Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?

One early vacation morning my wife and I took our kids to a playground to adjust their pre-museum energy levels. It was quiet and sunny with dew still on the grass. The kids ran carefree through the playground, making their own adventures while I settled on a nearby bench. I noticed the bench had one of those memorial plaques for a man named Everett:

https://ibb.co/GQsk7Dqk

The power of the memorial that morning had me daydreaming what it would be like to be a grandpa watching my grandkids running around the playground. That's where I want to be immortalized: not in a lonely cemetery but on a warm park bench, relaxing and enjoying the best things about life.

My youngest migrated his play to the swing set and called me over for help. I loaded him in and began pushing while thinking of old Everett, maybe pushing his own grandson, maybe in this very swing.

And then I noticed what was written just above him:

https://ibb.co/SwLJQgD4

In a breath my mind corrected the error in my daydreams and a freight train punched through my gut, leaving me unable to breathe. My heart sunk and fell out the bottom of me as I struggled to keep pushing my son. I'd later learn that my son, in that moment, was older than Evvy would ever get to be. It's been years and I still wrestle with this memory every time my kids play on a swing set.

Up in the San Gabriel mountains in Southern California, just off of a faint use trail above Sierra Madre, someone installed a memorial bench for their child who died shortly after birth. Stumbling on it on a hike, I was overcome with emotion thinking of the grief those parents must have felt, and how it spurred them into the monumental effort of hiking the bench all the way up there and planting it in the ground. I'm normally a staunch advocate of the wilderness principle of Leave No Trace, but I didn't even think about it once whilst seated on that bench.

This is really beautiful. One of the most moving things I've seen in weeks. The website and the comments and just the idea of memorial benches.

I'm very surprised it was able to get this much traction despite being launched only 8 years ago, long after the heyday of these sort of sites. How'd you do it?

Thought this was going to lead to something about a major annoyance or weird commenters but pleasantly surprised at the list of impacts, heartfelt, emotive, human experiences connecting community from the physical to the virtual (to the otherworldly no doubt).

There are a lot of trees with similar sort of sponsorships and commemorations... wonder if a spin off would be something like opentreebutes.org ?

I see my area is lacking dispite having many memorial benches. Unfortunately some are in poor condition. I will try my best to capture and record them. Great project. Will encourage others.

Great project, feels like the old web. I'm inspired to take a walk to my local park and add the memorial benches

For almost 20 years, I've wanted to build a site where users can upload photos of informational boards/plaques along the road (e.g. on highways), along with photos of the actual item the board was talking about. The idea was that you could browse a map, and see all the ones along the route you were thinking of traveling, and decide which spots were worth stopping at.

In those days there were no cell phones, and I didn't know much web development. Now, with GPS embedded into photos, this is perhaps a really easy site to build.

But I don't want to deal with user moderation. And I don't want the burden of continual maintenance.

I was also concerned that a side effect would be really nice, not frequently visited spots will suddenly overflow with tourists. A much tougher problem to crack.

I don't think I'll ever get around to it. Someone convince me otherwise. Or better yet, build it for me. :-)

Beautiful post. Nothing confirms the Dead Internet Theory better than the surprise at seeing genuine human interaction on the net.

We share the desperate need to connect with each other, no matter how arduous it has become to.

I will expect with sadness the day that the author complains about bot spam on his benches website.

Marvelous stuff. Appreciate the tips on the technologies used to stay abreast of the new regulations. I always thought it was a pity we were going to start losing comments and am glad to see that it's still feasible to keep them.

I was reading over a comment thread on songfacts.com a few days ago and thought to myself "this is what the internet was supposed to be". People from all over the world connecting to discuss their favorite music, across time and space, without any upvoting, downvoting, likes, followers, or other systems to game for popularity.

Without upvotes/likes/etc. as a "quality filter", you tend to read more comments written in broken English with poor grammar and so forth. I consider that an acceptable price to pay, in exchange for no viral memes, ragebaiting, etc.

I really assumed this was going to be about an automated benchmark suite...

Interesting site, will definitely add a few that are in my city!

I will try to record any that I spot in my travels