[HN Gopher] A weird epic ramble about Etsy homepages from the mi...
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A weird epic ramble about Etsy homepages from the middle 2000's
Author : youcould
Score : 332 points
Date : 2022-07-22 05:23 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| Fargoan wrote:
| That was not epic and I don't understand why he waited 15 years
| to say it.
| [deleted]
| AndrianV wrote:
| When you don't realize the thread has ended and Twitter displays
| a full-sized login banner, pushing back doesn't return you to the
| discussion but instead takes you to the previous website, I
| detest that situation.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--things
| like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-
| button breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| bilekas wrote:
| > The interview was also about Lisp. There was this Lisp moment
| in the middle 2000s. You had to be there. 11/
|
| This made me laugh a lot harder than it should have!
| CSSer wrote:
| This checks out though. One of the Stripe cofounders was
| obsessed with Lisp.
| jandrese wrote:
| Even better is how from the architecture he described Lisp
| wasn't even used at the company.
| shmde wrote:
| https://nitter.net/mcfunley/status/1550219636464967680
|
| I hate it when you don't realise the thread ends and twitter
| shows you a full sized login banner where pressing back doesn't
| bring you back to the thread but instead goes back to previous
| website.
| totetsu wrote:
| See what's happening? join twitter and we'll let you scroll
| back up this page.
| aphroz wrote:
| So Etsy was a great place and then they "fixed" it and now it's
| full of Aliexpress garbage thanks to the algorithms. Thanks for
| telling us how ridiculous it was to ask someone to manually
| compose the homepage by writing a 55 tweets story.
| afavour wrote:
| Etsy isn't garbage because someone stopped curating the
| homepage. It's because investors demanded growth above all else
| and Etsy now probably makes 100x the money it used to, human
| curation or not.
| ghaff wrote:
| More generally, truly artisanal is low volume and high
| priced. And as soon as someone discovers $SITE attracts
| buyers, all the incentives are in place to substitute mass-
| market manufactured good that maybe have the minimal handmade
| touch layered on top.
| suction wrote:
| It's the age-old battle between investors and entrepreneurs
| wanting to make crazy money and creative people just trying to
| make enough to live somewhat comfortably.
|
| It's also happened in the brick and mortar world, when American
| ideas took over Europe.
|
| For this to change, the American age would have to end, but I'm
| not sure if whatever comes next will be an improvement.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > It's the age-old battle between investors and entrepreneurs
| wanting to make crazy money and creative people ...
|
| ... wanting to wake up every hour, 24 hours a day, to sift
| through pictures of shirtless men to find some beautiful
| furniture to put up on the frontpage?
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yeah, that was valuable, and obviously could be distributed
| among more people.
| organsnyder wrote:
| That's the piece I don't understand. I get that they're a
| scrappy startup, but surely they could have spread the
| work among more people so that no one had to work 24/7?
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I kinda took that more as a slight embellishment than a
| hard truth. Surely there was at least a few people on
| rotation doing that. Having that done by a single person
| 24/7 would be almost literally impossible. It still sucks
| for the person in rotation, especially whoever was doing
| it at night.
|
| But in startup land, where you have limited resources,
| somehow the ticket to make that somewhat automated by
| queuing up a bunch of these things at once wasn't high
| enough of a priority.
|
| Honestly the best way to have gotten that fixed was to
| put the developers into rotation. I bet somebody would
| have cooked something up after the first shift!
| suction wrote:
| The shirtless men were optional. But curating a selection
| of photos out of a bigger amount of photos is creative
| work, I'd say.
| zemo wrote:
| the story is probably 2008 or so, maybe a little later but not
| by much. The author was long gone before any of the changes
| you're talking about happened. Etsy was still very handmade for
| many years after this story takes place. It wasn't until after
| the IPO (2015) that activist investors pushed out the folksy
| leadership and installed a more corporate CEO (2016) that
| changed everything and made it suck.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| Tweet 54 agrees?
|
| "The magic in the system was the person yanking 24 beautiful
| treasuries a day out of the sea of shirtless dudes."
| ertian wrote:
| The thing is...that doesn't scale. If somebody was still
| manually updating the homepage with a handful of curated
| beautiful items, then we wouldn't be talking about it because
| none of us would've heard of it. Or maybe it would have
| transformed into a mad scramble to snatch up the limited,
| curated items. Part of this thread suggested it was headed in
| that direction. In either case, it would've been more or less
| irrelevant, and we'd be talking about some other site full of
| AliExpress garbage instead.
| musingsole wrote:
| > then we wouldn't be talking about it because none of us
| would've heard of it
|
| That's defeatist logic. Sure, scaling with a single person
| doing it is likely impossible, but all of this reads to me
| as a bunch of technologists being utterly unable to
| integrate the human element into their systems. The
| conclusion is that a human aesthetic sense was needed --
| first to filter dickpics and second to put together a
| gestalt page.
|
| I can imagine ways to scale that, but it hinges on trusting
| the human element -- something technologists and investors
| are utterly incapable of.
| chucky123 wrote:
| I'm surprised Etsy was established so early. I though it was
| build in the 2010s.
| adventured wrote:
| For anyone curious (2005):
|
| site still has a "we just opened" banner
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050714023957/http://www.etsy.c...
| swayvil wrote:
| Hey Jared Tarbell. I think he was big in generative art.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| He was also a very generous patron of Albuquerque's game
| developer community. We had some great parties at his studio
| downtown.
| swayvil wrote:
| He strikes me as a fellow for whom cash is no object. Must be
| nice.
| mcfunley wrote:
| Yep same guy, and if the thread makes it unclear I really do
| consider Jared a genius of the most wonderful sort
| [deleted]
| wmeredith wrote:
| Does this guy have a blog? I loathe tweet storms.
| medion wrote:
| Right? We have blogs for these things. I don't get it.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Write a blog, dude. This is ridiculous.
| varjag wrote:
| Write ups go where eyeballs are.
| onion2k wrote:
| OK, dad!
| pessimizer wrote:
| The people doing these endless twitter threads are 50 years
| old.
| onion2k wrote:
| Don't be so pessimistic.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Is is that depressing to be 50? I'm almost there and I
| feel fine.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--things
| like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-
| button breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| vesinisa wrote:
| Agreed. I must say I now passionately hate Twitter. The fact
| that it is unsuitable for any utterings longer than a slogan is
| of course well-known (up to the point that when their CEO
| resigned he published his letter as a screenshot instead of a
| Tweet[1]) but they now additionally made the decision to drive
| up signups by making the content inaccessible unless you have
| an account.
|
| I could see Twitter gaining foothold as a "public forum"
| before, but it is now turning into another user-hostile
| monetization platform. This is of course understandable, since
| investors have poured billions into it. I guess I can only
| dream it will lead to its demise and to be replaced by a truly
| public service, like Wikipedia.
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720
| [deleted]
| hardware2win wrote:
| So, does domain expert for a few Ks of $ per month outperforms
| way more expensive AI?
| suction wrote:
| Not at scale, but the question is, do you really need to scale?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think giving everyone the same homepage wouldn't work at some
| size. The sellers on the front page would likely be totally
| swamped and would need much larger scale than the small-scale
| hand-made feel that Etsy wanted, _and_ it would also be bad for
| sellers who aren't on the front page.
|
| The thread seemed to mostly touch on some organisational
| disaster topics and a little bit of 'how can we make this
| system work better for sellers'. I didn't really see it as
| requiring automating the system so much as making it a bit less
| horrifying.
| jandrese wrote:
| I thought showcasing a single front page to everybody and
| rotating it every hour means the seller gets a massive spike
| in views once and then they are back to the dirty alleys of
| the search algorithm.
|
| It would have made more sense for the employee to spend their
| day finding good collections and adding them to a list. Then
| whenever someone loads a page a random item from the list is
| used. Old items would expire from the list after a week or
| two. This lets the employee do their job 9-5 and spreads out
| the load on the people who get featured on the front page.
