dodging is worse than you’d think because it makes an already quite expensive thing for the public budget, even more expensive?

I’m thinking about BART right now, which really might simply go away altogether due in part to the collapse in fare revenue that remote work triggered. BART didn’t have nearly as bad as Seattle’s fare ratio though - pre-COVID, fares and parking covered 66% of the operating costs. (Source https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/BART%20FY23-32... ) This was apparently the best or one of the best of its peers. It was 28% last year, just due to the fare revenue basically halving.

greekrich92• 4 days ago

The subway should be free, and continuous fare hikes when you're already double paying with your eyes because of all the advertising they shove in front of you is more incentive to turnstile jump. Overpaid do-nothing senior adminstrators and lawmakers who are in the pocket of privatization are the problem, not that 17 year old.

pclowes7• 4 days ago

Enforcing fares massively decreases vandalism, and antisocial behavior on public transportation.

If you don’t have public transportation that I feel safe having a 10-year-old ride on unaccompanied by an adult then you do not have public transportation. You have a very expensive drug addict shelter on wheels/rails.

xyzelement2• 4 days ago

Fares cover 40 per cent of the subway operating budget. It seems necessary revenue.

The 17 year old dodging fares becomes the 34 year old doing the same.

The percentage of fare dodgers who aren't pieces of shit in other parts of their life is zero.

dublinben• 4 days ago

Public transit should be worth the (inexpensive) cost of a ticket. The money used to make fares free should instead be spent on improving the quality of service. Better service attracts more riders, bringing in more ticket revenue, enabling further service improvements, and so on. It produces a positive flywheel effect that benefits current passengers, new passengers, and even drivers!

Free transit is a downward cycle, where increased ridership just increases costs, creating a negative flywheel.

inemesitaffia• 4 days ago

Private Jet rides should be free

necovek• 4 days ago

A transit system has a different cost and is actually paid for by majority of users: the fact that few abuse it is not going to break it (as long as we keep it immoral to do so — note that there may be valid reasons to do it, when someone is in some sort of urgency and eg. ticketing machine is overcrowded or broken: it's not on us to judge even if we might be right 99% of the time).

Here, we are talking about things where it takes volunteer work to keep a thing you want going — I do not even want to imagine a world where a board game night is organized by a paid pro instead of the enthusiast, even if a status quo means that there is always an assymetry between hosts doing most work and guests never hosting themselves (maybe they do not have a big enough space though — they can still volunteer to help though).

I've realized this in high school and uni and started making conscious effort to sometimes do the social fabric things even when I did not feel like it, in order to continue benefiting from the social engagement.

inigyou25• 3 days ago

This is, to some extent, precisely what happened to most of the internet. Things run for passion withered away; things run for profit remained. New people grew up surrounded by only for-profit things, and believed that was just the way things were supposed to work. They've never seen a personal website.

When I was 5 or 6 my dad helped me make a web page about the Star Wars movie I just saw and didn't really understand but I thought the pod racers were cool. Apparently our ISP came with a little bit of web space. That doesn't happen any more. You don't even get Usenet.

fellowniusmonk2• 4 days ago

This 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.

Exoristos3• 4 days ago

America 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• 4 days ago

I think a big part is the decline in organized religion.

intended2• 4 days ago

All organized things started going down in participation no?

rubylimetea• 4 days ago

Interestingly, I always guessed the opposite.

That modern American Christianity obsoleted the old clubs and "secret" societies - most of which were no longer very secret, more ritual than societal, and at some point had to define what "higher power" meant to its members - a topic that easily takes over the municipal development discussions - to not only the younger men but to the women (who were largely barred from such organizations).

90s television and the "role model" movement helped Christianity unify and sweep the attention of the youth, reflected in "youth group" programs across churches in the United States and also the rise of indie televangelists (some became millionaires, along with thousands of pastors).

By the early- to mid-2000s, Christianity had figured out how to put on a much better show (for the kids) and, especially in California, again had evolved into something new, more palatable, entertaining, and far more inclusive than you could ever get from something like a Masonic order or even a Rotary Club.

90s-00s Christianity was a massive movement that I wonder whether or not would be possible without the advent of TV. To me, those old clubs where grandpas met and discussed things was a way of the past. Like comparing newspapers to social media - just an obsolete way of sharing information.

watwut2• 4 days ago

There used to be a lot of disdain on HN against people who were "just partying". While the geeks stayed home, learned for school or job yadda yadda. People who socialize were always maligned here, their socializing was supposed reason why they earned less money.

