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30 minutes with a stranger

pudding.cool

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Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#71

Post by skeezyboy »

hackboyfly wrote: post #38
willemlaurentz wrote: post #30

Following the book "The Power of Strangers" I once did an experiment with talking to random strangers, it is amazing what you'll learn from random conversations: https://willem.com/en/2023-10-13_hello-stranger/

I would like to do that but I live in Sweden, talking to stranger is considered rude. Would be cool if there were a serious version of those random cam chats like omegle.

> I would like to do that but I live in Sweden, talking to stranger is considered rude.

you all sound like a lovely bunch. is this a modern thing?

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#73

Post by koliber »

999900000999 wrote: post #62
alex-moon wrote: post #39

I'm increasingly convinced that social isolation is the single great social ill of our time. I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected. But so much of the hate simmering away like a pot about to boil over is the result of loneliness. The evidence on this is startingly clear. https://www.sciencedirect.com…

Had a chat about this with a friend yesterday. In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction. At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods. Not everyone, but just having a role…

I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it.

A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now.

Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did not do a good job advertising:

- I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it

- It was that cheap on sale? Too bad I did not hear about it a week ago.

- DeVaughn’s closed!? I completely forgot about that restaurant. They had great food.

- Why didn’t anyone tell me earlier that there is a tool for easily finding a time for a meeting.

Advertising can be valuable. When done right, it does not have to be intrusive or annoying. This does not mean that every job provides value, but not knowing about something can cause people to feel negatively. Marketing is telling people about things.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#74

Post by qnpnp »

saberience wrote: post #68

I know it's supposed to be fancy and cool looking but this sort of website design where you have to scroll and then the whole screen animates really bothers me. It actually gives me a headache to try and follow it versus normal scrolling behaviour and text. As soon as I start scrolling down and I can't scroll normally and images and text start flying around I feel a disturbing feeling in my head and lose concentratio…

Sometimes this is indeed merely "fancy" and vacuous, but other times it is a meaningful and more engaging way to present the content. I feel like this is an example of the latter.

Even if you're not a fan and would have done it differently, it seems a bit hard to understand what could be so bothersome that you have to close it in 10s...

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#75

Post by polotics »

saberience wrote: post #68

I know it's supposed to be fancy and cool looking but this sort of website design where you have to scroll and then the whole screen animates really bothers me. It actually gives me a headache to try and follow it versus normal scrolling behaviour and text. As soon as I start scrolling down and I can't scroll normally and images and text start flying around I feel a disturbing feeling in my head and lose concentratio…

Yes I definitely was interested but the form-over-function of this presentation just got me to drop out and not finish reading. I ended up passing the link to a LLM and asking "summarize this for me"...

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#76

Post by stavros »

999900000999 wrote: post #62
alex-moon wrote: post #39

I'm increasingly convinced that social isolation is the single great social ill of our time. I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected. But so much of the hate simmering away like a pot about to boil over is the result of loneliness. The evidence on this is startingly clear. https://www.sciencedirect.com…

Had a chat about this with a friend yesterday. In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction. At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods. Not everyone, but just having a role…

You can't afford to be alone in any society. Not in the monetary sense, but in the sense that it will make you depressed. The fact that many people don't realize this is troubling.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#77

Post by rorads »

saberience wrote: post #68

I know it's supposed to be fancy and cool looking but this sort of website design where you have to scroll and then the whole screen animates really bothers me. It actually gives me a headache to try and follow it versus normal scrolling behaviour and text. As soon as I start scrolling down and I can't scroll normally and images and text start flying around I feel a disturbing feeling in my head and lose concentratio…

I usually agree with this, but I make an exception for Pudding because they consistently do this and it’s kind of their brand to have really immersive JS art/media. But I have the benefit of having read and enjoyed their stuff before.

It’s probably a false distinction, but it feels different to a SaaS product offering page, or product launch, where I need to get information, compared to someone using JS to create art.

This whole article could be summarised in about 300 words, but I would have had very little emotional or conceptual enjoyment of it.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#78

Post by a5c11 »

a022311 wrote: post #46

As someone who is generally shy, this sparked some hope in me. I have a really stressful time meeting new people, I just have absolutely no idea what to say, I panic and I leave. Well done for the execution, it's a very nice way to reveal interactive content!

Same. However, I had a few encounters where I was scared initially that I won't know what to say, and the talk will be quiet and weird, but my freshly met partner was so into the chat that I had problems cutting into. It was fun. Remember that the other person doesn't want to be weird either and will try to maintain the chat, unless it's totally not interested.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#79

Post by federiconafria »

tjoff wrote: post #50
pavlov wrote: post #18

Really great design. This is the unicorn of fancy websites because for once, it actually makes sense to override browser's standard scrolling behavior. The 30-minute timeline on the right provides an obvious context for what you're navigating with the scroll actions, and you wouldn't be able to do that with a regular scrollbar. Usually scrolling overrides happen because the designers' mindset was that the site should…

Took me a really long time to realize that I should scroll. Because why would I? There is absolutely no indication that there is anything to scroll to. I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be. So I assumed it was a podcast, re-checking that I had audio on etc. But nope, so I checked anot…

I was going to say that somehow I knew I had to scroll the first time I entered. But I went back after reading your comment and I have no idea how did I find out the first time, there is no indication that there is content bellow.

Re: 30 minutes with a stranger

#80

Post by qcnguy »

koliber wrote: post #73
999900000999 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a chat about this with a friend yesterday. In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction. At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods. Not everyone, but just having a role…

I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it. A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now. Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did…

This is a common problem with "your job is bullshit" rhetoric. It says a lot more about the speaker than the people whose jobs they're criticizing.

The most famous example is David Graeber, an academic who wrote a whole book on what he called "bullshit jobs". He claimed over half of all jobs were bullshit. But of the jobs he identified as such, most of them were actually valuable (receptionist, lawyers, programmers doing maintenance work). He just didn't understand why other people valued them. And, he was an activist deploying flowery rhetoric to make an argument for far-left politics, which is why nearly all the jobs he identified were in the private sector. Ironically, the most obviously bullshit job revealed by his work was his own, but for some mysterious reason academic activists were not identified as people with bullshit jobs.

Lots of people noticed this. Some even did studies on it! They found that the number of people who said in surveys their jobs were useless was only 20%, and of those 20% a lot of them had jobs that were objectively not useless. Instead it was cleaners, janitors, garbage collectors and similar who tended to feel their jobs were useless. Clearly "work is useless" is simply a proxy for "I feel like a loser" and not an objective evaluation of whether the work actually provides value to others.

People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have.

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