Hacker News Reader

Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

Some years ago I went to see the ball drop at NYC. It was a terrible experience. Every single person I saw had their phone out, the only thing I could see was flashes, everywhere. Nobody was seeing anything with naked eyes, just through their cameras. It was weird.

If you live/work in tourist spots, you can’t walk 10 feet without getting interrupted by a tourist taking their stupid, duck face picture. It is near impossible to enjoy anything in peace these days. I blame it all on social media. I can’t wait for all social media to die, but that’s not gonna happen, Is it?

View on HN

To be fair, regardless of that, spending New Year’s Eve in Times Square is my idea of hell.

I (and I’d argue most New Yorkers) cannot see how that would be in any way a good experience.

I agree. I went because it was novelty to me, I had moved to NYC and wanted to cross it off my list.

Cops, huge crowds, bone biting cold, long waiting times… not worth it. But worst of all is still camera flashes, in my opinion

My guess is that the longer you live here, you will intentionally go years without going through Times Square area :)

Mid-summer, 2020, we hopped in the car and drove to Nice, France. It was in a lull of COVID so we were able to walk around without masks for the most part. It was amazing to go to the "hip" tourist spots and be one of the only ones there, just enjoying the view. <sigh> now the tourists are all over the place in my own city and it is annoying af.

Off season travel is great for exactly this reason. Well, being bound to school holidays limits your options. One thing worth to remind ourselves of when travelling or seeing tourists were we live: We are either locals, but at much more places we clearly are the visitors. The trick is to behave like a visitor and not like tourists being only that many letters removed from a terrorist.

Social media is dead. We’re just burning in the hell of vapid content feed machines with ads interspersed.

> but that’s not gonna happen, Is it?

Something's gotta give. I don't think we can take it much further. I hope it's a passing fad. Once everybody shares everything it's not special anymore so how do you stand out? Having no online presence might become a new flex.

Stand out by doing more bigger/ridiculous/dangerous/wasteful/insert hyperbole here?

On the other hand A lot of friends are starting to opt for dumb phones, others (gen z) are now picking up digital point and shoot cameras.

What if clubhouse ‘took off’ and everyone’d be making podcasts instead of vlogs. “Quiet please”!

I guess it would be like the joke that since using a phone while driving is prohibited, people turned to reading books behind the wheel en masse

How does it interrupt you for someone else to be taking a photo of themselves?

>How does it interrupt you for someone else to be taking a photo of themselves?

Blocking one's path for once, even more so with telescope sticks and of course taking pictures with one in the background without consent. I live near one such touristic area where there's a rather narrow sidewalk. In the summer it is like running the gauntlet. I'm too often too nice by first letting people finish their posing and taking pictures, only that frequently even 5 selfies seem not enough because they didn't get that perfect angle right for the 'insta'.

They’ve got as much right to be there as you do!

> taking pictures with one in the background without consent

They don’t need your consent!

How to make people like you: "The law doesn't forbid me from doing this to you!"

Right up there with "I'm not touching you!"

Well, yes. I'm not touching you right now.

And if you're offended by that, you are being egregiously unreasonable. Exactly the same is true of the picture-taking "concern".

It's one thing to shove a camera in someone's face. It's another for people to have any reasonable expectation of not getting into even the background of a photo when walking down a city street or in some other busy place.

You’re not ‘doing’ anything to someone by taking a photo in public with them in the background. You don’t have reasonable expectations and it’s fine for reasonable people to disregard them.

They’ve got as much right to be there as you do!

Can do vs Should do.

Yes, you can stand in the middle of a narrow path and use a selfie stick to take photos. No, you shouldn't do that if it inconveniences everybody around you. Doing so anyways makes you a self-centered dickhead.

Does it interrupt the photographer when I pay them no mind and walk in front of them? Their muttered curses say yes. Therefore, photographers interrupt everybody else in the area who, unlike me, feel compelled by some social convention to give photographers a cone of exclusion in front of the camera.

Politeness goes both ways, photographers should try to be as discreet as possible. And others should pay some attention to what others do around them, including photographers.

Calling them photographers is being generous and this is not the place for your personal photo shoot. Sorry but after the 200th time of trying to walk down a crowded street in New York and waiting for someone to finish taking a group selfie, I'm done with that.

They should pretend it’s a city:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretend_It's_a_City

Multiple examples from the article:

> Making TikTok by playing loud music creates a nuisance for pilgrims from all over the world who come to the birthplace of Gautama Buddha

> Over recent months, there have been reports of TikTok creators storming farms and trampling crops, and even causing traffic jams while shooting. Chamomile farmers in Morang in eastern Nepal were forced to harvest their crop early, as some TikTokers trampled on their crop. In Kathmandu, a popular street that was decorated with colorful umbrellas to attract tourists after the Covid-19 slump went viral on TikTok, and authorities were forced to shut it down as creators flocked to the area, leading to traffic congestion.

Was aimed at the person I was replying to about people simply taking selfies.

On New Year’s Eve at NYC, the streets are jam packed. There is barely any space to move. Everyone around you has their camera out, trying to take photos of the ball drop. The only thing you can see are flashes. Then you’d curse yourself for waiting for hours in the cold, only to see flashes.

On a normal day in NYC tourist areas, it is common for tourists (especially younger women) to take pictures every few feet. Initially you’d be polite and not walk into their frame, but this gets old super quick. You’re irritated, they’re irritated (because you didn’t pause for their dumb photo shoot)… ruins everyone’s day. All you wanted was to walk uninterrupted.

I used to live and work in upper east side. Took me a while to get used to it

For me, I try to be polite and not get in the way of someone trying to take a picture of someone on a bridge across a sidewalk for example. But it can get to the point where I'm just rude and pretend I don't see them. At least selfie sticks seem to have become less common--probably because smartphones are often available with wider lenses today.

I used to work down the road from a big tourist attraction in London. Every lunch hour, I’d need to walk past a mass of people congregating outside the building taking photos, among other things (like forming a circle around a busker, taking up even more space).

I could try wait for a dozen people to finish taking photos (and it’s never just one photo, selfie or otherwise).

Or, after a couple weeks of this, I just stopped caring and would walk past them irrespective of interrupting someones shot. Now if they made an effort to leave an easily navigable gap behind the photographer so I could walk past without interrupting, sure, I did that. Most didn’t.

There’s still a lingering uncomfortability knowing I might be recorded forever in someone’s social media feed or whatever they do with the photos. Yes I know, it’s a public space and all.

maybe when we are all wearing always recording AR glasses people will no longer need to take pictures and post them all the time

Reply on news.ycombinator.com