verylittlemeat

It's a reality check for anyone who makes a better goodreads and doesn't understand why it never gains traction.

It's on par with complaining about facebook and creating your own better version of facebook while completely ignoring the reason why everyone is on facebook to begin with.

Goodreads will always win simply because it's where all the users are.

Like reddit or any huge site its usefulness isn't in the presented top layer (recommendations/front page/popular list of x) it's the depth of millions of users.

If you read a relatively obscure book and look it up on goodreads then you read through the reviews to find users who gave a high quality write up and then look at that user's profile. This will lead you to other users and books that are actual quality.

You could create a smaller website with a higher quality surface level but it's going to be infected with the bias of a small "elite" userbase making it a basically useless echo chamber.

OP is suggesting a starting place for people who feel unmoored. It's an anecdote giving him a formula to try on for size.

The kind of person who has strong feelings about their sense of style (for example dressing more feminine) already has achieved a kind of center or "normal" for their personality that the person who posted this lacks.

thread is pretty dead at this point but interesting comment thanks for typing it all out

It's psychologically comforting and you don't need to be an expat for it to be realistic. I agree that most people underestimate the value of creating a sustainable low stress life in their home country. Many people I know in the US seem to think working here means building up constant stress that eventually needs to be blown off in an orgy of travel and degeneracy.

I have about 80k in liquidity and in the back of my mind it's reassuring to know that if something went wrong at my job or I burnt out or got fired I would be ok. With just my savings I could rent a room in my city for something close to 10 years, including all basic necessities. Even just taking a part time minimum wage job I could easily double that time frame.

As it is I live happily in a small space with a very frugal lifestyle. Paradoxically I think going to work knowing that I could walk away at any time actually makes me a healthier and more productive person/employee.

I use Axiom to do basic ffmpeg stuff on a regular basis and it's never let me down.

https://axiomui.github.io/

I think people underestimate how much of the spirit of the old internet still exists.

For example, many twitch channels have an active offline chat that isn't advertised or even sanctioned by the actual streamer. I lurk/idle in the offline chat for a streamer who gets maybe 200-300 viewers per stream and there are now about a dozen of us from all over the world who have become friends over a decade. At this point many of us have met in real life or sent each other packages.

When I was younger I was very active on a small independent irc server and it was almost an identical experience.

Some people might find this video interesting. Family that fled into the siberian taiga for 70 years to avoid religious persecution. One thing that stands out in my memory is how they said their main form of entertainment was sharing and analyzing their dreams.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68

I'm reading the wiki on them (admittedly not the best or most unbiased source) and I don't really buy that they're white supremacists since among other things their leader is afro-cuban. But fascistic sure, I could see that.

Without playing the enlightened centrist card too strongly I don't see anything particularly more disturbing about the proud boys than I have from antifa. Of course antifa can't be accused of being fascistic since their name is literally "anti-fascism" and if you call yourself anti facist then obviously it is impossible to be a fascist.

Proud boys are literal nazis?

Unfortunately much like the hysteria of "communists" being lost on McCarthyites in the 50s the same is likely for the "far right" on the left now.

They're literal Nazis, don'tcha know.

It's really everywhere due to the election. I lurk on a meme video forum that leans conservative and they have started deleting and clamping down on any political content. Some people really enjoy stirring up and having political debate but lots of the regulars can't stand it.

I don't buy that they're trying to communicate in good faith. I remember very clearly sources like this* in 2016. There was so much hubris and minimizing of Trump that him having a 30% chance to win was like an irrelevant footnote to Hillary's coming coronation.

*https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cwc-j6YXUAEIMaM.jpg

The pollsters take too much credit when they're right and deflect too much blame when they're wrong. They need to do a better job of being humble and stop trying to pass themselves off as apolitical number crunchers just giving us the facts.

That seems outrageously obtuse. The electoral college is fundamental to predicting the US presidential election. The idea that 538 got it right but just didn't factor in the electoral college is a real stretch. If they screwed up polls in states that were crucial for an electoral college win then they screwed up full stop.

You're being downvoted but you're right.

I'm starting to believe that sites like 538 feed off of the general public not understanding that a 20% chance to win is 1 in 5. Endless ink has been spilled about how the public does not understand statistics but very little effort has been made to communicate effectively.

The whole thing seems like a navelgazing sideshow where the pollsters want to have it both ways. They want to claim their predictions are infallible but then when the public says they failed they want to backpedal with holier than thou "well, actually..." excuses.