| brianbreslin wrote:
| This is a reminder that many of the most popular sites we
| encounter are not phd level rocket science behind them, but in
| fact piles of duct tape and random scripts shoved in there along
| the way. So next time you think "I couldn't possibly build a site
| worth $100MM", know that most of the people who did probably
| shouldn't have been able to either.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| A lot of start ups run off of spreadsheets and some basic
| javascript html css pages.
| ratww wrote:
| Those are actually the good ones.
|
| I'd love to work at those. As opposed to the monstrosities I
| often see in some unicorns and well-funded places.
| vxNsr wrote:
| > _monstrosities_
|
| Spent a minute trying to figure out if you were trying to
| make a pun (mono or sites, or idk) before realizing that's
| how it's spelled. I gotta get some more sleep.
| ratww wrote:
| There are definitely systems that are monostrosities
| (monoliths that are monstrosities), but the worst places
| have microstrosities.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yup. Normally a lot of work but a lot of fun too if you are
| up for it.
|
| I look for dev teams of 3-5 for this type of company.
| circa wrote:
| This reminds me of an old blog called "Regretsy." I can't seem to
| find it at the moment but it was pretty funny at the time.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> This reminds me of an old blog called "Regretsy." I can't
| seem to find it at the moment but it was pretty funny at the
| time._
|
| It got nuked. The woman that set it up still owns it, but
| there's nothing there.
|
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/regretsy-closure
| knome wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120713185540/http://www.regret.
| ..
|
| Luckily, it can still be found in the wayback machine.
| King-Aaron wrote:
| Twitter for long-form text is just a dumpster fire
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--things
| like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-
| button breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| suction wrote:
| Maybe this is already the best we can hope for? Soon it will be
| a choice between overlayed captions on Tiktok-Videos, or zero
| eyeballs.
| Kaotique wrote:
| We need blogs again. I am sorry, but I cannot read an otherwise
| interesting writeup because of this insane format.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--things
| like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-
| button breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| ikt wrote:
| I have no idea why people do this to themselves
|
| https://nitter.net/mcfunley/status/1550219636464967680 is
| making it easier but I'm like this is 100% an article that
| could feature in any tech magazine or blog.
| vgel wrote:
| 2 reasons, I think:
|
| 1, I believe Twitter downranks link tweets in the algorithmic
| feed. If your following is on Twitter, you need to meet them
| where they are, but you can't meet them with a link. I've
| seen some people work around this by combining a Twitter
| thread that summarizes the post with a link at the end of the
| thread to the actual post, but then you need to write twice
| (or 1.5x, I guess) the words.
|
| 2, thread-tweeting can be lower barrier than blogging. The
| tech side (hosting a blog and associated yak care) a little,
| but mostly the writing. Writing a big post all at once is a
| _thing_ and easy to get discouraged by, where on Twitter, the
| lack of an edit button forces you to go forward and not
| second-guess yourself. It 's also more ephemeral, less
| feeling of "this needs to be perfect since it will live on my
| website forever".
|
| 2.5, There's a retro-tech thread tweeter (who I'll avoid
| naming since they've requested to not be linked from HN due
| to this recurring complaint) who's said they specifically
| find it helpful for ADHD since they can tweet out bursts of
| little updates, work on something else, then come back.
| Personally I also have ADHD and trying to write a twitter
| thread is my personal hell, but to each their own :-)
| theshrike79 wrote:
| As for #2. I'm _really_ jealous for people who can use
| Twitter as a kind of a blog platform. It's effectively
| write-only and you can't go and edit things afterwards.
|
| My jumbled up mess of a brain would never allow me to get a
| coherent 20+ tweet chain out without typing it out first,
| splitting it to tweet sized chunks, editing, re-editing and
| then copy&pasting it to a thread manually.
| dicknuckle wrote:
| Girl, same.
| UberFly wrote:
| I've been sitting on a weird epic ramble about Etsy homepages
| from the middle 2000's for the better part of 15 years now so I
| figured I would write it up as a thread 1/
|
| The story begins while I was still working in the financial
| industry in lower Manhattan, watching Visual Studio whitescreen
| for a half hour as it often did and questioning my life choices.
| 2/
|
| One day while that was happening a woman I knew DM'd me a link
| and said "I want everything on this website." 3/
|
| I don't know what she was trying to link me to because the site
| was broken, and it served me this error page. "Hey, sick error
| page," I remember thinking. 4/
|
| This kept happening though, and eventually I came to be dimly
| aware that there was a new site called Etsy with a reputation for
| being full of beautiful stuff. 5/
|
| That reputation came from the homepage, which at the time was a
| grid of items that looked like this 6/
|
| The homepage grids changed periodically, and they were always
| interesting. The items would be beautiful individually, or
| beautiful together, or it'd contain some oblique joke. They'd be
| a rainbow of color, or they'd be the same shade of eggshell
| white, whatever. 7/
|
| It was this really wonderful handcrafted thing about handcrafted
| things, from the pre-personalization era. 8/
|
| Anyway I became familiar enough with this via osmosis to
| recognize the name Etsy when I saw it on the python.org jobs
| page, so I jumped and applied. 9/
|
| There were a few red flags in my Etsy interview which I was not
| conditioned to notice or emphasize at the time. It was scheduled
| for 3PM, but didn't start until 3:30 because my interviewer was
| "really hung over." 10/
|
| The interview was also about Lisp. There was this Lisp moment in
| the middle 2000s. You had to be there. 11/
|
| So after joining the company I eventually learned that the
| homepages were sourced from a feature called Treasury. Treasuries
| were a way for Etsy users to create collections, roughly the same
| as Pinterest these days. 12/
|
| Treasuries were selected and promoted to homepages via human
| cron. There was one poor employee living the Leonardo Da Vinci
| lifestyle, waking up every hour around the clock to turn over the
| homepage. 13/
|
| When I started she'd been at it for a while, and it took another
| six or eight months for that to end 14/
|
| Obviously this is not the kind of thing a human being should be
| asked to endure for a startup. But you have to understand, there
| was a problem of approximately this magnitude everywhere you
| looked. 15/
|
| ------- So the first version of Etsy (2005) was PHP talking to
| Postgres, written by someone learning PHP as he was doing it,
| which was all fine. Postgres was kind of an idiosyncratic choice
| for the time, but it didn't matter yet and anyway that's a
| different story. -------
|
| The p95 of search in that era was several minutes. The site was
| down for a full hour each week or so, and not on purpose. The
| human tragedy of someone waking up every hour to change the
| homepage felt kind of contained I guess 16/
|
| So like many of the frontend features of Etsy in those years, the
| Treasury was built in Flash by a visionary named Jared Tarbell,
| the "fourth founder." He was more of a visual artist working in
| Flash as his medium than an engineer. 17/
|
| He lived in New Mexico and was very difficult to get ahold of.
| Once I talked to him and he told me he was working on etching
| intricate patterns into rocks with a laser, so he could drop them
| in the desert for future raccoon civilizations to wonder about.
| 18/
|
| Search ranking was a big problem for us, and we figured we could
| improve this if we knew things like "this or that listing is
| popular in popular treasuries." 19/
|
| Beyond that, the homepage was the same for everyone looking at
| it. We thought maybe we could iterate away from that to something
| less artificially scarce. Getting an item on the homepage was a
| big deal for sellers, but the math of the situation made it
| unattainable for most. 20/
|
| The Flash architecture really held those ambitions back. There
| were only 250 Treasuries live on the site at any given time,
| which was a function of the RTMP server backend it was using.
| This was some kind of Flash chat server dingus. 21/
|
| We didn't even have access to it. There was a contractor managing
| a Windows box someplace. And there was no database backing it, so
| as far as we knew once Treasuries were off the site they were
| lost forever. 22/
|
| In our heads this beautiful, wonderful thing feeding the public
| perception of Etsy was a small scale tragedy in terms of data
| loss and lost opportunity. 23/
|
| Back in the constant chaos of daily goings on on the engineering
| team, we were trying to get our arms around things like security
| vulnerabilities. We hired some pen testers for the first time,
| and they found problems everywhere. 24/
| UberFly wrote:
| SQL injection, cross site scripting, really just everywhere. If
| you name a category of security vulnerability, we definitely
| had it on every page. 25/
|
| Flash was one of the systemic problems. Everywhere we had
| Flash, we had XSS. And there were worse issues with it, for
| example, you could impersonate the Etsy CEO in chat with users
| without authenticating if you wanted. 26/
|
| There was an internal Flash endpoint you could use to
| exfiltrate all of our sales data, and in fact there was a whole
| other company that had figured this out and was selling our
| sales insights to Etsy sellers. 28/
|
| Anyway we realized that, oh god, we are going to need to get
| our arms around this Flash stuff. And Jared had his hands full
| with the raccoons and the lasers, so we tried hiring somebody.
