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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Travel/tourism is what I like to call "rudeness in aggregate". What I mean with that is that single individual people are doing nothing egregiously wrong as such, but above a certain number all combined create a strong negative ("rude") effect.

The most obvious example of this in context of travel are these huge cruise ships. No one is really doing anything wrong with that, as such, but craptons of tourists descending on your comparatively little city or town can become quite disruptive (as I've experienced first-hand as a resident).

There's quite a few problems like this, from small to large. Humans don't seem very good at taking "collective responsibility" for these sort of things, "because I'm doing nothing wrong", which is true, but also not.

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You might think of it as a tragedy of the commons.

Certainly, there are many who rely on the "rudeness" of the travelers for their livelihood. New Orleans comes to mind, when I say that people who live there may not appreciate the tourists, but know that many of the things they do appreciate (dining, arts, etc) would not be there, but for the tourist. Luckily, the peak influx can be avoided while enjoying the fruits the rest of the time.

As a kid working in a fast food joint, whenever someone would notice a bus of any sort pull into the parking lot, the cry of "bus!" sent everyone into oh-shit mode. I imagine a cruise ship pulling into a small tourist town dock is similar but much larger.

It’s weird to see downvotes on this comment. I think it is without question that me traveling to, say, Yellowstone is just fine but not if too many people do so each year. The damage done would ruin the place.

At a higher level I think the issue is overpopulation combined with ease of travel. We cause too much damage.

Question: how do you see downvotes (or any votes) on a comment? I use news.ycombinator.com but all I see is when the downvotes are large enough to gray out the comment. I often see people talking about upvotes and downvotes as though they can see a number. I’m just wondering if I may be “doing it wrong”.

You are not doing anything wrong, you can't see points for comments that are not your own.

Thanks for the confirmation.

When I commented the comment was grayed out. That was the only indication I had that there were downvotes.

Ah, thanks.

> It’s weird to see downvotes on this comment.

I saw it stand at 0 (i.e. 1 downvote) shortly after I posted it; I don't know if it went lower than that, but probably not. A single person downvoting something shortly after it was posted can make something appear "as if it's downvoted", but more often than not it's just a single person. I wouldn't put too much stock in it.

Ordinarily I disagree with this kind of thinking, but I live in Edinburgh, for some reason I hate that the old town now feels like a theme park, though I'm not sure why. Especially given that during lock down I walked around it a lot and missed all the tourists. Makes no sense.

It's about the number of people. Less than 5% is fun and allows you to meet all sorts of people from various places, at 5-15% it's already a bit more mixed, and at >15% it becomes disruptive to every-day activities and the place no longer feels "yours".

I'm just making these numbers up because I don't have a good way to estimate them, could also be ">50%" instead of ">15%". But that's what it comes down to.

I think COVID really highlighted the contrast; first it was a slow increase that you don't really notice directly, then suddenly none, and then suddenly a huge spike again. e.g. Edinburgh roughly doubled the number of tourists from 2012 to 2019[1] which, in spite of being a fairly large change, you probably don't really notice when spread out over a 7 year period.

[1]: visits to Edinburgh castle is probably a reasonable proxy: https://www.statista.com/statistics/586822/edinburgh-castle-...

Thats interesting about the visits to Edinburgh castle, probably very accurate. Feels accurate too. Around 2009 or so Edinburgh was pretty "dead" I remember work mates complaining about it, so much one of them moved to Glasgow. Now we have the opposite problem.

>single individual people are doing nothing egregiously wrong

Because you included the word "egregiously" I suppose technically you are right, but only on a technicality. A small "wrong" at the individual level becomes "egregiously" wrong at the population level.

- one person eating food in the streets in Japan isn't egregious, every tourist doing it is.

- one person being loud in a church in Italy isn't egregious, all of them is.

- one person touching some old Australian rock art isn't, every tourist doing it is.

When you consider your actions as a tourist, you have to consider a million people doing the same. Anything else is being a bad tourist.

Everyone makes mistakes; I tend to be forgiving.

For example "eating in the street is rude" is one of those things that's just a foreign concept to many people outside Japan. I just so happen to know about this from a YouTube video I once watched, but if it wasn't for that I could see myself doing it. Hell, even with that I could see myself just forgetting because it's such an alien concept to me that this is considered rude.

I was more saying when a tourist considers their actions. Not if. Of course not everyone knows every social idiosyncratic curiosity of countries they visit.

But "I'm only a tourist, it's ok" leads to the egregious "tourists are bad" concept.

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