HN Reader

It's the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it's much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression.

You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There's also the interesting effect that people will give you their innermost secrets, knowing you won't tell anyone (I actually met a serial killer who did this, heh). For instance I was on a long haul flight earlier this year, and my neighbour told me everything about her divorce. Like a kind of therapy.

I also find when I have a real disagreement with someone, it's a lot easier when you're face-to-face. For instance, I have friends who are religious, in a real way, ie they actually think there's a god who created the earth and wants us to live a certain way. Being there in person keeps me from ridiculing them like I might on an internet forum, but it also keeps them from condemning me to hell.

So folks, practice talking to people. Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.

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/science/article/pii/S235215462...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795362...

https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/hate-lies-and-loneliness-f...

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 concentration and almost get brain-fog from the distracting content moving around.

Please provide more accessible versions of websites if you're going to override the default behavior. I couldn't make it 10 seconds before having to close the tab.

This is the third time this is posted and the first time this makes it to the front page. I’m glad it finally got some attention!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44443348

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269179

One of the problems with their "better / worse" statistics: Bad interactions tend to outweigh good interactions. I think the rule of thumb is that 4:1 good/bad ratio in a relationship is "breakeven" where the relationship will stay neutral; higher than that and things get better, lower than that and things go south.

So if you could talk to a stranger, and there's only a 20% chance you'll feel worse, a lot of people would still not consider it worth the risk.

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 be a sequence of beautiful slides. They might prototype it as a Keynote presentation that is approved by management. And then some poor web developer gets tasked with building a site that feels like the Keynote slide show that everyone loved, and the only way to do that is to turn scrolling into an annoying "next slide" action.

In my family we usually travel to many parts of the world, and we have been compiling a series of anecdotes, when we take a taxi or an Uber, we ask the taxi driver different aspects of the city then always asking him some anecdote, funny or strange, that he has had in his life as a taxi driver.

And we have collected a large number of funny stories that we constantly bring up when we are at a party.

For example, the story of the Argentine taxi driver who, when he received some Danish tourists, they realized that they had forgotten a suitcase at the airport, but since they had an Apple tracker, they started looking for the suitcase with the help of the police and it turned out that the suitcase was in the trunk of a car belonging to another police officer, unbelievable right?

Or the story of the London taxi driver who, being tired after a long shift, picked up an old lady for the last trip and the old woman lay in the back seat and fell completely asleep, when the taxi driver turned to his rearview mirror and no longer saw anyone behind he thought: "What am I doing ? I'm driving alone, I am too tired." so he decided to go home. When he got home the old lady woke up and thought that the taxi driver was kidnapping her, and called the police.

Incredible stories and anecdotes are collected when you start talking to strangers and they feel confident expressing their ideas.

It's part of living, talking to strangers is very satisfying.

There is a huge selection bias there. People who are very disagreeable and hard to talk to tend to not participate in such a thing. Of course the average participant was open to talk to somebody and connect.

  "In 2014 in the 2014 study on Illinois trains and buses reach our searchers followed up with people who were asked to talk to strangers The people who predicted they wouldn't enjoy the experience. What these participants reported back was almost no rejections, pleasant conversations, and an overall positive experience."

This is basically fear the emotional pain of rejection or embarrassment, brought on by a fear of the unknown.

Between 18 and 24 months old, we begin to develop the 'ability' to feel embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, etc. This is self-consciousness, a part of self-awareness. Embarrassment, shame, etc have important functions. They signal a violation of social norms. This helps create and reinforce the interpersonal boundaries and rules that govern how we deal with people in society.

When you perceive others are observing you, you imagine what their impressions of you will be. If it's a stranger, a lot of people jump to a negative conclusion. Part of this is a mirror of how we see other people. Part of it is a human heuristic to fear the unknown, which keeps us alive in the jungle. And part of it is you making a snap judgement about what kind of person someone is based on how they look or what environment you're in.

