What great American cities looked like a century ago, in video (thread) | Hacker News Reader

What great American cities looked like a century ago, in video (thread)

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50 pointsvinnyglennon40 comments

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1755293706184208631.html

These videos are incredible. Are the sounds real or added? San Francisco, 1906. Assuming before the fire? Fun to see the streets filled with a variety of modes: horse and buggies, trolleys, cars, bikes, kids, etc.

I've seen this video (with sound) before. It sure sounds to me like the video's sound is a modern background track and is not original.

If there was no sound, I don't imagine I would have been able to watch the video for the full 3 minutes.

I wish I could see this, but since its on X and I'm not a member I can't view more than the first video.

I wish cool stuff like this was more openly available and that we didn't rely on platforms like Twitter to make it visible.

Yeah, same. I don't know why this couldn't be a blog post with links on Twitter or whatever closed platform.

https://nitter.poast.org/Culture_Crit/status/175529370618420...

Hammered.

Other instances are listed here: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

There's a Firefox extension called LibRedirect that automatically redirects you from closed platforms like Twitter/Reddit/etc to mirrors.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/

Best thing to do (for those of you that are into video archival and restoration) is to donate it to archive.org and museums.

Anecdotal, my granddad was an avid photographer / videographer back in the 50's in a fairly "backwater" area of the country, taking photos and whatnot of daily life and local events and the like. My dad got the negatives after my grandma died last year (she was like 94), he's digitising them and will probably donate the rest to the local museum.

Anyway. I hope people making these videos will also make "small" websites that just host the videos with texts and explanations in the style of the old internet, ideally on a host that can last the ages. With an option to download an archival copy, just a .zip with the text, videos, etc.

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1755293706184208631

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1755293708075864146

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1755293709950714314

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1755293712106578103

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1755293816825758158

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1755293818524483946

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1755293820277674074

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1755293899222909048

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1755293901034852498

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1755295770293465399

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1755296211811074294

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1755293706184208631.html

Amazing how much of the NYC waterfront is still recognizable over 100 years later. One structure I didn't recognize looks like some kind of dock for ships?

If you like this kind of video, I'd recommend you this youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1W8ShdwtfgjRHdbl1Lctcw

Notice the complete lack of advertising.

I've only skimmed the first video but I see a bunch of huge billboards.

no? There are giant billboards on the walls of the buildings and also on the trams.

Please do be aware that this is an openly white-supremacist Twitter account

How can you tell? This is a genuine question about trying understand how people get any information out of the Twitter interface. All I can find are hundreds of architectural desire posts sprinkled with some religious ones before having no idea how to try a different way and giving up.

Science sez that anyone who shares pictures of a marble statue is Literally Hitler

(And by Science I mean my Tumblr friends)

If it is, then it's certainly not very good at it. Scrolling back the past 6 months, I see only tweets about U.S. and European architecture and urban planning. There are indications that the account owner is religious, and grumbles about "wokeism" to the extent of secularlism being anti-religion, but that's about as insidious as it got.

Got any citations other than "He's too interested in Europe", or "He continues to tweet on X post-Elon"?

It's a clumsy stretch to label anything outside your presumably very narrow view on European history as being "openly white-supremacist". I think you've lost the plot, my friend.

It seems more like an SA type ideology, not really white supremacist per se (in fact, most SA fascists are fairly harmless, they're just really into like, traditional life and beauty and going back to the earth and shit--though that does sometimes involve deporting all the minorities).

The problem isn't that they're fascists, they are actually really bad with political organizing and gaining power because they so severely reject modernity. The problem is that they get duped by the SS types and then when they rise to power they just kill all the SA guys (its what happened in Germany).

Sorry, SA?

I was expecting a hyphenated ideology, not what Google gave me: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-sa

Yes!

Famous members include Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger, both of whom were "redeemed" after the war. Again, the former SA members were not considered as much of a problem to the post-war alliance as those of the SS (take that information as you like).

Source?

I love how you're right, that account is flagrantly white-supremacist, and everyone is downvoting your comment.

Very carefully and deliberately sprinkled among the posts are pro-Russian and leading questions designed to allow for "frank and earnest discussion" in the replies.

Questions like:

Why don't you live in London? With a cute picture of a London neighborhood. A question that has been explicitly asked to elicit "because the muslims are ruining everything" in the comments.

Why don't we make art like this anymore? With a renaissance painting. A question that has explicitly been asked to elicit "Because the radical trans-feminists are destroying art and culture" in the comments.

Why doesn't paris have architecture anymore? With a picture of an 1800s cafe. A question that has been explicitly asked to elicit "because the globalists want to homogenize everything that matters and increase the diversity of everything that doesn't matter."

What's the craziest thing you've heard of in the name of self-care? A question that has been explicitly asked to elicit "Open borders as "self care" for nations to "increase birth rates"."

This method of social media proselytization is very common and has been honed over the last 20 or so years to very slowly and deliberately introduce white supremacist ideas while cloaking the posts themselves in a veneer of respectability.

My assertion is that the people downvoting your comment are either white supremacists, or too stupid to realize they're being played.

All of my "because the..." responses were pulled directly from top-level responses to their "call and response" posts, btw.

The newsletter the account's bio links to removes the veil.

Serious accusations like this require more explicit evidence. One of the more significant contributions of Western culture are concepts like "innocent until proven guilty" and the "burden of proof lies with the accuser".

I'm strongly convinced that the biggest regulatory mistake in human history was not limiting car's maximum velocity to the horse' when we have the opportunity.

In the city I live, speed is reduced to 30km/h (18.5mph) for most of the residential area [1], including my most frequently commuted routes.

I love this town for many reasons, but this, the "silence" (especially compared to other towns) is something that cemented me in here. I find it really hard to exist in other cities, that are usually suffocated by cars.

[1]: https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/outlook-to-2030/reduc...

That metric is like the megapixel wars of cameras. Just something to chase so the newer model can be “better”. It does nothing except validate your purchase when you rev it obnoxiously.

To continue your thought, what are some things that need to be regulated in order to prevent future societal decay that the technology itself brings (such as allowing cars to roam free which propagated further car-centrism?)

Yeah, the history around this is both interesting and disappointing. Cities did have speed limits related to horse speed and at least one city had a referendum to mandate speed governors. But those efforts failed due to heavy lobbying by auto interests. So basically like today.

San Francisco's streets were cleaner of feces back when horses were the primary mode of transportation than they are now.

I bet the smell was worse though.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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