And that attitude is one part of the answer. Second is that home entertainment became easier and more fun, so people stay home watching movies, browsing internet, what have you instead of going out. And overtime, dance places became emptier and organizers demotivated.

makeitdouble• 4 days ago

On "just partying", while I get what you're saying, I have a hard time to believe they ever cared about what HN thought about them or that our opinions had meaningful impact. TBH I am/was more jealous of people with truly advanced "people skills" than anything, especially as they still earn pretty decently.

Lots more money is still made by networking or potentially mild grifting than through sheer innovation or technical excelence for instance.

zeroCalories2• 4 days ago

The stigma is pure cope. Most nerdy types I know wasted a ton of time on some stupid hobby. If not video games, it was some other dumb geek thing like anime, comic books, or furries.

tonyhart72• 4 days ago

Yeah, now everyone glued to their phone

crazy how 20 years different changes human life forever

inigyou25• 3 days ago

You can party sometimes. If it's all you do, you might have a problem. Berlin is a cool place, eh? (I swear that techno is targeted at autistic people)

gallerdude• 4 days ago

Staying at home is as entertaining as it’s ever been: video games, Netflix, don’t even get me started on short-form content.

mannanj3• 4 days ago

It was technology. With greater efficiency, came also greater separation and distance at home and with family and community and our initiatory rituals/rites.

We used to use community to pass those down, but now the average American family gets divided from each other at an early age as soon as the distraction and ideology from technology like screens and things social media comes into play.

Edit: Before internet, there were other forms of "social media" at play attempting to extract the attention of the individual units of the family and community, but they weren't as effective. With the internet they are more effective.

inigyou25• 3 days ago

What was the social media before social media? TV?

xg152• 4 days ago

It's trite, but I think a part of it is "because the internet happened" - and I don't mean just today's enshittification era but also the "good old times" everyone seems to remember fondly here. At some point, the internet was full of that kind of community spirit that you described, but of course this meant that people were more likely to direct their energy to online community building than to real-life stuff. And unfortunately online communities didn't always teach the skills that offline communities required, and also probably contributed a lot to the "consumer mindset" the OP warns against...

ghaff3• 4 days ago

I suspect there are a lot of reasons. You don't have men and their housewife for the most part. So the typically male Lions, Elks, etc. clubs don't fit as well with modern lifestyles for that reason in part. Bowling nights went out of fashion. People are less likely to to be clustered in a town/small city for work. There are just a lot of reasons why routinely heading down to $PLACE with all the guys after work just isn't that popular any longer.

Exoristos3• 4 days ago

The downfall of social institutions was well on its way by the Boomers.

danaris• 4 days ago

As someone who was growing up during the period where the Internet became mainstream...

This was happening before then. The Lions, Rotary, etc clubs in my area made very little effort to reach out and invite younger members. Aside from the Rotary exchange program, I couldn't have named a single event they were putting on that was genuinely aimed at people under the age of 50.

And the few times that they did try to talk to some of us young people about the club, the very, very strong impression I got of the pitch was "you can pay significant monthly dues to come to meetings with old people and occasionally go do volunteer activities out in the community." I already did some volunteering without having to pay for the privilege, and I didn't see the draw of going to meetings with old people.

xp842• 4 days ago

I really feel this comment. The most tragic part to me is that these older type of organizations, I’d actually argue would be great for what people like me would benefit from. People are so isolated and lonely and “third places” are known to be a good thing for basically everyone. And it’s not like I couldn’t, with some effort, attend a few events and probably make a few acquaintances to get sponsored to join one. But the age chasm that’s already happened means most of the people down there are in their 60s at the youngest which makes me as a younger (than that) person feel nervous that these guys might not feel they have a lot to talk about with me (or even that I don’t belong). And with membership being so static, a new member would find themselves the only ones who hasn’t known everyone in the room for 30 years. Of note, a similar phenomenon can be seen in early Internet communities: a coupon years ago I paid to join The WELL just to see what it was like. It was interesting from an Internet Archaeology point of view, but most of the people there are older Gen Xers or boomers. Basically no millennial ever joined The WELL, because the Internet had moved on before we got online. The community has only shrunk from attrition, so everyone there has known the other members since the 90s.