So when you're afraid that talking to a stranger will be a negative experience, really you're just trying to avoid getting eaten in the jungle by someone you fear. But we aren't in a jungle - we're in a society, with rules, laws, and norms. There is no threat to a conversation. And, as the study shows, your fears are usually unfounded. So go ahead and strike up a conversation with a stranger - it's safe.

I know this is 100% not the point of this post, but I really dug the little ASCII animations of the post. I'd love to know how they did that.

I always liked the idea and practice of what they called "rejection therapy" at the time.

Probably builds high-bandwidth, interpersonal muscle like nothing else?

Just an observation, not a mean critique about the project or even the conclusions.

There's 180 participants.

There's 26 people marked at "very liberal", which is 14% of the sample.

There's 39 people marked at "very conservative", which is 21% of the sample.

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Then we have 31 people marked as liberal, which is 17% of the sample.

And we have 63 people marked as conservative, which is 35% of the sample.

That already I would say is kind of an issue: more than a third of the sample are conservative people and 17% are their liberal 'counter part' or 'equivalent' (sorry for my wording, I'm not native speaker).

---

If we do a little additions we therefore have:

39+63 = 102, which means that 56% of the sample is conservative

31+26= 57, which means that 31% of the sample is liberal

The rest of the sample are centrists or "neutrals" (whatever this means)

---

I am NOT saying that the study is invalid I am not saying that it's poorly done

However, I think it's fair to say that the sample is skewed towards people with conservative views, by a HUGE amount, not just "a little bit".

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Aside from this: amazing UI design, I'm jealous and admirative of the results ^^

I love this study and the presentation - first time I’ve not hated the hijacking of scrolling on a website.

But I shudder at the thought of the new AI product that this data will inspire or train.

It’s gotten to the point that I see any significant collection of data about humans as a low-key threat to humanity.

I think spending 30 minutes with a stranger can be surprisingly powerful. You never know what perspective, idea, or connection might come from an unexpected conversation. I remember that once spent 30 minutes with a stranger at a cafe who turned out to be a trader in a completely different market than mine. In that short conversation, I picked up a few strategies and a perspective on risk management I’d never considered before. It reminded me that sometimes the most valuable insights come from unexpected places and just half an hour with the right person can change how you approach your work.

Pretty sure I read somewhere that many people prefer Waymo over Uber because there's no driver, which kinda contradicts these findings.

How about HN users? Do you typically enjoy chatting with an Uber driver?

If this "30 minutes with a stranger" experiment was performed during the pandemic, it could be that people were short on human connection at the time, and that explains why they valued it so much.

The Pudding is such a cool publication. They have incredible research and dataviz, in particular on cultural topics but not only. It’s worth subscribing to their newsletter. Glad to see them there!

Beautiful. I have certainly noticed that, at work, despite my desire to be efficient, without this sort of thing, it becomes unbearable no matter how interesting the actual work is.

Great visualisation ! We need more of this "social glue" since that's what keeps society together.

UI Feedback - I was having trouble figuring out what to do with the website, possibly due to the lack of text. I was tapping everywhere just to find the interactive areas (invisible buttons: who invented flat UI without shadows to hide all the interactivity?), and it took me some time to realize the website was scrollable (invisible scroll bars: who thought hiding the scrollbars without any indication of scrollable content was a good idea?). These issues are typically not the fault of the website, but rather the general UI/UX trends we have accepted nowadays. I’m using Firefox on Android.

Regarding social media - it has created more gaps rather than making us more social. It's ultimate goal is to capture our attention for as long as possible rather than connecting us. And lately, with the celebrities populating it, it has become a showoff/bragging machine.

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!

On a site designed like this where I tend to not notice the scroll bar, I usually just click on the things I see to try and make something happen. In this case, not much happens from clicks (because the site desperately needs a graphic to encourage you to scroll), so I quickly lose interest and bail.

