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Comment by tern | Hacker News Reader

Here just to share that I think "segregated" night clubs are essential for creating a publicly accessible and safe + positive vibe club experience.

Your other options are (a) let anyone in and you get a**** and total dilution of cultural values (quick death of the institution) or (b) it's a private party and you're not invited.

For accessible and good, you can stay on your toes and find new, smaller clubs and scenes that haven't had time to die yet, but that's its own exclusiveness: if you don't know, you don't know.

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Counterpoint: Hacker News, CDMX EBM scene, goth scene, LA underground art scene, SF renegade rave scene, Latin bars, gay clubs like the EndUp, which have been open and welcoming since 1971, gay black scene, free software movement, gay Asian scene in any city, bear bars, salsa clubs, martial arts clubs, drag bars, anime scene, furry scene, hiking groups, Trekkies, adventurer clubs, punk scene, bicycle riders groups, astronomy groups, ball room dancing groups, central american danza cultural groups, alcoholics anonymous... Even prestigious universities have countless open proseminars where you can just walk in off the street to a graduate symposium. I've gone to many, you really just walk in the door.

I'd argue the majority of cliques and scenes are extremely accepting and people self filter. Having a discriminating door guy is just being an asshole.

You can go out to hundreds of bars in Berlin without any door policy whatsoever. Legendary bars, cool bars, gay bars, etc. It's not like the whole of Berlin is segregated.

But this approach just wouldn't benefit some popular dance clubs. Without a solid door policy clubs would be stuffed with people who come there for wrong reasons. To pick up girls, to get drunk, to visit an attraction for the sake of a visit (not because they enjoy techno music), to get into a fight, etc etc. Have you ever been to a poorly managed club? They don't have a community, don't focus on a holistic clubbing experience, have many people with really bad vibes. Would you want to stay there for a night and the next day (night time + day time raves)?

> underground cliques

Let's be honest, techno is not underground in Berlin, these clubs are a massive tourist attraction. Berghain is not a 50 person dive bar in SOMA.

So your argument is that it's a popular tourist attraction so instead of capitalizing on it by say opening a second, moving to a bigger space, having more events, selling tickets in advance or charging higher prices they instead openly and famously discriminate based on physical appearance?

In Germany. Let me guess, they look at your ID to check your name and nationality first. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but I bet I'm not.

Btw, KitKatClub doesn't do that and they're equally famous.

I am reminded that we are on a tech forum :) Do they need to capitalize, scale, open franchise clubs all over the world? Techno clubs are not about that at their best.

Door policy is discrimination only in the sense that the very few people at the door have to make a swift judgment on whether your group will fit in. Can this be upsetting? Sure!

> In Germany. Let me guess, they look at your ID to check your name and nationality first.

By this logic liquor stores in the US also discriminate based on person's nationality since they check the ID.

KitKatClub has a strict dress code policy for their sex-oriented events.

Kitkatklub dress code is wacky. They're insanely serious about it but it's easy to conform to. It's a costume party.

As to the other point, you can separate the process to avoid the kind of blanket discrimination I think we can all agree is unethical. I bet they don't make the slightest effort. It's probably one guy that checks your ID and says yes/no and one guy that takes money. It could be 3 instead of 2 to avoid, just to be crazy, saying no to all the Jewish names, but it's not.

Next time I'm in Berlin, I'll try to remember to take a clicker with me and stand outside the place. I bet you'll start to notice a few interesting patterns that America has quite a few laws against. I've only heard them to be extremely proud of their bias so I'd be surprised if you didn't start seeing just classic discrimination because that's what humans appear to naturally do unless they work really really hard at it or have some structures to prevent it.

You could approach visiting Berghain the same way you do with KitKatClub. I don't recommend it, but you could. Treat it as a costume party - match the expectations, dress up appropriately, come with a friendly group.

If the community and friendly feel is the selling point, then no you can not really scale that way and simultaneously keep the community and relationships. You have to choose between the two.

As if Berghain is still a community venue, as opposed to a bunch of ur-capitalist hustlers selling the idea of community to lost and naive souls.

Community and scale do not mix. If the founders truly cared about community they would have wound the place up in about 2010 and done something new.

But once people experience a bit of success greed inevitably takes over…

I see your point, but a community venue and constantly wounding up and starting anew also don't mix. It's an unfortunate outcome of the scale and the system we live in. If Berghain was a XII century monastery in an inaccessible place it could have maintained a community venue for centuries. A large club in the techno capital of the world has to resort to a different approach if it wants to maintain at least some level of continuity, status, and quality for its community.

But it excludes arbitrary people from the community for arbitrary and superficial reasons.

Why is this so hard to understand?

This is an exaggeration. All communities have something that make them a community, and not just an everchanging group of random people. Is being into techno a random or superficial reason for being a part of the techno community? Is looking and being friendly a superficial reason for being a part of an intentionally accepting community? This is the same argument people use in many other contexts where inclusion is conflated with having no rules and preferences. Should gay sex parties admit large groups of drunk aggressive lads just because gay parties are supposed to be inclusive? This approach ends up compromising the community itself, it really doesn't benefit the cause.

Ultimately, I agree, and have spent a lot more time in many of these scenes than at Berghain.

