[HN Gopher] The Offline Club
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The Offline Club
Author : esher
Score : 50 points
Date : 2025-06-25 19:42 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theoffline-club.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theoffline-club.com)
| _rpxpx wrote:
| https://www.theludditeclub.org/
| larrymyers wrote:
| These places already exist, they're your local game stores! Show
| up, play games with other people. If you like competition most
| host official tournaments for various TCG's and table top war-
| games. These tournaments usually forbid devices while playing,
| since they can be used to gain unfair advantage, so you are
| forced to be offline by default. (Plus it's considered rude to be
| on your phone during a match.)
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not post snarky comments here? This is in the
| site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| edent wrote:
| Looks fun. But PS12.50 to read in silence? Am I missing
| something?
| LtWorf wrote:
| There's one in copenhagen where you have to pay to have a
| picnic in a public park :D
| heyheyhey wrote:
| Well, if it's at a venue, they have to rent it out.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| So, Meetup without the baggage (i.e. WeWork)? I'll take it. I
| made quite a few friends on Meetup back in the day attending and
| running group events in NYC.
| yesfitz wrote:
| I think there is a target market for this, and it might seem
| silly to anyone outside of that market, but it shouldn't.
|
| If you're a screen addict living in these cities, paying an entry
| fee could be reassuring because you _know_ that you 're supposed
| to be there. The same goes for having a non-skills based
| activity, because you can't screw it up.
|
| Compare that to a free and/or skills-based gathering[1], where
| you end up paying with social capital (which you don't currently
| have), and staying home with the screen becomes all that more
| enticing.
|
| 1: I help run a monthly pinball tournament locally, and we've
| taken deliberate steps to favor socialization over competition,
| which has been wildly successful, but there are still those for
| whom the skills-based activity is too much. I feel the same about
| dancing.
| tonymet wrote:
| There was a dream that was having a social life. You could only
| whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it
| was so fragile. -- Marcus Aurelius
|
| Relationships and things that matter are spontaneous. When you
| try to optimize them into calendars, checklists & databases --
| they become lame and fall apart.
|
| It's half the reason people aren't social. They try so hard to
| "schedule a meetup" and the meetup becomes work so people stop
| hanging out.
|
| You're just supposed to show up at someone's house and do shit.
|
| You don't make friends by agenda. You have cool experiences ,
| build trust and develop a bond.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Where I grew up, just showing up at someone's house unannounced
| was a faux pas. Scheduling in advance was the only way to do
| shit.
| tonymet wrote:
| Was it booked or was it "hey you home" and you head over?
| 9283409232 wrote:
| A mixture of the two. "Cool if I come by later" or "wanna
| go to PLACE Friday".
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| You're thinking about the wrong stage of friendmaking.
|
| The pitch here is for getting people over the first hurdle,
| which is being at the same place at the same time as other
| people, and to some extent, the second hurdle, which is
| striking up a conversation (as anyone who would attend
| something like this is, by their presence, signalling an
| interest in at least casual interaction with the other
| participants). This adds people to your "acquaintances" list.
|
| The next step is forming setting specific friendships. Your gym
| buddies, your work friends, etc. Then you need to actually
| invite some of those friends to other settings, until your
| friendship isn't entirely predicated on the particular setting.
| Then you need to spend enough time with that person to maintain
| the friendship.
|
| For most people, the big hurdles are the "being present",
| "striking up a conversation", and "converting setting specific
| friendships into general friendships" steps. Everything else is
| pretty straightforward.
|
| Casually dropping by someone's place unscheduled is typically
| reserved for pretty close friends. That's not what this service
| is targeting.
| tonymet wrote:
| bro i was hoping "the offline club" was a bunch of apps that just
| worked without logins radios rest APIs and all the other stuff
| that broke software
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(page generated 2025-06-25 23:00 UTC)