| 29/
|
| We hired this guy that I guess I will call Steve. That's not
| his real name. We let Jared interview Steve all by himself,
| which was a thing we never did again. 30/
|
| Steve worked there for about a month, or a month and a half
| tops. A couple of vignettes I can remember about Steve: one day
| he freaked out at me and called me a pseudo-intellectual.
| Touche. Totally fair. 31/
|
| Steve had this intricate conspiracy theory he believed in
| centered around Bertrand Russell, which I never figured out.
| 33/
|
| There was one day when the site was down--the new CEO ran into
| the eng room yelling at everybody. Everyone was hair on fire
| freaking out about it. And then suddenly, we all just stopped
| as we gradually realized that Steve ... 34/
|
| ... was at his desk watching an Infowars video at maximum
| volume. He'd been cranking the volume that whole time because
| he had his headphones on, but they were not plugged in. 35/
|
| One day, I was walking back to the office after lunch and I see
| Steve coming out of the building. I hid, crouching between two
| parked cars, so he wouldn't see me. 36/
|
| When I got up to the office, the head of ops handed me Steve's
| laptop. "Here you go, you've got to figure this Flash stuff
| out. We just kicked Steve out." 37/
|
| The first thing I did was make sure there were neither physical
| nor virtual booby traps on the laptop. After establishing that
| it wasn't going to explode or send my passwords to Steve, I
| opened up Adobe tools and started fucking around 38/
|
| I quickly surmised that he'd gotten nowhere, and was just
| watching Infowars videos that entire time. But luckily I got in
| touch with Jared who delivered a tarball of the Flash source
| (it wasn't in source control anywhere) 39/
|
| Somewhere in that tarball I found a set of credentials for an
| ftp server in a comment. After connecting to it, I do an ls and
| find a giant pile of binary files, format unknown. 40/
|
| However the file timestamps are a clue: this is the schedule of
| when the treasuries turn over. It's the treasury data! 41/
|
| This happened on a Wednesday or a Thursday, and I barely slept
| through the weekend as I tried to reverse engineer and recover
| all of this data. Which remember, we all believed was going to
| be a gold mine that would change everything. 42/
|
| I never figured out what the file format was, but I opened it
| up in hexl-mode in emacs and defocused my eyes and could figure
| out the basic size of the records and overall structure. 43/
|
| By Sunday I had figured it out just enough to be able to write
| a Python script that downloaded all of the data and grepped
| through it to dump out the Etsy listing ID's that were in them
| along with comment counts and other metadata. 44/
|
| And I had reverse engineered Jared's ranking formula, so I
| could emit the most popular (and therefore best) treasuries of
| all time. I hit enter on this script and let it crank for
| hours. 45/
|
| When it was finally done, after days and days of effort I
| opened up MacOS finder and flipped through the results. It was
| almost entirely men with their shirts off, which surprised me
| at the time. 46/
|
| I went back to the office and never mentioned it. I don't think
| anyone even asked what happened with the whole treasury data
| thing, because again, the entire building was on fire. 47/
|
| "Yeah, I don't know, the treasury data thing didn't pan out."
| 48/
|
| There apparently was this entire phenomenon of sellers putting
| up sexy pictures of themselves, and then people making
| treasuries out of them. But engineers and leadership never knew
| about this because the moderators were just filtering that
| stuff out. 49/
|
| A few years later, we rebuilt the treasury and let people have
| as many treasuries as they wanted. And it turned out that what
| most of them wanted was to make treasuries full of penises and
| vote them to the top. 50/
|
| This generated an entire protracted incident where I spent two
| weeks working on "class DickFilter" - and then pretty much the
| day that I was ready to deploy this the hivemind decided it
| wasn't funny anymore and the meme just kind of dissolved. 51/
|
| I guess it's a testament to the power of compartmentalization
| that I rebuilt the entire treasury and didn't forsee this
| crisis that was 100% predictable on the basis of my own
| experience. 52/
|
| Evolution probably weeded out everyone that would have dwelled
| on the Shirtless Men Result too much and given up back on the
| Serengeti or something. 53/
|
| There are probably several morals here I guess, but the main
| one for me was never to overlook the human in the loop. The
| magic in the system was the person yanking 24 beautiful
| treasuries a day out of the sea of shirtless dudes. 54/
|
| I still think about this saga a lot, for example when someone
| suggests in a legal filing that you could find bots on Twitter
| using AI without worrying about the human labeling. 55/55
| carapace wrote:
| ( UberFly the hero we need! )
| danielovichdk wrote:
| "He lived in New Mexico and was very difficult to get ahold of.
| Once I talked to him and he told me he was working on etching
| intricate patterns into rocks with a laser, so he could drop them
| in the desert for future raccoon civilizations to wonder about."
|
| Made my day
| vxNsr wrote:
| I loved the call back:
|
| > "he was busy with the lasers and the raccoons"
| torh wrote:
| Now this was a good story. I wish more people would write about
| stuff like this... and then I realize that most people can't
| because of NDAs and such.
|
| What I like about the story is that it makes my own experiences
| seem normal. At some point in life, we all run around trying to
| fix things we don't fully understand.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| beanjuice wrote:
| It feels at least like there is a simple writing style that can
| follow writing for twitter as a thread. This is a completely
| personal comment perhaps, but I think as a weird 'medium' for
| writing i think there is value.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--things
| like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-
| button breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Jaruzel wrote:
| Understood, thanks dang.
| andai wrote:
| This one from 2019 by the same person (also about Etsy) is also
| very amusing. (Sorry can't figure out this unrolling
| technology.)
|
| https://twitter.com/mcfunley/status/1194713712516423681
| tristor wrote:
| One of the most interesting parts about this to me was what
| wasn't said among the sea of what was said, and maybe shouldn't
| be an epiphany, but kind of was. The what wasn't said part was
| that, at least in its early days, Etsy was a site heavily
| targeted towards women, and what was said about the sea of
| shirtless dudes and the dickfilter made me realize that in large
| enough groups and without any sensible moderation, both men and
| women will focus on their basest desires.
|
| Now I'm kind of curious what sort of content ends up on Pinterest
| that has to be moderated out, because for some reason I assumed
| it would be categorically different from the type of content that
| has to be moderated out on a site like Reddit, but now I'm
| thinking it's probably pretty similar.
|
| That said, I think there's something foundational about having
| moments like these in your career. Startups really are zany-land,
| or at least were, and the days of Flash and PHP were /full/ of
| weird things you'd have to deal with operationally thanks to
| completely absent conceptions of security. Some of the strangest
| things I've dealt with technically all were related to operating
| services built in PHP. I know it's not really en vogue to say,
| especially with how bad Javascript is as a language, but building
| services and sites for the web is MASSIVELY better now than it
| was in the past. The late 90s, early 2000s was fraught with
| ridiculous security issues caused nearly entirely by the entire
| ecosystem of languages, frameworks, and the people using them
| being ignorant that security is even a thing. NPM package
| security issues aside, the current situation in the web is so
| much of an improvement over the past it's hard to fathom.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Etsy was a site heavily targeted towards women, and what was
| said about the sea of shirtless dudes and the dickfilter made
| me realize that in large enough groups and without any sensible
| moderation, both men and women will focus on their basest
| desires.
|
| That's not really what happens. Most users of a website are
| trying to use it as intended. It's 1% of users who get a kick
| out of trolling a website with weird content. The difference is
| that they have a lot of free time and their content can be
| gathered randomly from Google and posted with little effort.
| Compare that to actual sellers, who have to actually make
| something and photograph it, and you can see why the low-effort
| spam content fills the site up despite being a relatively small
| number of users doing it.
