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Comment by kbos87 | Hacker News Reader

It’s easy to hate on people for wanting to go to a place they’ve seen in a photo and to focus on the fact that they want the same photo there... I think that’s a casual knee-jerk reaction. The impulse to have a destination while traveling isn’t a new one, and people have been taking photos for decades upon decades. The problem is that we now have a platform that concentrates attention so efficiently on the 20% of attractions anywhere someone might go. I don’t know the solution, but shaking our heads at people for wanting to experience the world they live in (even if they aren’t doing it to our creative standards) isn’t going to help, and seems to be how a lot of articles about this topic bait peoples’ attention and ire.

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There's nothing wrong with wanting to go to these places and even taking photos of them, there is something greatly wrong with going to places and not respecting them: leaving rubbish, trespassing, damaging properties. This is very much made worse in the modern day of vain instagrammers because instead of taking photos of things, taking selfies is such a trend more than it ever was, which is causing people to climb into/onto things, tresspass and damage. That is not ok.

I don't think trashing of beautiful places is any worse now than previous generations.

I've seen tons of old broken glass and aging trash in the desert. A good amount of southern California has been paved over. Most of the northeast US is private land and the spaces in between given over to vehicles.

Yeah this new wave of disrespect isn't great, but it is nothing new and I don't think the focus should be shaming the instagram selfie crowd. General respect and teaching is still the way to go.

I don't think its new, but, as with everything nowadays, the scale is a lot larger and the desire for vanity pics has increased due to social media.

I have no issue with people taking photos, of themselves or otherwise.

What I find irritating are situations where lovely places become semi-professional photo shoots en-masse, where each group are spending hours trying to get the perfect shot, over and over, with lots of time reviewing the footage before deciding again it’s not quite right.

I think that’s fair and there’s definitely something to be said for having some courtesy and decency, especially in a crowded place.

Social media companies love to tell us about how they're bringing the world together or how they let us share our moments and memories with loved ones, etc. But there is something to be said about the comparison between how the generation before us shared these moments vs how we do.

'Back in the day', you would go on holiday, take a camera and a few rolls of film, snap some photos, and then return home. Perhaps a few days later you might find some time to go and get the film developed. You'd return and get your photos, ready to be shared with friends and family. You'd then set a date, you'd call your loved ones and invite them over for dinner or drinks so you could share your experiences and discuss your photos together. It was a face-to-face, real, personal experience.

Contrast that with the rapid-fire creation and consumption of photos on social media today and you can see how these 'moments' have become more trivial and feel less valuable.

I'm not saying one is inherently better than the other. There are pros and cons to both, but something tells me that if we're talking about "connection" between people, about authentic sharing between friends/family, the older way was better.

More often than not, 'liking' photos on social media ends up being a 'quid pro quo' so that you can get a 'like' in return down the line. There have been studies that show us that social media consumption has a negative effect (especially on younger audiences) on the mental wellbeing of users. Friend counts, likes and shares end up becoming a form of gamification where people chase numbers rather than real meaningful connections.

That is how we ended up in this scenario, where users flock to destinations to simply grab a photo, without ever really taking in their surroundings, just so they can keep up with the Joneses online.

Don't get me wrong, I don't completely blame the tech, the biggest part of the problem is the human condition and the ways we behave - and that aspect hasn't really changed much since we used cameras with rolls of film in them to today - we're still the same, attention-seeking people we were before, but the tech today just amplifies these traits.

Right, the problem is the “likes” or “views” and comments, whatever metric.

Anonymize (hide) the metrics and watch this attention seeking plunge.

No, that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

Do you think anyone is out there "seeking likes" for the sake of likes? If we hide likes and views, who would we be hiding them from? Third parties, or the person making the content? If the former, then the person making the content is still getting a dopamine rush. If the latter, then the audience will have a button that they're not sure if it does anything when they click it. If both, then someone will still find a way to track these things due to the outcome of the algorithm used to sort content to trending or not.

Oh, wait wait wait, no, let me guess, you want the idea of popular content to be thrown away completely and have the pseudo-communist overlords of silicon valley to select what is or is not trending manually?

Like, what possible solution do you think there is to this other than just leaving the system be as it is and being content with the fact that humans are humans?

I’m not sure what you’re on about. What I’m saying is that people seek approval and or attaboys and attagirls. They want the likes and they want the comments, the recognition. This leads to this behavior.

If they were posting things to a virtual void the great majority would quickly decelerate the rate of this behavior.

The same with Twitter. The amount of garbage that platforms spews daily would go down tremendously if likes and retweets weren't a thing. I can't spend more than a few minutes reading the most cringeworthy crap without questioning why I'm even looking at it.

True, but I think Twitter is a bit different in some aspect. It’s still about recognition, but it’s more akin to oneupmanship with yo momma jokes (and similar things) where people attempt to impress via quips and such and getting the attagirls and attaboys vis this idea signaling.

It isn’t so bad when it’s a group of five or ten being smart or crass and obnoxious within that limited group. The amplification via Twitter makes that unbearable. I agree the metrics do ultimately drive this behavior too.

