It's not even just music anymore. I love motor racing, but at the last meeting I went to, sat in the stands at an iconic first corner, tense with anticipation as the race started... Everyone around me sat there holding their phones up, filming it. I couldn't even see properly because of the forest of arms. People don't just... experience... something now.
What's even more ridiculous is that this wasn't a small race - it was filmed, and broadcast live. Their many, many camera angles and drone shots and everything else are superb, much better than your phone would be. It's on YouTube live and available years later. Why do this? It made me so sad.
They are going to the event in order to broadcast to their friends (or their profile feed) that they have gone to the events. Once I understood this, it made sense why filming is the most important thing for them in the event. They are not there for the race.
Glad I left social media (if you don't count HN). It'll be almost a decade soon since I deleted all my accounts.
Its mostly about sharing it with friends and social media. I dont know why these people feel the need to do this either. The healthiest thing I did last year was quitting all (common) social media platforms like Instagram, reddit and stuff like that. Life is much slower and I dont feel the need to check my phone every few minutes anymore (I barely posted anything anyway).
I guess people are addicted to new notifications. They are lonely and drawn to human interactions and attention through social media because they are incapable of getting it through real life.
I guess people want to prove they were authentically there, experiencing it themselves instead of watching it on TV. And I sort of get it. When I'm on vacation, I like making my own photos of everything, even if professional photographers have already made hundreds of far better photos of it. Somehow the ones I made mean more to me. And I don't even share those photos on social media.
So on the one hand making your own photos and movies at events is less authentic than just experiencing it, and yet at the same time more authentic than relying on professionals to film it for you.
When I'm on vacation, I like making my own photos of everything, even if professional photographers have already made hundreds of far better photos of it.
I have found when looking a photos from 20 years ago, I skip most of the shots of only landscapes, buildings, etc. The only interesting shots are shots with the people that I travelled with in them. They bring back all the fond memories, the things we did together, etc.
So I now, when making pictures of sceneries try to do it as much with my fellow travelers in them.
As you say, others can make better pictures of the scenery.
Totally! And as a kid of a family who mostly took pictures of the monuments and landscapes, it hurts a lot to just see 3-4 pictures with us in it out of 24 (or 25-26 if you were lucky).
I still take pictures of monuments, or the sky, or the landscape nowadays with my phone, at least trying from some unusual or less common perspective, but I do take a lot of pictures of my family as well, especially in day to day moments. And print them, from time to time, in physical albums. It's just so different.
And as a kid of a family who mostly took pictures of the monuments and landscapes, it hurts a lot to just see 3-4 pictures with us in it out of 24 (or 25-26 if you were lucky).
Same, we went to the US a lot when I was a teenager. I have many good/fun memories of all the places we visited together, people we met, etc. A few years ago I went through some of the photos that my parents still have with about the same ratio of pictures with us in it. Random desert shots are even more frequent than people shots :).
I try to make memories. While you are correct that the people are what make the vacation, the time getting everyone to pose for a picture is wasting time they could use to make memories. Even if you are getting an action shot (and thus now posed) you could be out there playing with them instead.
Nothing with with a few photos. However make sure you are making memories not just getting photos of someone else.
Be aware that under various regulations, you're potentially already at risk of accusation in terms of unwarranted data retention. If you haven't got a good reason to have kept those email addresses, something like the GDPR might not interpret that favourably. While the GDPR doesn't specify actual time limits, they are expected to be proportionate. Financial records are generally 7 years unless otherwise legally required, so for a decade, you would be saying that these email addresses are more critical/valid than that. That may be the case, I don't know your business, but be careful if you don't want some very awkward questions asked. Just the hassle of having to deal with complaints you might get (and various regulators would take notice of 1 million instances) is likely to be more than it's worth for most.
The suggestion downthread to send a very clear "we still have your address, would you like to opt in to this newsletter, otherwise we'll remove it" is not a bad one, but even then, some people will object to you still having it at all.
People originally opted in and provided it expecting to get a newsletter on how to use the app. We never seemed to have the bandwidth to create a good enough one, so we never sent it. We kept improving the app until it became very good and still never sent the emails. But retained the addresses, so that one day we could tell people the app has improved, to give it a try, include animated GIFs of it in action and gradually educate them on ways to use it. For that I get chastizement on HN, figures.
Yes, there is a clearly valid business purpose under GDPR for retaining the email addresses of users who want to learn how to use your app better and opted in. If you plan to send a newsletter out.
Other than those voluntarily entered emails (which aren’t even linked to the user), we haven’t retained literally any information about our users, despite having millions of users download and use the app over a decade. Which is far beyond pretty much any social app I know. But almost no one actually cares.
I really wasn't trying to chastize, honestly it was intended as a friendly dollop of advice as someone who's dealt with this kind of thing. But since you have replied, I would say:
> Yes, there is a clearly valid business purpose under GDPR for retaining the email addresses of users who want to learn how to use your app better and opted in.
Relevance is likely to be seen as contextual. Someone wishing to do something a full decade ago is not likely to be seen as sufficient evidence to justify contacting them now in case they still wish to. That's a big chunk of the point about time-limiting data retention - the data gets less relevant and more problematic over time. I get that you're not trying to colour outside the lines here, but from the perspective of your users, and anyone looking at their potential complaints from a regulatory perspective, the window in which they reasonably consented to contact has closed (and probably some time ago).
The regulations are there, ostensibly, to protect consumers. They will be interpreted in that light. I can almost guarantee that if you sent an email to your downloader base 10 years after they last heard from you, being ignored will be the best case, and the worst will be reports to local regulators.