| vgel wrote:
| I think there's something special about websites where everyone
| gets the same thing. Like how Wordle was so popular, or Hacker
| News -- I often mention to my wife some article from here, and
| she already read it so we have an interesting discussion. Compare
| that to TikTok "have you seen that one? no... well they're
| talking about this roman battle, but the soldiers are all
| birds..."
|
| That was a small part of the thread, but I mention it because of
| what he said about the power of human curation -- that the
| curator picked out these great treasuries from the sea of
| shirtless dudes. Because if you have the same frontpage for
| everyone, it's feasible to have an expert just pick that instead
| of needing some weird flaky NN that's expensive to develop,
| train, and run, and produces bland (or disturbing)
| recommendations anyways.
|
| (Even algorithmically-driven sites like HN benefit from that,
| like dang manually emailing people to resubmit interesting
| stories.)
| eterm wrote:
| There was a moment like this in this years' Glatsonbury
| festival where the performer (Girl in Red) made a cultural
| reference then realised that no one in the audience could
| relate, because, as she put it, "I guess your Tik Tok isn't my
| Tik Tok, huh?".
|
| There is a lot to be said about the death of the shared
| experience, I wish I had the energy and writing talent to
| actually write a book about it because I think it deserves one.
| It's shaping our world from our politics to our culture. There
| are many positives and negatives about it.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| That's why I don't like when shows release all episodes at
| once. There's something about sharing the same experience and
| talking about it for a week, year after year. I remember how
| Game of Thrones was a worldwide phenomenon. I think it's
| getting rare now. What was the last show that had a similar
| impact on popular culture?
|
| I miss that experience when reading novels. Best I can do is
| go online and find some people who read the same book 3, 8,
| 20 years ago. That's not the same.
| teki_one wrote:
| That is what I liked about good TV channels. Good curated
| content combined with shared experience.
|
| Customised feeds took this away from us, disconnecting us
| even further. I guess the Metaverse (or anything alike
| product) will try to exploit this and reconnect users in the
| virtual reality. Being connected is okay, but the context
| will be controlled by someone else.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Shared experience sure is getting smaller.
|
| And even when it is shared on a wider scale l, it is filtered
| thru your filter bubble and social bubble.
|
| And now every joke starts to be more of an inside joke.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| > Shared experience sure is getting smaller.
|
| It will be interesting to see how shared experiences
| evolve. We used to be limited by geography and subsequently
| cultures were geographic in origin. As geography becomes
| less of a limiting factor to how we share experiences,
| cultures and sub cultures will co-exist with the
| geographical cultures as well.
|
| I feel like we are in a transitional phase. Marketing works
| most efficiently when everyone has the same shared
| experiences. When marketers and widget makers have to
| increasingly create for niche sub cultures, the profits are
| less. Instead of making one ad for the super bowl, now
| marketers have to make an ad for each social platform.
| Instead of making one style iphone cover, there now has to
| be custom or curated designs for all the markets.
|
| I think eventually the profits will win out and or people
| will recognize the detrimental effects of lack of shared
| experiences, and somehow technology and society will
| coalesce around a broader shared experience environment.
|
| A hurdle to this happening is the fact that people love
| being part of sub cultures or "scenes". It may take a
| while.
|
| It is getting increasingly harder to socialize with people
| in general. There are so many references that the
| conversation has to stop, everyone has to view the
| video/tik tok/post, then the conversation can move forward
| again. Professional and educational settings I do not think
| are immune either. People are becoming so much more
| specialized in their fields that it is harder to identify
| with others. This would be less of a hinderance to
| socializing if everyone had a larger portion of shared
| experiences.
| ratww wrote:
| I don't know.
|
| I think since 2010 so many shared experiences coming from the
| internet that it actually became rare to learn new stuff from
| conversations.
|
| That's a huge pet peeve of mine. All my guitar playing
| friends watch the same fucking videos on Youtube, so they
| just repeat what the people say on the videos and there's no
| opinion anymore. Everyone watches Tom Scott videos and
| whenever I mention "Autotune" they go "They actually use
| Melodyne because someone on a Tom Scott video said Autotune
| is just an effect and every non-T-Pain vocal is Melodyne".
| Autotune can actually just auto tune, very happy for my
| Bavarian buddies for their success, but sometimes Autotune is
| just Autotune. I must have heard this about 10 times already.
|
| On Hacker News there's always those little memes... XKCD 927
| (Jesus I wish it would die), Betteridge law of headlines,
| Gell-Mann Amnesia. It's the same things over and over.
|
| Even conspiracy theories have become homogenised, and now
| there's no new crazy cuckoo theory coming out of nowhere
| anymore that you can laugh about with your friends.
|
| Before that the only shared experiences were things like the
| Friends last episode or news, or sports, or things like that,
| and that was MORE than enough.
|
| It's great that the new generations are learning that people
| can know about different things and share experiences orally
| rather than via a screen.
|
| Sorry for the rant.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| This is the first I remember seeing that XKCD. I have
| probably seen it before, but my immediate lack of context
| was comical to me given the premise of your rant :P
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Turns out there is even an xkcd for the phenomenon you
| just experienced!
| ratww wrote:
| Yep, that's the second worst XKCD! :D
| astrange wrote:
| The second worst XKCD is the one saying it's good to
| deprive someone of freedom of speech as long as you're
| not in government when you do it.
|
| Well, and the really old ones that are just him writing
| passive aggressive comics about his ex-gf.
| kibwen wrote:
| Nah, whereas 927 should die in a fire, 1053 is extremely
| insightful and empathetic. It's the only XKCD that I
| would frame on my wall.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| That is actually true. 1053 is pretty empathetic. I'd
| frame that one too.
| dwringer wrote:
| I confess to also getting bugged by the repetitive
| "speaking only in memes" phenomemon that seems to pop up
| past a critical mass of community size. Weirdly to me it
| seems like different ones go through different phases, but
| I haven't determined whether that's just an illusion
| created by my becoming attuned to one or another at various
| times.
|
| One of the last examples I remember is about 18 months ago
| I noticed everyone, everywhere, as if coordinated by some
| unseen entity, started replying "oof" to everything. Maybe
| this really is just a variant of the Bader-Meinhof
| phenomenon (another one of "those little memes" you
| mentioned, heh).
| themaninthedark wrote:
| >One of the last examples I remember is about 18 months
| ago I noticed everyone, everywhere, as if coordinated by
| some unseen entity, started replying "oof" to everything.
| Maybe this really is just a variant of the Bader-Meinhof
| phenomenon (another one of "those little memes" you
| mentioned, heh).
|
| Maybe but I think it is just more social signalling, to
| either show you are part of the opposition or to
| highlight the comment for like minded people. Similar to
| other comments : Yikes, Wrong side of history, a bad
| look, etc. Most of these comments are made on highly
| political threads, highly controversial topics such as
| system-d don't seem to evoke these kind of comments. That
| leads me to think that they are more emotional in nature
| than analytical.
| vxNsr wrote:
| No that was definitely a thing. Less so these days, but
| it was everywhere for a few months.
|
| I'm seeing lots of "r00d" these days
| gumby wrote:
| > I confess to also getting bugged by the repetitive
| "speaking only in memes" phenomemon
|
| You would have hated it, then, in the days of only one or
| two TV channels, and in towns where there weren't many
| newspapers.
|
| Which I suppose is a gloomy point: people have always
| been like this so it's unlikely to change.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The meme to speak about speaking in memes would be to
| mention: Star Trek, the Darmok episode. Temba, his arms
| wide.
| allenu wrote:
| Shaka, when the walls fell!
|
| I watched that episode in the last year and didn't make
| the meme connection until I was reading someone mention
| it somewhere. It would be interesting to have a modern
| take on that episode. The thing with memes is they don't
| necessarily convey an idea or a point that furthers a
| discussion. They're often just a way to relate something
| in the current context with a past idea (for a laugh), so
| it almost seems that a language based on memes would just
| end up stagnating culture.
| ratww wrote:
| That doesn't bother me at all, because I never heard of
| it!
|
| Maybe I should start participating in Star Trek
| discussions!
| groffee wrote:
| jrochkind1 and ratww at HN, ratww their eyes open!
