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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

The Dull Men's Club group of facebook is actually oddly interesting. I would classify it more as a group who point out the very small oddities of every day life that are not very interesting. There is a post where someone saw two geese with 42 bay geese, another where the rental company fixed a door with a piece of pool noodle. Its more like a "huh that's kind of weird I guess" group.

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One of my favorite books is The Mezzanine[0], which takes place entirely as a man ascends a single elevator but spins off onto all kinds of tangents that comment on and express exuberance about the most mundane things.

There's an entire thread on the evolution of stapler design, elaborations on the invention of perforations, and abundant self-reflection. It's almost like a hybrid of Leonard Read's "I, Pencil" and Hegel.

There's something magical about paying close attention to the mundane, IMHO.

Praise dullness!

[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mezzanine

Speaking of paying close attention to the mundane, it’s an escalator.

Wow, that book sounds like a mix of Johan Harstad's footnote riddled Forsaken/The Red Handler (and who's Max, Mischa & Tetoffensiven even is about 'idling') and George Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris[1]. As you say, the almost childlike fascination with the mundane is really valuable, it helps to guide my own eyes when wandering the city.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Attempt_at_Exhausting_a_Pla...

This is my favourite book, it's hilarious and it kind of mirrors how I go about my life: pondering every little detail and how everything fits together.

I'm not sure if it's the same thing as dullness though?

It's the facebook version of r/mildlyinteresting on Reddit, which is also very popular. I think it's because this is the kind of thing that fills our days: small oddities and observations that spark our brain but aren't exceptional.

Except this one is gendered, so somewhat more exclusive?

I don't think it's exclusive. There is no gate keeping and there seems to be a high ratio of female post creators and commentators. Reddit is 60/40 male dominated, so is also skewered towards male content.

Personally I see the name as more a jokey play on the stereotype of boring middle aged men who find such things interesting.

> Personally I see the name as more a jokey play on the stereotype of boring middle aged men who find such things interesting.

#nailedit

If your demographic information is important to your contributions to a group like that you're doing it very wrong.

Would you say the same if it were the Dull Women's Club?

>It's the facebook version of r/mildlyinteresting on Reddit, which is also very popular.

By virtue of the implied difference in demographics that's still a categorical change.

It's a bit like reading this site...

Gentlemen, have you heard The curious tale of Bhutan's playable record postage stamps (2015)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44054775

That’s not dull that’s fascinating.

Hello, fellow dull traveler.

There's high praise in some movies or animation where they depict the mundane; the long sequence in Ghost in the Shell just showing the city as it is, away from the main story (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARTLckN9e7I), most of Studio Ghibli's films, a lot of Breaking Bad and especially Better Call Saul, where there's a lot of scenes of people just going about their day, John Travolta getting a can of paint and a pizza in the opening of Saturday Night Fever (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfwQ_7xqO7Y), etc.

I had to block it because I realized it just completely overtook my feed and 99% of it was in that "interesting but ultimately forgettable within 30 seconds of reading it" zone that's filling up social media. I mean it lived up to its name - it's very "dull" if vaguely interesting.

this is the part of the internet that everyone would be better off avoiding: not bad but no long-term value. When the internet was novel and your engagement limited these were rarer, cool things to share (often face to face!). Now this content is internet sugar that will be the health crisis of a generation.

Isn't that most of Hacker News as well? "Oh that's an interesting technical solution - which is completely irrelevant to the work I'm doing"

The standard on Hacker News is intellectually interesting.

“I saw geese,” ordinarily wouldn’t meet it (though in imagined contexts it would, of course).

Or as described in The New Yorker, HN is often about performative erudition, as perhaps is the case with this GEB’ish sentence.

Nothing is completely irrelevant. It's just very hard to point out when and where some post on HN about properly frobnicating a wickie [1] server in a data center in South Baluchistan will subtly help your development decisions at your current or future job.

[1] What is a wickie server? Damned if i know. But I'm sure there is someone on HN who has done one.

The neat thing about HN is that I can nearly always find at least one thing on the front page that's useful to me, especially if I read the discussion.

Just looking through now, Canine is interesting because it's similar to Dokku, which I already use. I might consider using Canine in a similar role in the future if I want k8s with buildpacks.

The Dull Men's Club groups aren't like that. The needle to hay ratio is far worse. It's all "huh, cool" coincidences and mysterious objects, but nobody really intends to show the world anything useful.

I'd agree with you if there was anything else of value on my facebook feed.

I cannot think of anything better than a 99% dull feed.

Part of the point of DMC content is a solace from everyday stressors. That's a factor in why divisive topics--politics, religion, etc.--are discouraged when "main points" of a post.

My fave I remember seeing years ago was one where a man - over some long period of time - managed to park in every single parking space of a supermarket.

I feel like this energy perfectly encapsulates what dull mans club is all about

I think that's fantastic. The dedication to such a trivial accomplishment!

I suppose it's no different to people that grind computer games to get 100% completion. A little dopamine hit each time that number edges up, followed by the satisfaction of having finally completed a long-sought goal.

https://x.com/GarethWild/status/1386965962214289408

Legendary.

Recently some spinoff/copycat groups have also sprouted up. There’s a “Dull Men’s Forum”, and a “Dull Men’s Fun Club”, for example, which post similar memes. And a “Dull Women’s Club” as well (even though I also often see women posting in the Dull Men’s Club, I suppose women on average have different sensibilities about where to draw the line between dull and interesting).

I view this as a sign that the group has become too popular and lots its “edge” (which in this case was its authentic dullness), and now is just a place for farming likes and impressions from the broader FB community. A lot of it is quite derivative of other popular posts - “what is the purpose of this thing I found in my hotel/new house/grandma’s house” posts seems to be a really common theme, for example.

Some of these are _pages_ that post content stolen from "dull" groups or from other groups that are thematically not far off, like Aldi fan groups. As your view includes pages that are just mass-theft operations seeking Facebook payouts, you have selection bias.

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