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Comment by lesss365 | Hacker News Reader

Lifelong skater here. Learn to actually skate. Electric board riders look like dufuses. Seen quite a few in NYC. Their stances are always way off and unbalanced, seen many who couldn't stop manually, and it goes against/disallows for most of the reasons for having a skateboard. You can't get true ground/board feel while carving, its weight and form prevents execution of flip tricks, it takes away trial and error learning when it comes to learning how to skate because you're not actually skating, etc etc etc.

Tired of writing, the main things I wanted to point out are that electric board drivers look like assholes and eletric skateboards are retarded. It's as simple as that. Stop using these things and learn to skate

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I used to ride a longboard through the city all the time, not for tricks, but for transportation, is that wrong too?

Also, electric skateboards look hella fun to me.

Edit: This post reminds me of people laughing at me and telling me I hold my board wrong, because I 'mall grab'. Why can't you just be happy that people want to ride a board, there's no need to be a snob about it.

Haha, I thought of "mall grabbing" too when I read his post. Electric Longboards are a totally different application. It's like comparing apples to oranges. FYI I come from a background with experience in Snowboarding and Wakeboarding and that's what an eboard feels like except we're not restricted to water/snow anymore. This is great for people like me who have office jobs/family and just want to shred for a few hours after work to chill out. I also had a traditional trick Skateboard when I was younger, but was never very good and was always afraid of hurting myself. When I go to my local park where everyone goes for downhill skating I always laugh at the guys on trick skateboards and penny boards who look like they're going to eat shit at any moment. I often see some nasty bails and think to myself "well that's going to eventually turn into arthritis down the road". Hell, even traditional longboards look scary in comparison to my eboard (which has regenerative breaks). :) I can bomb step hills (and also climb them ;p) without worrying about getting pancaked by a car at the bottom. I can literally go anywhere a bike can go with my eboard. :D I like it better then my bike because I can instantly switch from "bike mode" to "pedestrian mode" and can drag it into a store/restaurant with me as opposed to worrying about locking it up and getting it stolen. I also build/fly drones too, so eboards are a great transportation method to enable that hobby.

Your "bike mode" point is one I hadn't thought of, and I find interesting.

For the record, I don't hate on longboards in any way. My point was that it seems that eboards take away from the actual skating experience. It's not a matter of doing tricks and such, but more about the act of skating. The balance of body with the board against the force your body exerts, the feeling of the momentum gained by said force, the ground feel between you and the board in combination with the pushing foot with ground, and the control and freedom that comes with it. My feeling is that electric skateboards take away from the feeling that comes with skating, which is what makes the experience for most who do. But from observation it also seems to handicap some (not all), seeing that many appear to be off balance and unable to really control their electric boards when needing to come to full/immediate stops.

But again I do like your counter point of it being a mode of transportation that's like a bike in terms of speed and energy costs, but allows for the rider the convenience of picking up and moving along

Your story sounds incredibly familiar. I'm a snowboarder too and I just like the feeling. I also think this is why I tend to mall grab, since that's how I tend to carry my snowboard.

People use electric skateboards for transportation, not to do tricks.

This sort of teenage gatekeeping is why nobody will take your advice seriously.

Same arguments skiers made about snowboarders when they came out.

It’s just a different thing, get over it!

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