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| https://twincitiesgeek.com/2018/05/how-star-trek-the-
| next-ge...
| ratww wrote:
| Thanks!
| throw10920 wrote:
| I thought I was crazy, being the only one that had this
| experience (along with a corresponding distaste for it).
|
| One of the parts of this that you didn't mention is
| politics, which irks me in particular. I can barely bring
| up _any_ political topic without incurring a strong
| emotional reaction that causes the other to close off their
| mind - and that includes with people that I mostly agree
| with!
|
| There's even this politics-like part of homogenized
| programming subculture - strong emotional reactions to
| things like webtech, Electron, C++, Rust, Windows, Apple -
| and you see the same "arguments" over and over (because I
| don't believe that there's really "critical thought with
| the intent to convince" happening - just talking points
| regurgitated over and over).
|
| In the particular case of HN, many of these memes just
| straight-up break the guidelines, and many users don't
| care, because they'll upvote or vouch low-quality content
| that fits their worldview. (I'm guilty of this myself, even
| when I'm specifically watching myself to try to avoid it)
| ratww wrote:
| Oh I completely forgot about politics.
|
| This kinda thing definitely seeped into politics.
| Especially with Facebook memes, even my parents couldn't
| escape those :(
|
| And yep, programmers in 2022 are definitely not a group
| known for originality! Even (we) the dissenters walk in
| step...
| itronitron wrote:
| I wonder if that political emotional polarization will
| burn itself out in the next five years or however long it
| takes for most people to inoculate themselves to a
| modified form of information. Back in the mid `90's when
| the internet was a new thing for most people there was
| real exhaustion from the information overload of hours
| spent 'surfing the information superhighway'. But now no
| one is really affected by that specifically. If we
| adapted to that then I am hopeful we will adapt to the
| new political ragebait making the rounds.
| doubled112 wrote:
| > All my guitar playing friends watch the same fucking
| videos on Youtube
|
| I see the echo chamber effect in a lot of these
| communities. You need one of the 5 approved amps for X
| style, or are you even a guitarist? These arguments amuse
| me more than anything.
|
| But is everybody really like that? If I'm watching YouTube
| videos on guitar gear I'm trying to get a feel for
| something, and then I try stuff. Sometimes I agree,
| sometimes I don't, but at the end of the day I choose what
| I like.
|
| I hadn't played in quite a few years and am recently back
| at it. Back then, I certainly owned things the Internet
| community collectively agreed sucked. Now that I'm back at
| it, some of this gear is now considered good to great, and
| I have to laugh about it. No regrets for having my own
| opinions.
|
| I don't have many friends who play though, so perhaps being
| all on my own shelters me from the monotony. Or perhaps you
| need to find different people?
| ratww wrote:
| Well it kinda is, in the online communities it kinda is.
| The vocal majority watches the same things, buys the same
| things, decides to sell the no-longer-new things after
| the hype cycle is over, has pedalboards organized in the
| N approved ways, has the same trendy guitar, the same
| amps.
|
| In those internet communities there's people who don't
| play this game but they barely post. In real life,
| there's also the people who don't care, but then again
| they won't really talk about it as a hobby.
|
| But the people who actually had some interesting insights
| 10 years ago are now only parroting the "mainstream"
| guitar influencers. Which themselves are often parroting
| things from 10 years ago.
|
| I'm not complaining, btw: it is what it is. It's just
| that it is homogeneous and boring!
| substation13 wrote:
| Gosh, XKCD 927 is the most low effort comment that comes
| out _every time_ sometimes tries to improve the state of
| things. I think there could be an argument for banning it
| entirely from Show HN threads.
| scrame wrote:
| "Relevant XKCD" is one of the few things that will get me
| to log into a site just to downvote.
| clukic wrote:
| We're living in a moment of great homogenization. The
| myriad of microcultures that spanned the globe, and gave
| rise to so many unique ideas and movements are evaporating,
| and the result is a type of global group think.
|
| The results of this are evident everywhere. Fashion, music,
| web design, food, academic writing. In any discipline or
| artistic endeavor, it's like the whole world decided this
| is the one best way to do things and nothing outside of
| that norm receives the nourishment (capital, time,
| attention, thought, support) that it needs to develop.
| ratww wrote:
| Exactly. This, to me, is the major downside. Anything
| outside the norm in subcultures, subgroups, hobby
| communities, is left to wither and die.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This could just be a symptom of getting old. Whatever
| subcultures you found yourself a part of are basically what
| you're stuck with at this point, unless you go out of your
| way to find different kinds of people and hang out with
| them. This is a lot different than when you're still in
| school and forced to be in the same room with people that
| are nothing like you for many hours a day, many days a
| year, years on end.
| ratww wrote:
| Well, it's not really about specific subcultures, the
| Autotune comment for example was from random people from
| different walks of life, different ages. It's just that I
| happen to work with it sometimes, and I slip some mad
| facts into conversations... you know, to be interesting.
| But then people drop the "dId YoU kNoW tHaT AuToTuNe iS
| jUsT aN eFfEcT" thing and I'm like AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
| not again.
|
| All my friends, acquaintances and groups that I see daily
| are also kinda new, seeing I moved countries and barely
| see old pals, so I doubt it's about being stuck in a
| group.
|
| And it's not really about hearing the same things as from
| N years ago. It's more about hearing the same information
| from 10 different people. Before I would hear a piece of
| information from one or two, despite having access to
| pretty much the same number of people. There is
| definitely more information online, but people are
| looking at the same things! Things weren't as homogeneous
| as they are now.
| miloignis wrote:
| That's an interesting perspective, which I've seen a bit,
| but I think I've experienced the opposite as well, and I
| wonder how common it is. If everyone has shared basis of
| reference for something, then you can move on and talk
| about other new things!
|
| For instance, most of my friend group watched CGP Grey for
| a while, and we don't debate how to choose a movie or
| restaurant anymore, we just choose one quickly via either
| approval or veto voting. Or online someone mentioned XKCD
| 927 and then we can discuss the finer points of the new
| standard instead of just how it's going to replace all the
| others (for instance, instead of saying Matrix is just the
| chat protocol to unite everything else, talk about how it's
| an eventually consistent graph replication protocol and how
| that differs from XMPP's point-to-point system).
|
| It feels like this shared culture and background can serve
| the same purpose as like shared education in math,
| literature, and history - to provide ground knowledge and
| references as a jumping off point to discuss more in depth,
| or with more nuance.
| ratww wrote:
| Oh, don't get me wrong: I really like useful information
| like the one in the CGP Grey video you mentioned, and
| also things like regional/cultural information that is
| part of "shared culture". Same for things like TV shows
| or music or old kids shows... Those really don't bother
| me. Shared culture is important!
|
| But the things I'm complaining about don't really become
| part of "shared culture". They're more like temporary
| "memes" that people use to show off they're interesting.
| Which is perfectly fine, we all do it! But the issue for
| me is that those little trivia tidbits that people are
| using are repeated so often that they start to irk and
| people look deeply uninteresting. :(
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| This just seems like you only go to places your familiar
| with yourself. Go to forums and meet new people you're not
| similar to and you'll get exposure to all kinds of new
| things. Go to /x/, heres some new ones for you
| https://boards.4channel.org/x/thread/32404158
| ratww wrote:
| Well, sorta but not really!
|
| I kinda expect old forums (and old friends!) to have the
| same old lingo from before and be set in their ways. But
| the crazy thing to me is that this happens with new
| venues and new people too.
|
| I not-so-recently moved countries, and also moved cities,
| and it's definitely crazy how even completely new people
| still talk about the samey internet things as the other
| city. I did the same 15 years ago, and it was completely
| different.
|
| I'll check your link for fun stuff later!