Brendinooo• 4 days ago

Armchair historian AT BEST but...a lot of grassroots social institutions formed in the period between the Industrial Revolution (mass migration to the cities) and the invention of the radio. There were all of a sudden a LOT of people close together, some were even starting to get newfangled leisure time, and there wasn't a ton to do. On top of that, a lot of the institutions were ethnic because of the mass immigration that was happening at the time.

From there, the track downhill is death by a thousand cuts: radio, melting pot, television, suburbs, Internet, etc.

So in a sense one might mourn the loss, but I think it seems worth pointing out that they were enabled in the first place by a particular set of conditions that weren't some baked-in human default.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 days ago

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?

Because at that time, the younger generation outnumbered the old. And today, the older generation outnumbers the younger. They grew up in a growing world, and you have grown up in a shrinking world. Not shrinking quite so quickly that you can't help but notice... not yet. We're not Japan, not yet. When you read that heartwarming story about the Japanese train line that stays open until that one Japanese girl finishes high school, that happened because she was part of a shrinking society. Do you think they had dances planned multiple nights per week in her prefecture?

nektro• 3 days ago

Why weren't the young a kind of apprentices to the old?

this question could explain almost everything about american life right now

brap• 4 days ago

This 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• 4 days ago

Agreed. 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.

Dig1t• 4 days ago

I 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

t0mpr1c32• 4 days ago

I 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.

PeterHolzwarth4• 4 days ago

I don't know that I would characterize the typical Substack writer as a "journalist."

It's just opinion blogging.

MikeynJerry• 4 days ago

Created an account just to echo this. I don't agree with the author at all.

I moved to Seattle about a year ago and it's taken just as long to build something that vaguely resembles a small board game community, and I still have issues with people ghosting or refusing to play anything other than what they brought.

And despite having multiple regulars, none of them have ever invited me to anything. Not even other game nights. Multiple times I have heard something akin to "Oh yeah I invited X and Y (other regulars) to Z event" and it hurts every single time.

Two days ago, as the last two people were leaving, one asked the other if they wanted to join them for an improv festival that happened today. I love improv. They declined, so I was awkwardly like: "hey, I would love to go with you, can you send me the details when you get home?" and all I got was radio silence.

The frustrating part is that the person I asked had just gone through a rough breakup, so for the past few weeks I'd been inviting him to a bunch of stuff, even going out of my way to organize stuff just for him to get out of the house, because I thought we were good friends.

Sorry for the rant.

TL;DR: I agree that it's really hard to get people to show up and I don't know what it will take to change that, but if you figure it out, please let me know.

biscuits1• 4 days 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.

PeterHolzwarth4• 4 days 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_orbit2• 4 days ago

That'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.

bluecheese452• 4 days ago

What is interesting is that WW1 had a lot of the same elements yet did not produce the same community coming together. My theory is that a crisis is a necessary but not sufficient element. WW1 was ugly but was not existential. But WW2 scared the upper classes enough that they were willing to share part of the wealth for a while.

flakiness• 4 days ago

This sounds very American (in a good way to be clear). I wonder how this applies internationally.

alentred• 4 days ago

I think it does. It sounds generally human to me. And I am not an American FWIW.

sim04ful• 4 days ago

This 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• 4 days ago

I'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.

mannanj3• 4 days ago

I 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?

nicbou3• 4 days ago

I meet everyone this way. I reach out to people and people reach out to me.

inigyou25• 3 days ago

Some usernames stick out. If there's a thread about DNSSEC you know tptacek will show up to complain about it.

Razengan• 4 days ago

So many cool things were built and forgotten, or didn't get the attention or popularity they "deserved"

charcircuit2• 4 days 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.

puttycat• 4 days ago

Good Toastmasters clubs are a good example of this.

kazinator• 4 days ago

No, if you build it, they won't come. Most such projects never see adoption by users.

hahahaa3• 4 days ago

Yep 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• 4 days ago

Noticing 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• 4 days ago

Such 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.

grahar64• 4 days ago

I 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.

inigyou25• 3 days ago

Fusion 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• 4 days ago

This 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• 4 days ago

I totally agree with this.

h2aichat• 4 days ago

Is that why the US organized the World cup? (Soccer, of course)

dkga• 4 days ago

Those 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.

inigyou25• 3 days ago

This is very relevant to FOSS. Why isn't there a good FOSS foobar? Because you didn't build one.

m30472• 3 days ago

I'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.

inigyou25• 3 days ago

It all starts with making, though.

adrianwaj• 3 days 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!"

If You Build It, They Will Come

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