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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

This just sounds like poor law enforcement to me. Stopping your car on the side of the road is typically legal. Photographing something from public property is legal in the US. What isn't legal is littering, trespassing, and theft. If you were there to damage the lavender because you thought that would be a fun thing to do, that to me is the same as being there because you want to take a selfie. You should be arrested and charged with trespassing. The fact that this isn't happening is a failure of law enforcement, not a failure of social media. (Though my own photographic philosophy is that a picture with people in it is ruined, I realize that not everyone agrees.)

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This is true of the first anecdote about the private property, but the other issues are still issues. We have a few “hot” locations in Colorado, most notably Maroon Bells in leaf season, and the level of general disrespect is shocking: ladders, fights, overcrowded parking, and so on. Sadly I have no idea what a solution is - the land is public and limiting access numbers is exclusionary and easy for the privileged to “hack.” It’s really a challenging cultural and philosophical question: how does one define and perpetuate common decency in an increasingly crowded world? And, going back to the distaste for people “in the shot” and the DIY attempts to make locations less appealing, is anyone entitled to an “unspoiled” view by their own definition? To some extent Christo and Jeanne-Claude explored this concept from an artistic perspective decades ago, but cultural shift doesn’t have a finite end in the way an installation does.

I was in the area the week that the road opened up and went for a sunrise. I was the second person there at 4am, but by 5-6am there were around 30 people there!

I can't even imagine what Maroon Bells is like during high season.

In addition to this, I wonder if the farmers could set up props to discourage photography and sabotage the shots. Ugly banners, balloons, drones with ribbons, blaring offensive music, signs with semi-offensive verbiage. Or boxes of rotten fish to stink up the side of the road.

Content aware fill is great for everything listed except for the stink!

Thats the equivalent of asking girls to dress unsexily to prevent harrassment/rape. Those farmers have a right to maintain their beautiful and appealing environments without having them messed with by tourists and other idiots.

They make money from selling lavender. Not from having pretty fields. If the police won't do their jobs, you can take matters into your own hands.

Why buy lavender if you can just be a photographer/instagrammer and steal them? Pretty fields are what brings potential buyers to their farm in the first place, no?

Have you ever travelled to a farm because its pretty to buy their lavender? If I buy lavender, its because I want lavender, not because the farm is pretty (and Ill probably buy it from a shop and not the farm directly)

The weird thing for me is the people are literally taking a picture of themselves committing a crime. It seems like it would be easy to bring a case against someone doing this?

Sounds like one officer each evening issuing citations might do the trick.

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