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah. I'd say while channels like Tom Scott and Smarter
| Every Day are good, they "encourage" a shallowness and a
| certain homogeneity
|
| It's only about the "money shot" the punch line and that's
| it.
| moomin wrote:
| You definitely could write a book about it. But inevitably,
| some people would then be intimately familiar with your ideas
| while others would have no idea who you were.
| vgel wrote:
| Yeah, there's definitely positives to the algorithmic /
| personalized approach. He mentions it in the thread, even:
| they were feeling pressure because there was only one
| homepage with ~15 slots, and getting on it was a big deal,
| but only a tiny fraction of sellers could get lucky. You
| either got super lucky and got a huge sales boost, or
| nothing, no middle ground.
|
| Compare that to, the other day I uploaded my first TikTok
| about some obscure bit of Lord of the Rings appendices
| minutiae[1] and got 1500 views. Not going to be the next John
| Green here, but it felt cool to just try something on a whim
| and have some success. The algorithm spread that viewership
| out and made things more "equal", I guess. Plus, it made the
| "niche lord of the rings content" genre possible, since it
| wouldn't merit 1/15th of all TikTok viewership in the "TikTok
| has a fixed Etsy-style FYP with 15 videos" alternate
| universe. I wonder what the most popular 15 videos on TikTok
| are right now...
|
| That's all to say, you should write that book (or essay!),
| I'd read it :-)
|
| [1] Middle-third-age Gondor looks a lot like a mirrored Tang
| dynasty China, and has other similarities
| glenngillen wrote:
| A podcast I used to listen to would throw out seemingly
| random ideas and then try and debate the moral and ethical
| angles of it. One episode started with a premise like
| "Netflix is the end of society".
|
| The person arguing the affirmative called out something I'd
| not fully appreciated: binge watching of shows has killed
| what we used to call water cooler conversations. Prime time
| TV was a great provider of shared experiences most
| weeknights. Sunday evenings would be some just-released-to-TV
| blockbuster. And we'd roll into the office the next day and
| "omg! Did you see X last night?!" Of course they did, there
| was only like 3 channels back then (I'm in Australia, don't
| laugh ;). But binge watching, catch-ups, streaming in all its
| form has sufficiently time shifted everything to the point we
| have low guarantees about having a shared experience. Or
| maybe I only managed to consume 2 episodes, and you watched
| them all. But you cant remember exactly about... "episode 2,
| is that the one... oh no that's episode 3! Never mind". We're
| not able to have the same kind of free flowing conversations
| we used to. They also pointed out that sport is one of the
| last remaining shared in thine experiences that provide that
| offer similar opportunities. But it carries with it the
| factional tribalism the can push us away from someone as much
| as it can unite us.
|
| That was used as a jumping point to suggest this lack of
| shared experience has slowly broken our sense of togetherness
| and community. That in turn has fostered the kind of
| hostility to others that seems prevalent online.
|
| I found that a bit of a bridge too far. Though at the same
| time so much of the rest of the rationale actually resonated
| with my own experience, I've just not found the destination
| we're at quite as bleak.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| The lack of shared tv is older than just Netflix. Before
| satellite tv or digital tv when there were only a few
| channels, popular tv shows would get viewing figures that
| would be totally insane by todays standards (eg 10s of
| millions of people in the U.K.) so there would in theory be
| much more of a shared culture from it.
| ghaff wrote:
| But even after cable TV, which is pretty ancient at this
| point, the networks--especially the Big 3--still mostly
| dominated viewership. There were occasional hits on
| channels like AMC, but it was mostly ABC, CBS, and NBC.
| vxNsr wrote:
| This is actually the plot of a SNL skit, a bunch of friends
| are having dinner and each time they try to bring up a
| topic someone else stops them because they haven't
| seen/experienced it yet. It starts out normal but get
| progressively more out there, I think the punchline is they
| can't talk about the weather.
| ghaff wrote:
| Binge watching and on-demand viewing aside, there's also
| just a lot more fragmentation of TV viewing. Even a hit
| streaming show like Game of Thrones has much lower
| viewership than hit network shows did at least in the US.
|
| But certainly the asynchronous watching has an effect too.
| "Everyone" watched Seinfeld etc. on Thursday night. Today,
| even for shows that drop weekly, most people are just out
| of the habit of watching shows as soon as they come out.
| afavour wrote:
| Strongly agreed. I graduated university just as Lost
| started airing. As much as people deride the show now it
| was a genuine phenomenon at the time and I maintain that
| talking about the hatch or Locke's map was a huge social
| boost to me as I tried to figure out workplace social
| dynamics in my first real job. As a sibling commenter has
| said about the only equivalent left is sports and I
| begrudge having to engage with it.
| ratww wrote:
| Oh, similar experience here. We'd often download the
| episode and watch at work too.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| It's a conversation I've had with colleagues, and I've
| heard it repeated online (red letter media) recently. I
| think it's slowly entering public consciousness and some
| streaming platforms have taken notice and are returning to
| episodic releases.
|
| Looking back from a personal standpoint, communal watching
| and discussion of those shared cultural phenomenons really
| marked my life. The most emblematic recent examples would
| be Lost and Westworld I think.
|
| But it's funny your comment about TV blockbusters, it shows
| it's been going on for much longer and we didn't realize
| it. My mother use to tell me often about her childhood in
| the 50s, how every week-end they would show the big
| blockbuster westerns with John Wayne on TV for a whole
| afternoon, and it's what everyone would watch and discuss
| afterwards. And it's just now that I make the connection
| with this phenomenon.
|
| Looking back at my childhood, I can't remember TV being
| anything but trash. (I think it varies wildly from country
| to country.) There were no blockbusters on TV, and Cinema
| played the role of providing that shared cultural
| experience.
|
| Now Cinema is dead and we're going to streaming. Who knows
| where it will end, but maybe there will be room for that
| experience to continue in another form.
| ghaff wrote:
| >I think it's slowly entering public consciousness and
| some streaming platforms have taken notice and are
| returning to episodic releases.
|
| Furthermore, as streaming options proliferate, I assume
| that more people are hopping between services. Episodic
| releases don't totally solve that problem--but it does
| add some friction. Someone can't now signup for a service
| to watch the new hotness lots of people are talking
| about, binge watch, and then cancel their subscription.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This has nothing to do with Netflix. Most television shows
| still get released on a week-by-week basis. It's more about
| the death of network television and proliferation of
| options. Everything is a paid service and people's
| subscriptions don't universally overlap. There is virtually
| nothing left that everyone watches (except the Super Bowl).
| No more Mash finales.
|
| There's _kind of_ still tentpole film releases, but Covid
| put a serious damper on that for a few years, and globally
| the market is splitting with China and India developing
| their own gigantic film industries equal to Hollywood.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Binge watching satisfies a small, but vocal, group of
| people. The super-fans with time to watch 15 hours of
| content in one sitting.
|
| The rest of us are just left out. Even if we get time to
| watch one or two episodes, we can't talk to the ones who
| binged it all, because they can't remember what happened in
| which episode. The only way to prevent spoilers is not to
| communicate at all.
|
| I like the Disney+ way of dumping 1-3 episodes straight
| away and then an episode every week, that allows the water
| cooler talk and fan theories to develop.
| andai wrote:
| What did people talk about before TV?
| glenngillen wrote:
| Society in general was just structurally much different
| back then. I'm projecting a lot from anecdotes from my
| parents and other elders, and so it's a fairly limited
| sample of life in the outer suburbs of London & Dublin.
| But...
|
| Church and community groups played a much larger role.
| Sport was still as popular. You might "go see a show" but
| it seemed like a much bigger deal than going to the
| movies is today.
|
| My earlier comment wasn't about people having something
| to talk about. It was that people were able to talk about
| an experience they both shared. Regularly. Like every
| week, if not every day (about watched they watched the
| previous night).
|
| I think maybe the other observation here is that before
| TV people were more likely to actually experience things
| together with others, and not just talk about them after
| the fact. Way out of my wheelhouse here though as I'm no
| historian.
| ghaff wrote:
| >You might "go see a show" but it seemed like a much
| bigger deal than going to the movies is today.
|
| I'm not sure that's true. The studio system in Hollywood
| churned out a huge number of movies.
|
| Today (and really for a long time) my sense has been that
| going to the movies tends to be about younger people on
| dates, getting together with friends for a fairly low
| effort, not too expensive activity. And, probably for
| this reason, from what I can tell cinema attendance has
| sprung back better than a lot of people expected.
