> People I knew made vague threats that I would regret leaving or talking about it. A roommate of mine stopped telling me where he was going when he left the house. Friends whom I trusted contacted me and played stupid about their own involvement in order to suss out what I knew. I can't say with confidence that Nonchalance encouraged this behavior, but they should have been able to predict it.
What kind of person regularly interacts with so many people that several of them – "people", "a roommate", and "friends" – are part of some secret society and feel the need to start bothering her about no longer partaking?
Hell, I'm lucky if I can find one person I know to play Words With Friends. And none of them would notice or care if I stopped playing, they'd just assume I got busy or something, like every other middle-class 30-something with a job.
I guess this is a wealthy socialite thing? Reading this feels so foreign to me.
Wealthy socialites don't have roommates. This reads like the author is in college or fresh out, where school friends + roommates + roommates' friends + parties + nights out = interacting with a lot of people.
I think it is young person with many friends thing. Roommate suggest either college student or someone not wealthy - wealthy people have own apartments. They are probably all members of the same social group.
I would love to have this restarted but as a cooperative and with only the people who refused or left Latitude because of the power/information asymmetry. Or those types of people. They saw the problem and acted even when being a member must have been a lot of fun and it must have been painful to be left out.
The mystery and social connections from something like this are great, the number of people obviously using it to play out some power fantasy are not. Do you want cults? Because that's how you get cults.
Kat Meler's quote "I'm more for 'surprises' now, I think. A surprise is a secret that everyone agrees will only last for a finite time, and will ultimately be gifted and shared." is a great lesson to learn from this.
I wish there were more (co-ed) fraternal organizations without the cult aspects. You know — a nice house, a pretty flag, a space to hang out and talk about interesting things. There's a certain social niche that just doesn't get filled by jobs or single-purpose meetups. Reading about this startup feels me with a deep sort of longing, despite knowing that it's a corporate construct.
Wow, I can't believe the cynicism and bile in this thread. Even the title of the submission!
I didn't get to participate in this game, but I played in a elaborate plot-based scavenger hunt that some friends of mine in San Luis Obispo spent months (and thousands of dollars) planning. It was incredible, and I feel very special and honored to be one of the relatively few people invited to participate. Many months later some of the semi-permanent fixtures left behind caused some controversy and confusion in the papers: http://www.sanluisobispo.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/artic...
I had the kind of fun that you only get when someone burns a huge chunk of their life and treasure to make something for you. It's pretty clear from reading the vice article that the Latitude Society was a similar project. I live in SF and somehow completely missed the opportunity to participate, but I'm pretty sure I would have loved it.
Years ago EA tried to create a game called Majestic. It was an interactive fiction that interrupted you in the middle of your day, kinda like this. They screwed it up by doing things like playing "This is a a game." at the beginning of phone calls you would receive (thanks, legal), but it would be pretty lame to be reading headlines on HN bashing "EA's for-profit alternate reality game".
> I heard from a Nonchalance employee that Jeff had said he thought we were "entitled," that he was angry because he'd given us a $2 million gift we didn't appreciate properly.
This is the heart of the matter, I think. While it's speculation, it appears what went wrong is that Hull failed to delineate the 'business' from the rest of it.
The way he feels would strike me as odd (at best) if I hadn't experienced something similar myself. More than once.
On at least two occasions (the rest are vaguer) I started some business venture where the impetus was largely philanthropic/idealistic. Both times the end result was messy for everyone involved and largely unproductive. While the specifics were different, I think the main reason why things went South was that I mixed business with pleasure. I shat where I ate.
I'm not saying it's impossible or inadvisable to turn your dream into a business, or do business that you enjoy too, or start a business with your romantic partner for that matter. Rather, I think it's crucial to clearly delineate, and write down on paper, and discuss with everyone involved, which parts of the endeavor are business and which are not. And perhaps more importantly to discuss whether it's possible to separate these things in the first place.
A fascinating story that manages to make up for an abomination of a website.
I found the comparisons between then the social networks of Latitude and digital social networks the most interesting. The failure of Latitude seems to be in (of course, perfect) hindsight due to the differences in cost between digital and "human" social networks. To support Latitude, the costs had to be raised far higher than it's user could support. Facebook of course just makes you pay with your eyeballs and your privacy. Both of which are evidently less dear to us than the cash in our wallets.
I can't help but take the human social network as an organization idea farther. I mean it in the best possible way when I point out that every time I go to church there is a point in time in which everyone is asked to give what nominally should be a significant amount of their income to the church to keep it operating. ( Not to mention the sermons we sometimes get could put NPR to shame...) All these networks also need funding to survive, this is not a problem that was unique to Latitude, but an organizational restraint that all social networks that rely on the "sneakernet" primarily instead of the internet face. And, it's one that they've solved.