Very cool design. I would love to listen to those conversations that grinded to a halt. I saw one profile where their affect before was 9, at beginning was 6, by middle and end was a 1. Their partner went from 7 to 8. Is it miscommunication or misunderstanding of how they were perceived?

For us that spend a lot of time on the internet, it's easy to forget that most people are not that different from you. I believe comments online, on Hacker News on otherwise, tend to be made by people with fairly extreme views - you have to feel something very strongly to shout your opinion into the internet! But most people are, well, normal, including you. Step out of your bubble every now and then and you'd be surprised at what good may come out of it.

I can't read it like this. It's just too much work.

I'm surprised with how most of the people that felt worse after the conversation seem to be paired with someone that felt better after the same conversation. I would expect any negative feelings to be reciprocal so I wonder what happened in these interactions...

Not a fan of fancy websites, but this one really hits the nail on the head.

It's telling about society how much of these conversations revolve around work. It makes sense, since it's where we spend most of our time, but at the same time a lot of people are not happy at work. Recently I've been avoiding this type of smalltalk because it has this pattern that starts with "and what do you do for a living". I'm trying to make the world a better place is not usually the answer. I wish it gets normalized to ask "what do you like to do in your life" as a first question. I like to cook and fix bicycles and in general do something practical.

it's so refreshing to see this kind of content in HN :*)

There have been a few of these types of website designs on science/popular science topics, while very cool at first then the novelty fades - I wish they just get to the point.

After moving to a new city I desperately need this in my life. Something like omegle but more serious.

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/

Such a minor thing but I absolutely love the way the faces / avatars are rendered here. Just characters in a PRE tag. Gives me Commodore 64 vibes. I'd love to know how they came up with those and put it all together.

I see a lot of people complaining about the scrolling thing but I don't get why, can someone explain?

Don't scroll too fast, the cards with texts won't show if you do and then you'll miss it

The Pudding is one of the bright spots of the internet for me. Does anyone have any recommendations for other new / blog interestings websites on the same level?

I have a laptop coil whine that syncs animation on that page exactly :O

That makes me scared of both modern webdev and hardware quality.

Chatroulette was on to something. But is it still full of men exposing themselves?

Hello

This is interesting, but I’m curious how much of the effect is due to getting paid $15, and how much the data was affected by the fact that everyone was isolated in COVID lockdown at the time.

Hi

There's something comforting about conversations with strangers. It gives me a feeling that we are all in this together.

One subtle effect of living as a visible minority is people assume you can't speak the local language. Even in minute everyday moments like stepping into a crowded elevator people avoid saying a few words. No one means any harm but it can feel surprisingly isolating. Almost like everyone else is in some grand linguistic conspiracy against you.

For those interested in the subject, recommend the book The Power of Strangers by Joe Keohane that covers this with further depth. Worth reading!

A good conclusion at the end. I'm right now going to therapy, feels good and helpful. But remembering recent experience (before therapy), I can say that I am very similar to the wounded in the sense that even thinking of making a new acquaintance, I evaluated people with suspicion. Now, during therapy, I'm all for new acquaintances and even started taking the first steps towards it.

I've been interested in this general question for a while. Years ago I ran a startup that connected strangers for spoken conversations. After tests, we kept it to audio only - no video, no text, no profile info. That was what kept the conversations civil. Add video, or text, or profiles and behavior changed (basically became a dating site). Results: F-M talks were only about 10% longer than F-F and M-M talks.

(Longer-term we focused on connecting people recovering from serious health issues.)

Wow the web design's amazing

A perfect blend of design, empathy, and data

this is the best thing i have seen in a while

It looks nice and I really want to engage with the page further but since my time is limited today and I'll have forgotten about this by tomorrow: What's the tl;dr?

I'm ready

Nice project, although often the text falls off the screen of my phone.

"They reported feeling better"

Has anyone ever controlled for the fact that people lie? Especially about how they feel. Furthermore, people don't even know how they feel half the time.

How do you even measure this?

