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Comment by solraph | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea in general principle - but if I lived in the right city/country, and didn't already have something similar, my first thought based on the landing page pictures would be;

"This is only for white guys in their twenties."

I don't know if that's intentional, but if I was in the location target market, I'd close the tab at that point.

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This comment inadvertently reveals why clubs like this can't exist: there's always someone counting races and genders in photos. High functioning male social clubs generally have implicit rules, like "straight-acting gay guys are fine but don't make it weird" or "no weird lefties". But you can't have those rules anymore. So "male social clubs" get overrun with board game types who are OK with accepting everyone. Which means high status guys, the kind of guys who are trend setters, tend to stay away.

> High functioning male social clubs generally have implicit rules, like "straight acting gay guys are fine but don't make it weird" or "no weird lefties".

I think that whole conformation thing is why they don't work. Nobody wants to hang out with people pretending to be someone else so they fit in. Any social connection you make is then fake too.

> Which means high status guys, the kind of guys who are trend setters, tend to stay away.

The board games types can also be high status trend setters, just not in your circle. That's fine though. Nothing wrong with seeking out people that are like yourself.

But there's plenty of places where you can find what it sounds like you're looking for. Like sports bars. Won't find the board games types there and not many women either.

Huh? "Conformist" is the most common type of person on Earth and conformists prefer hanging out with conformists. Social clubs are entirely a conformist phenomena, almost by definition. All those Elk clubs and bowling clubs and so on were chock full of conformists.

I don't agree. If you choose the right club you don't have to conform and you can just be yourself. Especially in the cities there's a scene for everyone. In the countryside it's slim pickings of course so you do have to conform.

Maybe that's one of the reason people in small towns are so different, the social dynamic is stricter because there's just not enough people around to form groups of people that are different. City people like me, if we don't fit in we'll just find another place to go so we're more aligned. We can choose our community because a city isn't a community, it's a big box of lots of different ones. If you live in a small town you don't get to do that (not as much anyway)

But the idea that there's no community there at all is not correct. I live in a big city but I keep running into the same people :)

Ps I don't think one is better than the other, just more suitable to some people than others. I'm a city guy and I moved to the town of my girlfriend for a decade but I couldn't stick it. She couldn't stick the city with me, not for more than a holiday. That's ok too. Just meant we had to go our separate ways.

Edit: But yes when I said "Nobody wants to conform" I was just talking about myself. I guess there are people that want that. Thanks for the correction.

It's a subtle matter. Seeking acceptance and validation subconsciously and being willing to conform to get those is probably a much more common pattern compared to a conscious desire to compromise and to conform.

> I don't agree. If you choose the right club you don't have to conform and you can just be yourself

There is absolutely no such club for many people who are even slightly out of the normal expected range of behavior

Really? Back in my day, there were all sorts of nerd groups, which were often plagued with horrible social dysfunction.[0] People just muddled through.

[0] https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/

That's not too geek-specific. I've seen that at almost all kinds of volunteer-driven organisations. Like a local radio station, student fraternity, backpacker houses. Disorganisation, feuding, usually because several people put more effort than the rest but feel like they also are more important than the rest. Coupled with usually not very strictly defined roles and responsibilities this is a recipe for discord and fighting.

I've seen it at typical geek places too like makerspaces but it's certainly not limited to the geek communities.

At the groups I'm part of the vast majority is neurodivergent but things go really smoothly. We rarely have incidents.

They're not neurodivergent-focused groups but there's just a (much) larger percentage of us attracted to events that stray a bit further from the mainstream.

In my experience people do not just muddle through anymore. I don't want to speculate about why that might be, but I have seen so many weird behaviour explosions at these sorts of events myself that leads to people being ostracized

I could speculate, it was partially because of that blog post. The more social nerds are encouraged to cast out the antisocial stinky ones. Instead of a whisper campaign, there's a social media ejection.

(Nerds in particular have been lured into fake socializing with fake friends on a discord or something. I've seen this where someone disappears and it's like "i dunno, maybe he got busy with life". None of their 'friends' really care if he's dead or not, because if he really did get "get busy", that is an indictment on them.)

> there's just not enough people around to form groups of people that are different.

That's certainly part of it, although I think the bigger factor is that people who are different just leave. Small towns are conformist because of survivorship bias.

Good insight. I didn't think of that.

But high status guys by definition wouldn't be seen dead in clubs like these to begin with. They are socially successful ladder climbers already, that's part and parcel of being high status.

I think a gracious reading here is a "boardgame type" is the sort of person you would only encounter at your friendly local game store etc. GP has a point, but I know plenty of 'high(er) status' groups include 'non-straight-acting' and 'weird lefty' guys, but they are cool guys to hang out with, and not like weirdos who slithered out of their mother's basement.

Popular people like other popular people, because that's how you throw a party.

Anyway I wish OP the best. But in the grand tradition of internet meetups, "these people are really fucking weird."

> But high status guys by definition wouldn't be seen dead in clubs like these to begin with.

The problem with joining a club is not that it’s a club but that it’s a club governed by Title IX legislation and the Damoclesian threat of getting cancelled for telling the “It’s too white in here” college liberal that he’s no longer welcome to attend.

« board game types » ??

I guess it depends if you are after a club with men to help you climb some status ladder, or if you are after a club that helps you make male friends, regardless of where they come from.

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