Is there an actual regulation or case law showing what the cutoff time is du jure?
I would be glad to respect it if there was.
As it is, laws do allow for things they didn’t explicitly prohibit, and especially good-faith things like welcoming people to try the free app again, which they themselves downloaded and asked to be exucated about, since it’s improved, and showing them how and why to use the improvements.
Yeah, that's fair enough, and it is annoying that there is rarely a specific time set in regulation (or even case law which is broadly applicable). Most regulatory bodies will tend to say things like "as short as required/possible" for retention, which is clearly open to interpretation [0].
I would personally see 10 years as "a long time" in this kind of context (although that may be contextual depending on what your product does, obviously). If you can honestly claim/show good faith, that is usually acknowledged, but my point was rather how it would be seen out of the blue from an organisation that has been silent for 10 years (my personal first thought would be "why the hell have they still got my information?", but I am well aware that I'm not the average).
Genuinely, I don't mean to imply bad faith on your part, only to suggest the reactions it may receive, and how careful you should be with your messaging.
>Is there an actual regulation or case law showing what the cutoff time is du jure? I would be glad to respect it if there was.
I'm sorry but what sort of BS excuse is that ?
The whole point is that YOU are supposed to know:
a) What data you have
b) What you need it for
It is simply not possible for data protection law to spell out an exact cut-off time because there are so many permutations.
For example, if its for tax reasons then you need to keep it for the duration dictated by tax laws.
But if its email addresses you randomly harvested a decade ago, I think every man and his dog would agree that a decade is too long. Even more so if there is a material difference in permitted use of the harvested address.
P.S. There is no such thing as "good-faith things" in GDPR legislation. Please don't make shit up.
I'm not entirely sure I can agree, although the premise is seductive in certain ways. We do lie to ourselves, but we also have meta-cognition - we can recognise our own processes of thought. Imperfect as it may be, we have feedback loops which we can choose to use, we have heuristics we can apply, we can consciously alter our behaviour in the presence of contextual inputs, and so on.
Being wrong is not the same as a hallucination. It's a natural step on a journey to being more right. This feels a bit like Andreesen proudly stating he avoids reflection - you can act like that, but the human brain doesn't have to. LLMs have no choice in the matter.
Very clearly put, and I'd only emphasise that without the final "enforcement" point of that, the other points become entirely irrelevant. While European regulators have imposed some significant sounding fines on prominent entities, they generally work out to be "less than the value gained by doing the thing in the first place" - or at least close enough to that for the entity to not consider it too negative/a future deterrent.
Unless you have some body which is a) serious about enforcement, b) sufficiently toothful to make a dent and c) not undermined by wider geopolitical posturing or economic neutering, you can have all of the regulation you might want and still end up in the same place. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't try and control this, but that we have some extremely large genies to stuff back into bottles along the way.
Yup, there's a huge number of entirely physical/analogue ways that "many hands" could make the world a significantly nicer and more sustainable place. Public works, environmental works, having the capacity to do more than the bare minimum for the quality of the built environment - there is no shortage of things worth doing, just things worth doing profitably.
Are those people cutting the grass/operating the elevators happier/unhappier than they would be otherwise? (I don't know, but perhaps you do). You seem to be strongly implying that this is in some way "wrong" rather than a subjectively different view of the purpose of human existence - for what reason? (I'll ignore the glazier example as it seems quite extreme, and also comes with more obvious/specific "victims").
>Are those people cutting the grass/operating the elevators happier/unhappier than they would be otherwise?
There are numerous studies that show menial labor leads to poor mental health. Perhaps these people employed as makework automatons are happier than they would be if they had no employment whatsoever and were destitute on the street, but these are not the only two alternatives.
>I'll ignore the glazier example as it seems quite extreme, and also comes with more obvious/specific "victims"
The "victims" at the Taj Mahal/department store are the visitors/customers who have to pay slightly higher prices as a result. While not as extreme as the glazier in the broken window fallacy, the grass cutters/elevator operators exist on the exact same spectrum.
I think what leads to poor mental health is varied - poverty is definitely one cause, presumably one which is lessened in this case. I completely agree with you that there are more than two alternatives, but society seems unwilling/unable to consider any of the more radical.
You could frame those visitors to the Taj Mahal as victims, but that takes quite a narrow and short-term view of value to them. Would the Taj Mahal be as pleasant a place to visit if it were in an even more unequal and precarious society than it is? We all pay for things that don't directly benefit us through taxation (usually). The childless pay for schools, the car-less pay for roads, but we benefit from the society that having them creates. It seems hard to say that those visitors to the Taj Mahal would not benefit from being in a more prosperous and sustainable society.
No I'm with you. There's an honest and an intent to it which I've always loved - plus an intent to do more with less in terms of form. No finicky detail to hide tricky areas, no taking of advantage of material to distract the eye - it stands or falls on form and function alone. I get why some may not like it, but for me it's a pure form of architecture. It's the building equivalent of a Dieter Rams, or a mid-period Olivetti. Beautiful.
There's absolutely mismanagement, and politicians could do an awful lot to change this. Ironically, in the UK at least, most of the reasons why they don't are due to historic regulations designed to protect either the fossil fuel industry or an initially weak green energy industry, which no longer serves any purpose except to push both households and businesses into decline.
What's even more ridiculous is that this wasn't a small race - it was filmed, and broadcast live. Their many, many camera angles and drone shots and everything else are superb, much better than your phone would be. It's on YouTube live and available years later. Why do this? It made me so sad.
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