If You Build It, They Will Come

// Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries

True in general. As a kid you think of things as bigger than you. Like whoever maintains a hiking trail or runs your towns diner is "big" compared to you.

As a grown up you hopefully realize that it's the other way - the work and effort to make and maintain those things is vulnerable and fragile.

I think about this whenever I see someone hop over the subway turnstile. The transit system is "for granted" - it's you and your few bucks that matters. But of enough ppl feel that way it all goes away via decay eventually.

America used to be awash with grassroots social institutions. I know an elderly gent who belonged to the Lions _and_ two similar organizations. When my mother was young, there were dances and dinners multiple nights a week. Which, for me, raises the question why weren't these things passed down? Why weren't the young a kind of apprentices to the old? That seems like the natural progression. But we see this generational rift in many areas of American life, including on the job training or something as practical as home cooking. It's like gazing into the past across a cataclysmic divide.

You really have to do it for the love of the game. It can be surprisingly vulnerable to be the social fabric, and it’s super easy to fall into various toxic inner dialogs when you’re busy and others don’t pick up the slack, or if others don’t reciprocate the effort, or worst of all when others don’t include you for whatever reason.

> Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries.

I feel like this generally applies a lot in life, and most people generally sees themselves as passive consumers when it comes to most things. You can just do things, even if people look at you weird or say your weird, even in public, and nothing really changes when they say/think those things about you. Just enjoy life as much as you can, in the way you wish, without harming others.

“I’ve come to believe that part of today’s problem of social alienation is a problem of too many free riders.”

I started planning street festivals a few years ago. It’s now a lucrative and growing business for me. The demand for events at all scales vastly outstrips supply, and I think growing social isolation is part of the reason.

The free riders might seem like a problem to someone who just wants there to be events, but it is a huge opportunity to us who throw them.

This is indeed part of the something i've been internalising for quite a while. I've always felt i needed to improve my social circle by finding/making one, but i realised it's better to just have hobbies and skill sets that make me useful and relevant to a certain niche and then my circle would naturally arise from there.

It's also why i'm trying to participate more here, even with the crippling imposters syndrome that prevents me from contributing anything...It's so difficult actively participating in a group that seemingly got cultivated from a culture somewhat alien to my own upbringing.

This is very interesting. I never thought of myself as a “consumer” in that sense, but I guess it is 100% correct, I’ve always been a consumer and I have in fact taken things for granted.

I don’t see that changing, to be honest, but it’s interesting that this never even occurred to me. It seems so obvious in hindsight. Quite the blindspot.

Do not expect a reward, dude.

I spent 15 years building a local community, I had 10,000 daily users once, people recognized me on the street, then everyone left on a whim when Facebook made it easier to hang in one's own echo chambers.

I still think it was worth it.

Once in a while, I bump into a stranger, and they tell me how the found their only true love because of me, or how they landed a job that made them loads of money because I facilitated communication in our community. Other times... I barely escaped molestation by a disgruntled member once, and someone threw a glassful of Orval at me (yes, it really happened).

It was still worth it.

No, if you build it, they won't come. Most such projects never see adoption by users.

Reminds me of 2013 when I organized a TEDx, gosh so much work for absolute zero return. Also risk, what was I thinking?

". . . but our social scripts telling people to produce social fabric . . ."

The author of the article may benefit from reading "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam. Although it's now in a class of books on American history, it explores this topic in depth.

afaik, a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric." Of course, the Internet (or technology), by its nature, is actually collating society while keeping many comfortable through its economics, and thus the script is to keep isolated.

I also believe Jim Morrison, the lead of The Doors, made the prediction of technological music collation some 60 years ago.

This makes me realize I should show my appreciation to organizers more. It’s easy to take events for granted.

Thought it would be about feds breaking in because you built a nuclear reactor in your basement while exposing your neighbors to some radiation.

Good Toastmasters clubs are a good example of this.

Agreed. And, it's really not that hard to organize a simple event.

I used to talk myself out of it all the time, but have recently just been going for it. It's been great.

This sounds very American (in a good way to be clear). I wonder how this applies internationally.

This is entirely about social friction.

Blaming the people trained by the smartest people on earth (with population level ad sales and a/b testing) to reject friction until they start to feel it as a poison isn't their fault.

We built a low friction co-working space that was mostly a social club after work hours, and by reducing that friction even the most intense introverts ended up integrated.

It's not difficult it's just hard.

I think this is a little bit oversimplified and I don't know that it's even true at all. It's basically the opposite story of what's told by "Bowling Alone".

That book was written in the year 2000, when the author observed that institutions that previously provided social fabric were all dying. The United States used to have a robust web of institutions that provided social fabric and they have mostly all gone away, and they went away because people just stopped attending them, seemingly because of lack of interest. This was then proceeded by the "problem of social alienation" that this author is talking about.

This problem of social alienation was predicted long ago by the people who worried about the collapse of institutions that provided social capital.

As someone who does organize many group events, I can tell you that it's really hard to get people to show up. A good percentage of people bail last minute or don't respond to invitations at all. The problem gets worse the older people get as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

In 2026:

- If you build it (and it doesn't take off) then they won't come.

- If you build it (and it does takes off) they will come and compete with you to build their own.

>If You Build It, They Will Come

This is probably the worst advice I had ever heard in my life and has resulted in me wasting years of my life. It is not the act of building something that causes people to come. If you were to rent out a $10,000 venue for your awesome event. There isn't going to be some magic that causes people to come out let alone pay to let you recoup costs. Building something is the most expensive part of doing something and ironically has almost 0 effect in my experience in getting people to come. Getting people to come is purely a marketing thing and does not require an actual thing to even be built.

So many cool things were built and forgotten, or didn't get the attention or popularity they "deserved"

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no offence but i dont know what is this article doing on hackernews. looks like a diary entry at best.