I feel like everyone right now should be watching the 1995 movie Safe. It is THE movie about ominous psychosomatic illness. Julianne Moore is amazing in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_(1995_film)

It starts off a little slow but I promise you will never forget it.

I don't think this whole conversation needs to be so dramatic.

I live in NYC and do projects like this chair all the time. I talk to my neighbors and ask them when they wont be home or when would be a good time to do X hours of work.

Most of the time they say don't worry about it as long as it's not past like 9pm or before 10am. I extend the same courtesy to my neighbors in turn. Just communicate and be reasonable.

"You're invulnerable to coronavirus" is not a summary of that quote let alone a fair one.

There should be an Internet Forum Law where any sufficiently large forum just becomes about current events and politics. There are already endless places on the internet to talk about those things, I'm glad I share this place with users trying to resist it.

What's the point of being one of the useful ten million if you don't have a bigger superfluous population to lord over.

I think the prognostications of fear, uncertainty and doubt will end up wrong. Twenty years ago we had a controversial close election that had to be decided by the supreme court. Plenty of people did not want to see Bush in the white house and the country did not collapse.

Honestly the media hating on Rogan isn't more complicated than getting eyeballs and ad revenue.

"How X makes you fat" or "Why X is more dangerous than you think" where X is something common and popular. In this case X is just Joe Rogan instead of coffee or chocolate.

Whenever I read about Joe Rogan on HN I wonder how many people have actually listened to one of his podcasts or are just mad/concerned he had X crackpot on his show.

You should check it out one day. It's not nearly as controversial or dangerous to society as apparently some people want you to believe. I found a coffee I really like from a guest he had on once.

Isn't the self help section one of the largest in the bookstore? I don't see any great mystery - cults of personality, money, power, genius - aspirational culture. As far as we know haven't those things always been part of human nature? You can put a negative spin on it and call it self-loathing or fetishism but for some people it's motivation.

The HN bubble is real and it's easy to be derisive but the OP you replied to doesn't seem to be a troll. Sincere people are easy targets for the cynical but the flawed opinions of real people are more interesting than whatever sanitized death waits by appeasing something like n-gate.

It's hard to define "a lot" for 2 reasons:

1. The human population is very large so even the smallest fraction is a sensational number.

2. Any death is a tragedy for someone, not the least the person who died.

This creates a situation where you have lots of people talking past each other.

Doesn't Tesla alone moving from CA to TX refute that considering they could probably afford to operate anywhere they want?

The parent did say editorial board but I would suggest that a criticism of the NYTimes in the same spirit that actually warrants attention is its board of directors. Many if not all of them are wealthy lifelong democrats.

I'm not trying to move the goal posts on you, just pointing out what I think was the original intent of the comment that - that left or right you should always follow the money.

I just finished a great book called "All the Shah's Men" about the history of the Iranian revolution. To have everything that happened in Iran boiled down to "countries invaded by, bombed by or had coups instigated by the USA, since the end of the Korean War" is really a stretch lacking basically all context.

As a casual reader of history I always thought US interference in Iran was a pretty clear cut example of wrong doing but now I'm not so sure.

I can't speak on the other examples in that image but knowing more now about Iran it makes me question the narrative of the nefarious motivations behind US interference.

Originally I was more in favor of phpbb style forums and anti likes/favorites/upvotes but I've abandoned that attitude.

I really think it's the same as it ever was. If you want to find quality you need to start with your interests and then find a community from there. Discovering a huge community and being frustrated or upset that it's not catered to your preferences is a mistake. The lower the barrier to entry, the lower the quality of the forum will be.

And it's important to remember barrier to entry isn't just technical knowledge. Barrier to entry could be something as obvious but unspoken as writing style. Even as I'm typing this comment I'm aware that using my "hacker news voice" with all of the attendant style rules that make it fit with the community.

*edit: also I'm sorry to see that you are being downvoted because I get your sentiment

I get your general breakdown but my issue is somewhere in between.

I never use the tiktok meme machine part of reddit anymore. As you mentioned I do have a bunch of smaller hobby subreddits that I only visit on my locked down oldreddit RES configured personal devices.

My problem comes when I'm not on my own machine/device and I'm trying to troubleshoot with "xyz question site:reddit.com" through google and get bogged down in new reddit or app reddit. It's really infuriating the way new reddit compresses threads to only a handful of magically prepicked comments out of possibly hundreds. You have to remember everytime to click to load the entire comment section just to browse the UX abomination they created.