However, all of them are fairly self-selecting in different ways that I think are difficult or impossible to achieve in a long-running, ostensibly "for everyone" institution like a techno club.

I understand you feel that way but materially it's incorrect.

You can be exclusive for exclusive-sake and you'll attract the dolce & gabana crowd and maybe that's what they want - people who will spend $500 on alcohol.

But as far as techno I've met all the Belleville 3, two of them twice and each time it's been at tiny spots with like $0-$5 cover.

I've even been to warehouse parties with producers big enough to have Wikipedia pages that are just honor systems where you promise to venmo the promoter and there is no door guy. Highschool kids could just walk in doing hard drugs and to be honest they probably did.

But then again, there's certainly pop techno and non-pop techno. Tiestos YouTube has like 3.7 billion views. That's a different problem than say Legowelt with 200k.

> Hacker News

Pay attention to the downvotes, and browse HN with "showdead" turned on, and you'll see that HN stays the way it is in large part due to aggressive exclusion of those who can't stick to society norms up to an including the metaphorical "door guy" (bans).

Self-filtering is a start. But pretty much all cliques and scenes also have lines you will get ostracised if you go past. The extent of their reaction if you will vary, and sure, there's a difference between proactively judging you based on appearance and retroactively judging you by actions, but in some scenes your appearance is part of the game. That sucks if you don't fit in, but it also sucks for those who want something specific if you're that one person who can't self filter and insist on ruing the experience for everyone else.

Exclusion based on contribution is different than exclusion based on discrimination.

It's a very important difference.

If I, just some random dude, submitted a correct mathematical paper solving a millennium or Hilbert puzzle to a prestigious journal, for instance, they would publish it regardless of the fact that I'm not so and so from Princeton. They wouldn't exclude my valued contribution.

Discrimination would be me submitting the correct solution but first having to find and tack on so and so from Princeton as the author in order to even get considered.

Now I'd probably have to wrangle them a bit to convince them, but that's just credulity, not discrimination.

That's quite different than say Hattie McDaniel, a black actress, being excluded from the premiere of her movie, Gone with the Wind and unable to accept her Oscar on stage because of discrimination.

Discrimination exists regardless of contribution for reasons ultimately unrelated to the nature of the contribution

None of the people you're arguing with here have been defending exclusion based on discrimination of the kind you're objecting to, so it's then unclear why you're making this argument.

The specific comment you replied to that I replied to did not argue for the kind of discrimination you're talking about here either.

I'm absolutely sure that the kind of discrimination you're talking about is also an issue with quite a few clubs, but they are two very different issues.

Sure but consequences come from systems, structures, and institutions and not from intentions.

You can tell me it's some vibe check but it's structurally set up to discriminate based on classic markers and there's been intentionally zero remediations to avoid it.

In fact, many reports of xenophobia, antisemitism and racism persist, just Google it, it's everywhere.

That's why we had to fundamentally re-form our institutions in the US in the name of inclusion and not just have better intentions.

Berghain and Tresor can to whatever the fuck they want, I don't care. But let's call a spade a spade and not pretend it magically turns to something else based on wishes and dreams.

Then attack the lack of remediation, and the lack of more objective criteria, not the notion that there are criteria for participation in all kinds of communities including in most of the ones you used as examples of inclusive ones.

> That's why we had to fundamentally re-form our institutions in the US in the name of inclusion and not just have better intentions.

Are you suggesting that worked?

> But let's call a spade a spade and not pretend it magically turns to something else based on wishes and dreams.

The problem is that you appear to call a spade something else entirely, and attack a position nobody has taken. I note that you have expanded on specific issues and pointed out another club that has specific policies that can be easily conformed to elsewhere, and that was a much more productive line of argument to take.

Some of the dead can be interesting as long as the discussion does not touch topics that send them off. Makes you wonder if you could create a discussion direction tag based partial shadowban.

"I'd argue the majority of cliques and scenes are extremely accepting and people self filter. Having a discriminating door guy is just being an asshole."

Yes and it is a pretty good description of most Berliners. As a capital, that has mainly lived the last 30 years by sucking tremendous money out of the other federal states, as a city that has little industry and businesses left, as a place which administration has become dysfunctional, it gives the stupid arrogant little Berliner a feeling or superiority if he gets into a club but others must stay outside.

And before you donwvote me, for many years I loved this city. I caught a last glimpse of the post reunification Berlin, when basically all the good clubs had no license or whatever. Bars and clubs at the craziest places. Took the police years to close this down. And today, if you walk through Prenzlauer Berg or Oranienburger str. OMG.

Honestly when it comes to Berghain, the paternoster next door at Neues Deutschland Druckerei und Verlag is way more interesting and fun.

> (a) let anyone in and you get a** and total dilution of cultural values (quick death of the institution)

The counterargument to your point is somewhat self-evident: all the great nightclubs in Berlin that have way more relaxed entrances than Berghain that aren't filled with assholes and aren't completely diluted of cultural values.

Often times it's the exclusivity that attracts the assholes who normally don't listen to that kind of music anyway.

I'm not going to go that far. I'm sure there's decent people there.

I've got no interest in discriminating against the discriminators

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