This has been one of the best things I've read in a while. I hope it is real :)

I have significant social anxiety and was bullied much growing up, but I painstakingly built a small but close group of friends as a teenager and into my 20s. At the same time, the Internet was changing everything, I thought for the better, and goodness it really did seem like it made things much easier for me. Like my meatspace friends, I fell into a familiar pattern of carefully constructing a consistent circle. More often than not this translated into online friends becoming IRL friends.

Then social media happened. Again, that feeling that this makes things so much easier for me. Occasionally I noticed I was not carefully curating friends anymore, I was unwittingly in a race to collect acquaintances and to attract attention. But I’m working at a startup, I don’t have time for the old ways! I stopped seeing people so much (even old friends and family), it seemed we had nothing to talk about because everything was already posted online. I’m spending more and more of my time arguing with strangers, who I see as little more than NPCs, through distant connections. I’m getting more angry, feeling more hopeless and alone, disliking people more, and finding myself brimming with hostility governed by a hair trigger. I am thinking about moving to a more remote place with my wife to get away from people.

This is what social (and mainstream traditional, I suppose) media has wrought. It’s hard to say if it was always intended to be this way, but the truth is all sorts of malevolent individuals and groups picked up on its ability to divide and conquer us unlike any propaganda tool in history, so it certainly is now.

I few years ago I killed all my accounts (except this and one other thing… I do still feel a need to find and connect with interesting people, but sparingly and only where I feel relatively in control). I started calling people and trying to hang out in person again. I have even found myself daring to talk to strangers, even when I know we are on completely different ends of the ideological spectrum. And much like the subjects in this article, I almost always feel better. I am rediscovering the terror and joy of making friends and temporary acquaintances again.

Words to the effect of "we live around people who act and feel like us":

Yeah, but maybe not for the reasons you think. I'm not sure the reasons are a priori discoverable, although they can be revealed by statistics. Or to put it another way "is it something in the water, or new car smell?" So something happens in groups which amplifies similarities.

The State of Washington collects voting results by precinct, and precinct sizes are typically in the hundreds of voters.

* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/36th-dist-colored.html

The distributions are not normal.

* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/dist-not-normal/distributi...

What got me started with this was King County making their canvass available in digital form. At the time I was feeling bored and like I needed some additional exercise, and publishing a quarterly zine and knocking on doors and delivering it to everyone in my precinct seemed like a natural thing to do; I had the thought that I might be able to see some effect, of some kind, in the canvass for my precinct (just a rather arbitrary notion, I like measuring things). As I kept doing this over a number of years it gained the attention of the established political order.

Anyway I started clustering the results because I had the software, and hammer... nail.

* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/perl/data-index.cgi?imagem...

One of Cialdini's "weapons of influence" is "liking", and again that may not mean exactly what you think it does. There was contemporaneous research going on about this. One of the notions was that you would be more likely to sway people who were "like" you. So where do you find these people? Well, maybe in precincts which vote similarly to yours. So this raises an issue for politicians: maybe they should identify people who are on their side in places where they are weak and prevail on those people to talk to their neighbors. Just a thought. But the reality was that trying to get for instance a "90%-er" to go to actively meet and court "40%-ers" was like asking them to lick dog vomit. On the other hand I used cluster correlations to identify an "like" precinct in another part of the City and took a walk; I was shocked at how similar it was in terms of physical features. I know, I know, confirmation bias.

* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/perl/cluster-correlate.cgi...

I suppose it does take a certain mindset to make knocking on stranger's doors a good time; and I don't know that that is a good idea everywhere. But I like talking to strangers, hearing their stories, and flipping each other shit. It's a skill which has served me well in my life.

To me, talking to strangers is like not flexing that judgment muscle we keep on, while also gaining different perspectives and learning.

I remember the days using chatroulette :)

How do I load this into a database and query it with an LLM? I applied to get access to the dataset as a random. Guess I just have to wait and see what they say.

In addition to the fascinating content, this is a very cool way to present it.

I wish it would be normal scrolling.

Jh