Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

supernuclear.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 517 posts

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#411

Post by bonoboTP »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #299

For the political side of this, a good next step is to have a few peoples assemblies anyone can attend, where issues are voted on. In my ideal world, these votes would be the "law" of the land. But currently, you'd have to send the results to whatever government is in power. What is and isn't allowed in a particular area should be decided by the local community.

If you do it too often, you won't get a representative picture of the entire community just those who have both time on their hands and either an ax to grind or are somehow very invested. This is a very typical failure mode. The people who are extremely active in such matters don't have an average personality profile. You know what I mean if you've ever used Nextdoor. Also if there are constant meetings and votes, regular people won't know when something important is being decided. It's a typical trick to hide important stuff among lots of other minor things to overwhelm the regular working person and make it impossible to track what's going on. Make the votes frequent enough to be able to course correct if people are dissatisfied, but rare enough so that people can know when they really need to focus on this topic. Maybe choosing a mayor and local representatives every 4 years is too rare, but I also wouldn't want my neighborhood decisions to be captured by some small clique of "in-crowd" who invest hours and hours into getting things there way and obscuring what's happening.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#412

Post by lanfeust6 »

dfltr wrote: post #55
non- wrote: post #39

When people say "you can just do things" this is what they mean. Fun article, I hope everyone reading this who wishes they had something like it in their neighborhood starts this weekend by inviting their nearest friend for coffee on the stoop.

These people are anarchists! No really, they are. The stoop coffee to "It takes the hood to save the hood" pipeline is real.

"anarchism is when you talk to your neighbors and do things that don't require permission in the first place"

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#413

Post by volkk »

timerol wrote: post #17
volkk wrote: post #15

i think there's a really valuable app/site to be made that involves discovering people or handling communications literally on your block (i.e hyper local neighborhood). nextdoor is the 1.0 of this that introduced the concept but poorly, and i'm still waiting for a 2.0 i guess it doesn't have to be an app, since whatsapp can handle most of this, but there's a discovery piece that would be missing that this app can so…

I could not disagree more strongly. I would be appalled at using an app for something better accomplished by a flyer or drinking coffee in front of my house. People live in physical space. "How do I talk to my next-door neighbor?" is not a problem that the internet should be helping with

clearly this isn't working given that this post is highly upvoted as some kind of feat that people sat outside and talked to their neighbors. no one talks to each other, and either way you look at it, certain apps get people out there. love them or hate them, dating apps have made for plenty of encounters possible that otherwise wouldn't be. you can make the argument that they've made society worse, and I might agree with that, but we're already here. we're in the internet/device era where people rely so much on them that we might as well make better versions of the bad ones. i think there could be ways to do it well without making another nextdoor. just needs optimism and imagination

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#415

Post by lolinder »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #400
lolinder wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but when people say that they usually mean "areas that follow a post-war suburban style of development". Think culdesacs and no sidewalks. Define people? When most people I know say suburb they mean this: You're far enough the urban core that you probably have to drive to get to shops and jobs, but close enough to the urban core that you don't pass through farmland to get there. Some suburbs are like what you descr…

I mean, you’re making the same sort of NTS argument here, aren’t you? > Some suburbs are like what you describe, but most are exactly like what OP links to. Without defining what constitutes a suburb, how can you argue that most are good? Your argument hinges on your own definition of suburb IMHO. I’m not sure what the right answer is, but in my experience most people mean post-war development patterns when they talk…

No, I'm not, because I'm not saying that what you are identifying as a suburb isn't a suburb, I'm saying it's not representative of all suburbs. I provide a perfectly valid definition:

> You're far enough the urban core that you probably have to drive to get to shops and jobs, but close enough to the urban core that you don't pass through farmland to get there.

Since my definition is broader it's less susceptible to NTS fallacies. What you identify as a suburb is a suburb but it is not all suburbs.