The issue is trying to incorporate normal startup methods of monetization, or attempting to gather users in a typical software startup way before you even try to monetize. Facebook could do this because the cheapness and "distance" of online behavior makes it simple, but as illustrated in the article, physical space is expensive and people are messy creatures who just soak up time being dealt with (I wonder how much damage or wasted time "jukebox-incidents" caused on a regular basis). Human social network startups -- if such a class exists, would be better served in my mind by copying how other well established networks such as churches spread, giving up control of that spread and monetizing that growth instead.
For instance, Latitude could of taken their most dedicated participants, such as the author of this piece, and given them (perhaps a minimum amount of) training in creating their own network and allowed the to go out as "seeds" into other neighborhood and cities where they would create their own "secret societies". Then, sell digital services, supplies and consulting to these new operators. I would characterize it as catalyzing an organically spreading human experience and profiting off the demand created by that spread instead of centralizing an experience, homogenizing it and profiting off how easily accessible the information from that experience is.
it was interesting to read that shortly after reading doctorow's new novel, 'walkaway'. having the book fresh in my mind really highlighted how asymmetry of ownership was built into latitude's dna, and was practically its raison d'etre.
the sad thing is of late this business model has become widespread - the party with capital to seed the enterprise wants to retain ownership and control, but they depend for a large fraction of their labour into selling volunteers the fantasy that they are part of "building something together". you often end up with a beautiful, vibrant structure emerging from the volunteers, which is then coopted (and all too frequently destroyed) when the owners try to assert their ownership by way of more explicitly capturing the created value.
You could just as well be talking about Couchsurfing. Surfing, at least for me, is near impossible because no one accepts my personalized, timely requests. A flood of people, with no profile description or references started using the site just to get free accommodations. The few free, community-driven events there are now, are mostly set up around drinking at night. The attendees list is now basically a FB-style "like" and no longer a sign that you're actually going to the event. Three to four years back, 9/10 events were free and made by other members. Now, 9/10 are "free" (donation required) or straight up paid, and run by small businesses.
This seems like it would've been incredibly fun, at least to me, though it does make me wonder if I'd have been willing to join in the first place. I'm also curious what other things like this exist out there in the world that I just don't know about.
Even though I've read this article before, the first thing I thought of this time was the Fyre Festival tweet that ended with "the real lesson we should take away is how easy it is to lure a bunch of rich people onto an island with no hope of escape"
edit: From Snctm website: "...all Gentlemen are required to wear a Tuxedo with Bowtie. Ladies shall be elegantly dressed in Evening Wear or Lingerie ... At Pool Party, Gentlemen are required to wear Shorts, while Ladies don Bikinis or Clothing Optional."
I was referring to the ... asymmetry in those rules. It is clear that when they screen for "esthetic appeal" and "professional status", those have different weights for different genders. That's the creepy kind of private sex/fetish club, not the cool kind.
Duh? If the "professional status" metric was applied equally to both genders, then the club would be 90% men, which is the gender ratio you want for a different kind of sex club.
Seriously? I mean the implication is that men are screened for wealth and women for attractiveness. The relative weights between wealth and attractiveness differ along gender lines. As in: rich men buy their way in to a club where they can sleep with, or at least look at, attractive women. As in: there is a hooker/john power dynamic at play here.
I don't mean to be insulting, I honestly thought I was being subtle in a fun, snide and understandable way but apparently I was not.
Off topic, but is anyone else having trouble loading and reading the article? I tried 3 times and the website is utterly unusable. Keeps sending me to the bottom of the page.
Same here, but they already got my page view, and don't really care if I read the piece too. I wonder if the random scrolling back-forth ensures all the banners get actual time on screen, to maximize ad income.
Arrow keys worked great for me, before I discovered that it was jerky for me too, which definitely distracted, it was frustrating to get to the end of the essay.
Yes, scrolls randomly past 500 other articles in Vivaldi (Chrome) on OS X. Why did anyone ever think allowing JavaScript to control scroll was a good idea.
Cannot read the site on mobile because it keeps randomly scrolling to the bottom of the page and loading new articles. Lools like borked infinite scrollong
Equally bad experience trying to read articles on vice. Scrolling is terrible, jarring, slow, find myself in the middle of a newly loaded article without realising.
Tend to give vice a miss now, which is a shame as quite enjoy some of there articles when I should be working
> People I knew made vague threats that I would regret leaving or talking about it. A roommate of mine stopped telling me where he was going when he left the house. Friends whom I trusted contacted me and played stupid about their own involvement in order to suss out what I knew. I can't say with confidence that Nonchalance encouraged this behavior, but they should have been able to predict it.
What kind of person regularly interacts with so many people that several of them – "people", "a roommate", and "friends" – are part of some secret society and feel the need to start bothering her about no longer partaking?
Hell, I'm lucky if I can find one person I know to play Words With Friends. And none of them would notice or care if I stopped playing, they'd just assume I got busy or something, like every other middle-class 30-something with a job.
I guess this is a wealthy socialite thing? Reading this feels so foreign to me.