| ssully wrote:
| This is just an anecdote, but one of my favorite parts
| about reading Devil In The White City was the social
| aspect the World's Fair had on Chicago. The people of
| Chicago were very personally invested in winning the bid
| and making it a success because it was part of their
| city's identity, which in turn was a part of their
| identity. They wanted to show other cities that Chicago
| was able to do great things just like New York or Paris.
| It became a big part of general life for people in
| Chicago during that time.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Radio
| rchaud wrote:
| Radio, and before that, newspapers, the local sports
| teams, gossip about town.
| Beldin wrote:
| Water cooler conversations weren't killed by binge
| watching, but that did remove a significant portion of
| possible conversations. Common things remaining are current
| events mostly (top of my head): gossip, politics, news,
| sports, work.
|
| Other stuff can still happen, eg. a colleague
| enthusiastically sharing something they learned or a
| discovery they made ("did you know how to properly use a
| paperclip?!").
|
| But yeah, there's significantly less "things you probably
| also saw since yesterday and have an opinion about" stuff.
| timvdalen wrote:
| I think I know, but is there anything special about how
| to properly use a paperclip I might have missed?
| cauefcr wrote:
| I am curious now, too, maybe it's about proper linkage
| for a paperclip-chain?
| adbachman wrote:
| This is why I'm getting back into watching my local sports
| teams.
|
| There's nothing more civically uniting (in my city) than
| taking about the Ravens.
|
| If you can get over the geek, middlebrow dismissal of
| "sports ball" and the whole CTE thing, live local sports on
| TV crosses racial and class boundaries more than anything
| else I've witnessed in my 18 years living here.
| ssully wrote:
| I honestly wish I gave a shit about sports, because I
| feel like it's possibly one of the most unifying things
| amongst males imo. Growing up I always felt like I was
| playing on a slightly harder difficulty when it came to
| making friends because it seemed like everyone enjoyed
| sports but me so I had to make those early connections in
| other ways.
| Li7h wrote:
| Going to a live event can be a catalyst for how you feel
| about them. I used to hate sports as well, but live games
| have a certain energy about them that does not come
| through in television. Find a friend who likes a team and
| ask to go to a game with them.
| ssully wrote:
| Oh I do. I've gone to a number of games for every major
| team in my city (Chicago). I always have a good time.
| Some of that is because of the game, but I don't think
| it's surprising to say the people and environment are
| what makes a game fun to go to.
| Li7h wrote:
| I'm curious why you want to "like sports," because it
| sounds like you might already. Maybe not at a devotional
| level, but what do you think you're missing out on? Is it
| because you think it would make it easier to bond with
| other guys and make more friends? No pressure to answer
| if you don't want to.
| ksdale wrote:
| I played some sports growing up, but I also really
| strongly disliked a lot of sports that I didn't play
| (which I now don't mind watching at all), and I think if
| you like anything competitive, it's _possible_ to at
| least get interested enough in some sports to use them as
| a conversation starter.
|
| One thing that helps me get interested in sports I don't
| otherwise care about is to think of them like a board-
| game, thinking through the math of various possibilities
| and optimal strategies.
|
| Another thing, if you live in a state that's amenable, is
| to bet small amounts on the outcomes of games. Betting
| $20 on a game makes it way more entertaining (for me
| anyway), and when I lose, it was worth the money just to
| enjoy the game more.
|
| The last thing that helps is to think of it as a purely
| physical performance. Going to watch live sports can help
| with this - but for people who haven't spent much time in
| the sporting world, it's hard to understand how _big_ ,
| how _fast_ , how _strong_ , how _coordinated_ ,
| professional athletes are, and it's possible to just
| enjoy watching people running and jumping and throwing
| the same way you'd enjoy watching people dance or play
| music or esports or whatever, just people with
| exceptional skills doing exceptional things.
|
| At this point in my life, I emphatically _do not_ enjoy
| sports for their own sake, I pay attention to them for
| the social aspect and for the reasons mentioned above,
| but I couldn 't care less about the outcomes of anything.
| It's a far cry from how I felt about them as a young
| person, but it's evidence, perhaps, that not being
| interested in them doesn't mean I can't still connect
| with people over them.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| The Ravens are the worst, but otherwise this is the
| correct take. I love how sports unifies the locals.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| s/ravens/ratbirds/
| MrPatan wrote:
| If I put my cynical hat on (who am I kidding, I'm always
| wearing it), I would ask how useful would it be to prevent
| Common Knowledge from forming for an autocratic government to
| stay in power.
|
| Think about the emperor's new clothes, but instead of the kid
| shouting his message in the town square, the kid privately sent
| the message to each of the same people. Not the same result, is
| it?
| [deleted]
| carapace wrote:
| I was #5 at Etsy back in the early days. Three co-founders (who
| actually bought the site from some other dude, they didn't create
| Etsy), Jared Tarbell, and then me. (There were some other folks,
| support staff who technically worked for the investors IIRC)
|
| It's pretty much my only "impressive" job of my career, in terms
| of name dropping at parties. But in terms of technology and
| business it was a madhouse. I remember thinking "Nothing like a
| business was happening at Esty." when they fired me. (I was going
| to quit, but my girlfriend at the time convinced me not to, and
| then they fired me a week or two later anyway. Long story.)
|
| I always figured someone would eventually show up and want to
| interview me about it, but that's never happened so far.
|
| I've forgotten most of the wild stuff.
|
| All the business logic was in stored procedures in the DB so as
| you can imagine it was always on fire. Upgrading didn't help
| because our growth rate was ridiculous.
|
| The frontend PHP guy was a newbie to programming. He barely knew
| what he was doing but he could nail those beautiful UX designs
| pixel-perfect. The guy's probably a millionaire now.
|
| The backend sysadmin, DBA dude was a total Master-Blaster. If he
| didn't like it he would literally throw a fit and scream at the
| CEO and shut things down until he got his way. He used to lie to
| the CEO all the time if he didn't want to implement something
| he'd just say "it's impossible".
|
| They built a skateboard half-pipe in the office even though none
| of us skated.
|
| It was pretty nuts.
|
| I found out later on that they hired me because my resume was the
| first one on craigslist that had Python on it. Then during the
| interview they found out I used Devorak layout on my laptop and
| that's why they hired me.
|
| The "middle layer" they had me write was pretty much useless. It
| basically passed requests from the webservers to the DB. Over 80%
| of the API was empty methods, literally just a docstring, with
| all the processing happening in a decorator.
|
| I implemented a cache in there (early use of Memcache. Glyph
| hisself wrote a Twisted interface to it in front of mine eyes!
| They were like "We want to hire a networking consultant. What
| about this guy?" Me: "You want to hire Glyph and I get to hang
| out with him and learn from him!? Yes. Yes, please." So that was
| nice.)
|
| The thing is they didn't turn on the cache. It just sat there.
| The investors pushed this Sid person onto us to try to get some
| semblance of adult supervision. ... I've told this story before,
| Sid wanted some information on long-running requests, and I had
| to switch it (the cache) on in prod myself to show them that the
| required logging was already there.
|
| There there was the other Sid who wanted to rewrite everything in
| Java. (First Sid wanted to rewrite in C++.) "Project Phoenix" he
| called it, that didn't go over well.
|
| (Recall that the problem wasn't the implementation language of
| the server code, it was that _all of the business logic was in
| stored procedures in the DB_ so rewriting the server code was
| never going to help.)
|
| That's all I got this morning.
| ratww wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the story.
|
| The original poster also made a thread about the middleware
| [1], and there's a video about it too [2]
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/mcfunley/status/1194713712516423681
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eenrfm50mXw
| carapace wrote:
| Hmm.
|
| I've never met Dan McKinley
|
| > ... adding a Python middle layer.
|
| Yup, that POS was my baby. "Emid" the Etsy MIDdle layer.
|
| > They had asked a Twisted consultant what to do, and the
| Twisted consultant said they needed a Twisted middle layer
| (go figure).
|
| That's inaccurate.
