The rise and fall of Latitude, an exclusive underground society (2016)

> People I knew made vague threats that I would regret leaving or talking about it. A roommate of mine stopped telling me where he was going when he left the house. Friends whom I trusted contacted me and played stupid about their own involvement in order to suss out what I knew. I can't say with confidence that Nonchalance encouraged this behavior, but they should have been able to predict it.

What kind of person regularly interacts with so many people that several of them – "people", "a roommate", and "friends" – are part of some secret society and feel the need to start bothering her about no longer partaking?

Hell, I'm lucky if I can find one person I know to play Words With Friends. And none of them would notice or care if I stopped playing, they'd just assume I got busy or something, like every other middle-class 30-something with a job.

I guess this is a wealthy socialite thing? Reading this feels so foreign to me.

The mystery and social connections from something like this are great, the number of people obviously using it to play out some power fantasy are not. Do you want cults? Because that's how you get cults.

Kat Meler's quote "I'm more for 'surprises' now, I think. A surprise is a secret that everyone agrees will only last for a finite time, and will ultimately be gifted and shared." is a great lesson to learn from this.

Also my original post with no discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11240405

I didn't get to participate in this game, but I played in a elaborate plot-based scavenger hunt that some friends of mine in San Luis Obispo spent months (and thousands of dollars) planning. It was incredible, and I feel very special and honored to be one of the relatively few people invited to participate. Many months later some of the semi-permanent fixtures left behind caused some controversy and confusion in the papers: http://www.sanluisobispo.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/artic...

I had the kind of fun that you only get when someone burns a huge chunk of their life and treasure to make something for you. It's pretty clear from reading the vice article that the Latitude Society was a similar project. I live in SF and somehow completely missed the opportunity to participate, but I'm pretty sure I would have loved it.

Years ago EA tried to create a game called Majestic. It was an interactive fiction that interrupted you in the middle of your day, kinda like this. They screwed it up by doing things like playing "This is a a game." at the beginning of phone calls you would receive (thanks, legal), but it would be pretty lame to be reading headlines on HN bashing "EA's for-profit alternate reality game".

This is the heart of the matter, I think. While it's speculation, it appears what went wrong is that Hull failed to delineate the 'business' from the rest of it.

The way he feels would strike me as odd (at best) if I hadn't experienced something similar myself. More than once.

On at least two occasions (the rest are vaguer) I started some business venture where the impetus was largely philanthropic/idealistic. Both times the end result was messy for everyone involved and largely unproductive. While the specifics were different, I think the main reason why things went South was that I mixed business with pleasure. I shat where I ate.

I'm not saying it's impossible or inadvisable to turn your dream into a business, or do business that you enjoy too, or start a business with your romantic partner for that matter. Rather, I think it's crucial to clearly delineate, and write down on paper, and discuss with everyone involved, which parts of the endeavor are business and which are not. And perhaps more importantly to discuss whether it's possible to separate these things in the first place.

I found the comparisons between then the social networks of Latitude and digital social networks the most interesting. The failure of Latitude seems to be in (of course, perfect) hindsight due to the differences in cost between digital and "human" social networks. To support Latitude, the costs had to be raised far higher than it's user could support. Facebook of course just makes you pay with your eyeballs and your privacy. Both of which are evidently less dear to us than the cash in our wallets.

I can't help but take the human social network as an organization idea farther. I mean it in the best possible way when I point out that every time I go to church there is a point in time in which everyone is asked to give what nominally should be a significant amount of their income to the church to keep it operating. ( Not to mention the sermons we sometimes get could put NPR to shame...) All these networks also need funding to survive, this is not a problem that was unique to Latitude, but an organizational restraint that all social networks that rely on the "sneakernet" primarily instead of the internet face. And, it's one that they've solved.

The issue is trying to incorporate normal startup methods of monetization, or attempting to gather users in a typical software startup way before you even try to monetize. Facebook could do this because the cheapness and "distance" of online behavior makes it simple, but as illustrated in the article, physical space is expensive and people are messy creatures who just soak up time being dealt with (I wonder how much damage or wasted time "jukebox-incidents" caused on a regular basis). Human social network startups -- if such a class exists, would be better served in my mind by copying how other well established networks such as churches spread, giving up control of that spread and monetizing that growth instead.

For instance, Latitude could of taken their most dedicated participants, such as the author of this piece, and given them (perhaps a minimum amount of) training in creating their own network and allowed the to go out as "seeds" into other neighborhood and cities where they would create their own "secret societies". Then, sell digital services, supplies and consulting to these new operators. I would characterize it as catalyzing an organically spreading human experience and profiting off the demand created by that spread instead of centralizing an experience, homogenizing it and profiting off how easily accessible the information from that experience is.

the sad thing is of late this business model has become widespread - the party with capital to seed the enterprise wants to retain ownership and control, but they depend for a large fraction of their labour into selling volunteers the fantasy that they are part of "building something together". you often end up with a beautiful, vibrant structure emerging from the volunteers, which is then coopted (and all too frequently destroyed) when the owners try to assert their ownership by way of more explicitly capturing the created value.

heck, the person behind little free library has trademarked and is monetising the name https://littlefreelibrary.myshopify.com/collections/charter-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11243631

344 points dcschelt a year ago 120 comments

The current incarnation of that concept is Snctm, in LA.[1] More sex, though.

[1] https://www.snctm.com/