Instagram is currently hiding likes in Ireland as part of a test, only the person who uploads the photo sees how many people like it. It will be interesting to see if they roll it out everywhere or decide against it.

That’s interesting and thanks for pointing that out.

Personally I think the converse would be more effective hide the score from the uploader. People upload to gauge their popularity (via image proxy).

Basically I don’t think the issue is, hmmm, what pic got the most likes, do I can get likes too. It’s let me see how many likes I can get on my pic. Obviously people will copycat to go for reproducibility of likes, but are mostly interested in the likes.

So just kill all the social networks? I love your enthusiasm but I don't think it works that way?

I mean if you kill the comments (ignoring "likes and views"), nobody would post anything on Hackernews. Engagement and community building are how message boards and social networks function...

Sorry, with regard to comments it was more geared to the comment count (metric) as well as the aspect (anodyne one-two word fawning comments that don’t engage beyond that).

IDK that killing comment count, likes, upvotes, or your engagement "metrics" really do anything. If I can post a picture and get 100 people saying "Damn, you look so sexy!" imma post that shit even if I'm unable to know exactly how many people just told me how sexy I am!

If you can create a feedback loop, people will use that loop to use that loop to get positive feedback. Unless you eliminate comments entirely, people will keep doing this. And if you remove the counts from your platform, you're just opening yourself up to have a secondary service provider create those metrics and sell them to influencers instead of being able to monetize them yourself.

Again, there's no advantage for a social network to kill its ability to create a community and content on its own. It goes against the model. You want to make this a bigger discussion about corporate responsibility and whatnot, that's a worthwhile conversation. But saying "keep the social platforms, but kill the social part unmeasurable" is a weird place to take it to.

The urge to take photos is weird. I'm travelling at the moment, and it seems everyone's first reaction of seeing something magnificent is... "I've got to take a picture of this!". I'm no exception.

I started asking myself, are we experiencing, or Instagramming?

Pictures are weird.

I've always hated being in pictures, but I wish there were more of my everyday life growing up (including my 20's) to show my son. Digging through my grandparents house and seeing 1000's of photos of fireworks, parades, etc I know what you mean, just enjoy it. But slice of life photos of my grandpa being a young father to my mom and aunts/uncles gives an interesting perspective I'm very glad was captured.

I spent a few weeks in Japan years ago and my favorite photos are the ones with me and other people just bullshitting around. There are probably 1000 photos of mountains, temples,paths, and animals that are essentially meaningless now. I've tasked myself on my last few vacations to ask for more photos, and to try and get as many candid ones as possible, while refraining from taking a bunch of "desktop background" photos I'll never use.

A concern I have now is many of those slice of life photos are being lost to cloud services that shut down (is flicker a thing? did it ever have an e?) or deliberately destroyed as part of snapchat's principle design. I'll get off my soapbox and let be, and just get some hardcopy photos so when my son is digging through my house, maybe he sees something equally interesting.

I'll always remember this really sad story I read somewhere. An old couple had rented early video-recording equipment for a trip to the grand canyon. They took videos of the canyon, and some of the videos included brief accidental glimpses of their young kids in the periphery. Decades later, those glimpses are priceless and precious to the old couple, whereas the videos of the canyon are worthless. "Why did we aim the camera at those stupid cliffs?! Our kids were right there! If only this shot was one more inch to the left..."

For this reason, I almost always ask my wife or kids, if they are with me, to get into the frame if I am photographing nature or a building or something. Maybe not every time, but most of the time. I figure that some day I will enjoy looking at them more than whatever other thing it was that I was taking a picture of at the time.

Snap a photo and then continue experiencing it in the moment. Not sure why it has to be one or the other.

A web service that analyzes ig-unpopular locations and then I go there. most people are oblivious to the fact that beauty can be found almost anywhere. many people don't even seem to have a personal concept of aesthetics which goes beyond popularity.

I agree, people have always been taking photos while traveling or visiting a specific location. Passing blame or shamming individuals for taking selfies does not seem like the proper route to take if there is a problem (which i am not saying there is or isn't). When I was younger I enjoyed taking selfies at spots but as I have aged and studied media in University my perception of the selfie has changed and I think that may be a solution to this - not shamming through articles.

i don't agree with your lion's share blaming (whatever "the problem" translates to - 80%? >50%?) Insta; the person being interviewed also doesn't think Insta is mostly to blame for this

i generally agree with person being interviewed and opine that travel is cheap as hell and the externalities aren't really captured at all - environmental ruin, local destinations ruined for those who actually live there, none of this is accounted for.

one example are bachelor parties in cheapish locales - you're not gonna see most of this on the 'gram, but you can bet the jokers renting the airbnb against local laws are going to be annoying as hell for the people living in the building

i think more and more locales are either going to ban or are going to tax the hell out of this and all it entails (Airbnb, lodging for non-residents, ....). and yeah, sure there are millions of other places in the world, have at it, as long as it's not here - or you're paying out the nose for it, and that $$ is being used to improve local stuff/offset environmental impact

All of my ire is focused on social media, especially instagram. I don't know if it's possible for me to care less about someone I don't know, or barely know, having been somewhere. Finding out what they ate there is even less interesting.

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