|
| Glyph was the Twisted "consultant" (for those who don't know,
| he's one of the main authors of Twisted.)
|
| But he was called in later, the middle layer was not his
| idea, I had already written most of it by the time we hired
| him. I do not know why they wanted to hire him. Pretty much
| the only thing he did was write the Twisted Memcache
| interface, and that took him about 20 minutes? He live-coded
| it in front of me, less than 100 LoC.
|
| The thing was, Haim (the sysadmin & DBA) blamed all problems
| on the middle layer as a scapegoat. It wasn't actually the
| problem (how could it be? It did almost nothing!) but since
| no one else knew that it was easy to blame it. People talked
| about "the Emid Problem" but it was really the DB on fire all
| day every day because Haim wouldn't let any business logic
| escape his control (as stored procs in the DB.)
|
| > The initial release of this resulted in two full weeks of
| downtime, and an infamous incident where one of the investors
| had to drive to Secaucus to physically remove the other
| engineering founder from the cage.
|
| I don't remember that particular incident but then they
| wouldn't have told me. Haim's meltdowns in the data center
| were legendary though.
|
| All that stuff about teams must have been after I got fired.
| I was the whole Emid team when I was there.
|
| > people were understandably really mad at this middle layer,
| but nobody agreed on the reason to be mad
|
| Right, because it wasn't actually the middle layer that was
| causing the problems. It wasn't helping, but it wasn't
| hurting either. (For one thing, it wasn't like it was spewing
| tracebacks or anything like that. It worked fine, it was just
| pointless.)
|
| It was very frustrating having my work blamed for problem it
| wasn't causing, and then being unable to get anybody to
| listen. (Rob didn't have the knowledge to evaluate the
| technical details, Haim was lying to him, and Chris was
| sitting next to Haim playing along with it.)
|
| Anyway...
|
| > The theory of the drop-in team was that the existing middle
| layer was bad because although it used Twisted, it still used
| a threadpool. (Twisted is a reactor loop like nodejs, but in
| Python.) For Twisted acolytes, this situation was heretical.
|
| Again, this didn't matter because the middle layer wasn't the
| bottleneck.
|
| > The middle layer didn't really do anything. It was
| consultant-provided speed holes which (it was believed) would
| make things faster by (counterintuitively) adding network
| hops.
|
| Yep. I told them this at the time. (Again, it wasn't
| "consultant-provided", the three founders hired me to make
| this thing. Glyph came later and was only there for a week or
| so IIRC.)
|
| > The middle layer just received RPC and invoked postgres
| stored procedures. Which, if you have a superficial
| understanding of things, seems like the kind of boilerplate
| you can replace with an abstraction.
|
| Yep. Like I did: a single decorator handled 85% of all the
| API methods, the method bodies were just single docstrings to
| satisfy syntax. Not even a "pass" statement!
|
| > Then they proceeded to discover that here in reality every
| single existing endpoint did things differently.
|
| That would be the other 15% of the API, yes.
|
| The rest of that thread is beyond my time, but it sounds
| horrible. Godspeed.
|
| > So over the course of a few weeks we frantically rewrote
| the drop-in replacement to use a threadpool instead, exactly
| like the original heretical one.
|
| > Leaving us with literally the same code as the thing it was
| dropped in to replace, plus a ridiculous declarative
| framework, plus some tests. It was around this time that
| everyone got fired (but not me).
|
| Okay, that is fucking funny.
|
| I regret the waste, but this makes me feel a little bit
| better about the whole mess.
| mcfunley wrote:
| > Right, because it wasn't actually the middle layer that
| was causing the problems
|
| That's generally true about the overall stability, the DB
| popped constantly.
|
| One reason Emid got grief was because it started barfing
| every time sprocs, table schemas, views, etc were changed
| and nobody ever really managed to resolve this. The DBA's
| would update the text of a sproc without telling anyone and
| Emid would start throwing exceptions. Certainly a set of
| fixable problems, but nobody ever really got a good mental
| model of when it needed to be HUP'd.
|
| "Emid uses psycopg, ergo we have to rewrite the whole
| thing" was one of the insane justifications tossed around
| for the rewrite project. Never made any sense.
|
| The business issue motivating removing the middle layer
| altogether was just that to do anything you needed to
| change three things in three different programming
| languages (maybe four if it involved JS or Flash), and this
| was foolish.
| mcfunley wrote:
| Sid #1 was someone that worked with Rob's dad, IIRC. Not from
| the investors. He continued to come around for a long while. It
| was amusing to me watching Chad (CTO hired after the eng
| founders left) take meetings with the guy.
|
| During the period between Rob's CEO tenures he and Sid #1 built
| a Google Analytics alternative together, which was in fact
| written in C. We very narrowly avoided acquiring this company.
| jvidalv wrote:
| I honestly think that these kind of situations are the best
| ones of our careers.
|
| I barely can't rembeber the perfectly written API, but I still
| laugh over some of the wild shit I saw over the years on
| companies that started with a single php file and a mysql db,
| and when you go to have beers with your teammates its a 100%
| safe topic to just have laughs all the way long.
| carapace wrote:
| I'm sorry but I cannot agree.
|
| While there was excitement and fun, we objectively were doing
| a terrible job, and that felt terrible.
|
| Rob and Chris were simply incompetent, and succeeded only
| despite themselves. Haim at least knew his stuff, he was just
| unprofessional (screaming at Rob, etc.) (Edit to add: Rob was
| a great UX designer, all those beautiful layouts and pages
| were his work. He was incompetent as a CEO.)
|
| Working there became so frustrating I was going to quit.
| (It's the only time I didn't quit a job that was obviously
| bullshit. I don't blame my girlfriend for convincing me to
| stay on, it was my choice, but i recognize that it was the
| wrong choice.)
|
| We wasted so much investor money.
|
| The thing that bothered me the most was that we used our
| users as the QA dept. Chris would push to prod, things would
| break, and he would scramble to fix them. The users thought
| he was their hero fixing problems and didn't realize he was
| the one causing the problems in the first place!
|
| And then, in the end, the whole thing was gobbled up by (I
| think) the Waltons? And now it's a caricature of what it
| aspired to be.
|
| Despite the "success" of the company I see it as a cautionary
| tale.
| ratww wrote:
| I agree that these things suck.
|
| I had a very similar experience in a few startups/scaleups.
|
| They were incredibly successful despite the horrible tech
| and horrible environment for development.
|
| IME the reasons for that are often due a culture problem
| stemming from the top, so there's no way to really fix the
| problems as an employee.
|
| One of those companies still has one of the founders in a
| "tech director" or something like that. Really great guy,
| great person, but he must be writing his 3th or 4th ORM
| now, and I'm not even joking. The first few iterations were
| in PHP but the new one was going to be in Java. Each time
| the backend needed a new feature that was difficult to
| implement on top of the previous ORM, he would retreat to
| design a new version of the backend (including a homegrown
| ORM) and gets green light from the CTO. He and the team are
| clearly not really good at producing a good design, and
| also not good at finishing, considering the messes left
| behind on every rewrite-everything implementation. When I
| worked there there were three "official" ways of talking to
| the DB.
|
| The frontend framework was replaced a couple times (jQuery,
| Vue, another one which I won't mention since nobody uses
| it), even though the home page didn't really change for a
| few years. It was an e-commerce-like site but not even the
| items in the homepage would change (it started changing
| while I was there, though!).
|
| The dev headcount was >400 IIRC, so it's not surprising
| that they had so many rewrites.
|
| I got burnout pretty fast from all that. Adding a single
| button to a page was a two-to-four-weeks ordeal. My manager
| was a bit of an asshole, who said the problem was me and I
| should go back doing therapy and taking antidepressants
| (like I disclosed I had done a few years ago) instead of
| looking for a less stressful job.
|
| Kinda saddens me because it's a company I liked, although I
| couldn't stand the tech culture.
| [deleted]
| macNchz wrote:
| In reading more about early Etsy and Treasuries I found this blog
| post from 2006 praising the interactivity and community driven
| nature of the Etsy browsing experience at the time, interesting
| to read alongside the twitter thread:
| http://christenbouffard.com/interest/just-what-is-iospace-do...
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