> but in my experience most people mean post-war development patterns when they talk about suburbs

Even this is too broad to sweepingly say all suburbs are bad. I've lived in 5 different suburban neighborhoods as an adult, 4 of which were developed post-war, and all had sidewalks and plenty of walking around and neighborly interaction.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#416

Post by nathancahill »

czhu12 wrote: post #94

Really heart warming story. My 2 cents: The group is at a critical point now, having ~100 Whatsapp members. From what I've seen this creates a chilling effect where you inevitably end up with cliques and social cooling. No new members will feel like they can actually send a message into a 100+ person group, while the old guard starts to use it as a notification board, rather than a real chat. Eventually, newer member…

The WhatsApp group isn't the point though, seems largely secondary. This would continue to exist with or without the group.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#417

Post by sfnative88 »

I just feel the need to point out how ridiculous the lack of socio-economic diversity appears to be in these images. California and the Bay Area specifically is suffering and this kind of privileged whimsical time-killing project comes off as insanely tone-deaf. To me at least. Just my opinion as someone born and raised in that city.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#418

Post by BurningFrog »

ghaff wrote: post #348
xattt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the entire thesis of Jane Jacobs’ work: urban living works because of friction-by-design. Inadvertent interactions between people you see every day build a sense of community over time — the “sidewalk ballet”. I always wondered what she would have thought about her ideas in the context of COVID.

In the context of a lot of discussions here, Jacobs also seemed to believe in community driven development. Yes, she helped stop some highway development that many people here would (mostly rightly) hate. But a lot of people here would also consider her a NIMBY--even a fairly strong one--for supporting the right of communities to drive their own development whatever outsiders might desire.

The hostility to outsiders is usually also part of the community spirit...

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#419

Post by losvedir »

afavour wrote: post #2

> my husband Tyler and I wanted that sense of community that feels like it’s only possible in the suburbs, but we believed we could achieve this while living in San Francisco. This genuinely threw me because in my experience the suburbs are the antithesis of this, just lots of people occupying neighboring space and rarely talking to each other. Still, a heartwarming story all the same. And yes, this is _exactly_ what…

> This genuinely threw me because in my experience the suburbs are the antithesis of this, just lots of people occupying neighboring space and rarely talking to each other.

This post and the comments here are genuinely interesting to me, because it shows how much people have different experiences in "suburban" and "urban" living. That, in turn, puts a whole new spin on everything I read about NIMBYism and urban development and whatnot. People don't even have a shared basis for what a city or suburb is and totally different experiences in each, so it calls into question how well we can even agree on or communicate what we want!

Personally, having lived over (urban: Manhattan, Boston, suburban: Houston-ish, Chicago-ish, rural: California, Missouri), I tend to agree that suburbs are the sweet spot for knowing your neighbors to some degree. In my Manhattan apartment, I lived in a tiny studio crammed into a building with tons of other people who I never met. In my rural living, people were mostly too far apart to mingle. In my suburbs, we were "friendly" with people about 6-7 houses in either direction, and front or back.

I live now in what I'd call a suburb (along this street: https://maps.app.goo.gl/7VfBtjzq3fMJRGXL9), and there's lots of people frequently "going for walks". There's not that much to walk _to_ but people are generally pretty active when the weather is nice, and so you run into your neighbors a fair bit. I'd say I know by name the families (so, multiple people) of about 10 houses in my near vicinity, and have the cell phone numbers of a handful.

I love this stoop coffee idea, and am going to have to try it here with my wife and kids.

Re: Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

#420

Post by kennyq »

theyinwhy wrote: post #387

I know this is offtopic but why are people pushing Whats App? They could have used Signal just as well. Privacy literacy seems to be neglected so so much.

I've been thinking about this throughout the day and I'm not sure that I agree that Signal is a good candidate for this kind of communal group.

Firstly, Signal doesn't have a way of separating topics. Sure, you can have multiple groups that are loosely linked together but it's not really seamless.

Secondly, Signal's permission controls are lacking. Let's say you have a Signal group dedicated to posting meet-up details. You'd only want to allow trusted participants to be able to post. This can be done in Signal by making it so that only admins can send messages. However, admins can strip other admins of their role which means one rogue user can ruin the group.

With that said, I completely agree that WhatsApp really isn't ideal from a privacy standpoint. I especially dislike the fact that any participant can find out the phone number of anyone else.

I'd personally prefer something like Matrix for this purpose but onboarding strangers onto Matrix just sounds like a real nightmare.

Post reply on HN