If it was (more) moderated it would just be sterile, boring, and less true to reality. The entire point is to label areas with the most obviously applicable stereotype, and for that it's doing a great job.
I’m not sure why there’s such a high expectation of accuracy on something called “hood maps” that doesn’t use extensive moderation? Just move on if you don’t find it interesting or amusing.
I guess I didn't see a big "this is a joke" label on the site so evaluated it as I would any service purporting to provide maps - where accuracy is a P0.
There used to be something similar to this (was it called wikimapia?) back around 2008-2010 or so (maybe it's still around?) where people could up/down vote the tags and if the downvotes prevailed the tag would go away.
AFAIK there is no mechanism to artificially favor any particular view. There is only the thumbs up/down mechanism meaning what you see is what the userbase finds useful or amusing. It ain't that serious.
There is probably a good middle ground between amplifying and stifling.
You go to twitter, and ignorance is on blast. You try to get GPT to do anything non khaki non beige -- good luck.
Either extreme is harmful imo, but we haven't found a way to a happy medium because, guess what: "will anyone think of the investors/advertisers/lawyers/...?!"
Stop censoring, stop amplifying. Just reflect what is.
It's a great question, and I don't pretend to have an answer. Also, I was thinking bit more broadly than just Hoodmaps -- the amplification of nonsense (being generous here, amplification of vile, harmful misinfo is more like it) has been an issue across the "social" media landscape for years. Same goes for the corporate-y "sanitization" of everything into bland lumpy paste -- it's not a new phenomenon.
The one common thread I see there is ~money~ -- both the dark patterns that frontload incendiary garbage into feeds, and the ultra-conservative (as in, cautious and risk-averse) culture of large corps that stains their products, these are in effort to maximize profits / minimize losses.
It would be inaccurate to say for example "nobody wants to see musk's inane drivel" -- there are probably a handful of stans, sycophants, grifters and trainwreck-watchers who follow that aberrant humanoid. But the mutant has a megaphone, and projects his mental illness larger than life, on one of the major online platforms that reaches tens of millions. This is the sort of amplification I see as being harmful. It's out of proportion, and many of the users of that platform seem to reject it.
A little website tagging neighbourhoods? As long as no one there has the power to override what people put in and force their own individual opinion to the front? Let it be! So what if some nancy wrings her hands that a neighbourhood is tagged with a racial slur? Maybe it was someone from the very neighbourhood who tagged it as such. Who draws the line and where, regarding what is permitted? If something really transgresses against major social mores, people will shun it.
We've got to remember we don't all ever agree on nothing -- different groups, different cultures hold different values. Don't muzzle people because you don't like what they say -- but at the same time, don't multiply their voice; especially not those who aim to start fights.
obviously if they support the view point of the reader they are well informed. If they don't they are ignorant. Its my understanding thats how the internet works.
What do you look for when using this to decide where to move?
Looking at cities near me, I see things like "suburban kids trying to be urban", "we cute here", and "stroller mommies who brunch", alongside some racist stuff. I'm not sure how to use that information when making a life-changing decision like moving to a new city.
Bakfiets moms, International School kids, wannabe TV stars, hipsters, tourists are all useful signals. I'm an international parent who ride a bakfiets and likes art but does not want to be a tv star :-)
Of those three examples I gave? No issue at all, why do you think there is one?
>and somewhat useful.
I don't see how they are useful when deciding on where to move. Can you explain how you find them somewhat useful in the context of moving cities? How are you factoring in "we cute here" into your relocation decision?
I had an identical experience: in my area all of the comments were disparaging ethnic groups and having lived here my entire life the specific groups targeted were not even accurate.
To me it feels like a place to vent about an "other" you suspect may or may not be there.
Same. I live in a poor neighborhood but it has two dope parks, a swimming pool, cool places. The map tells me I'll get murdered at the streets I cross literally every day and night
'dope park' might not be a clear term. I think you mean excellent parks, but my mind immediately went to parks where you might accidentally step on a hypodermic needle.
My town has both types of parks, with a little overlap in the venn diagram.
Has anybody used dope to mean drugs since the early 90s? Even then it could weirdly mean heroine or marijuana, which I'm guessing why it fell out of use.
No, but a lot of HN is (former) kids that had to sit through D.A.R.E for 12 years of school. "dope" immediately means "drugs" in my mind.
I was really sad when I learned what drugs actually were and it wasn't some guy in a trenchcoat and sunglasses giving you a flask filled with boiling pink stuff with smoke coming out the top. 12 years of drug education and they never really said what it was, what they did, what the side effects were, etc.
As an example of a more informative map of income/deprivation, I recently encountered the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation website (https://simd.scot). Only applicable to Scotland (obviously), but it is interesting to see how each city is a mosaic of social status. From personal experience, it is extremely accurate down to the street level!
Oh great. NextDoor was bad enough. Now we get a map version, where anyone can post their inchoate terror of people who don't conform exactly to their ideas of appearance or behavior.
I enjoyed the Cape Town categories. At least in my experience the :
'Students', 'Drunk student', 'Poor students', 'Karens on community whatsapp groups', 'newly weds and almost deads', 'Spoiled rich kids' are all pretty amusing and have a at least a hint of accuracy to them
In case you don't want to give your location, you can click deny in your browser and it seems to take you straight to NYC, then you can search for other places.
Cool, but it was impossible for me to navigate to my city. I entered it by name and the map put it's center at 500 miles south of where I was expecting. Then I couldn't even correct the mistake by scrolling to the city because the map stopped me from scrolling too far away.
It also auto-completed my city name, but only with "United States" instead of the state and country. There are two cities with the same name in the US - one in Oregon, one in Montana. It defaulted to the Oregon one and put me at a nearby larger city.
The data is a bit stale but this site is great and seems to have checked out well for the cities I've lived in or visited a lot (Dublin, Utrecht, etc.)
The creator of this website was on Lex Friedman podcast[1]. He has dozen of other projects like these. RemoteOK and nomads are two projects that I remember. He talks at length of how he started all these projects single handedly.
This appears to be more prone to abuse than Wikipedia, perhaps because the encyclopedia topic attracts the "right" kind of nerds.
I've been thinking on an off how to identify and label sub-areas of cities
automatically in meaningful ways, and how to compute/extract from text useful sets of attributes to describe them.
If this Website was less prone to trolls, its data generated could be used to train and evaluate machine learning models for that task.
B2B: Where would you open your office in order to be close to your customers?
C: Where to find the nearest pizza?
C2C: Where to rent an affordable room close to a university?
Toronto area is mostly accurate and funny. it's been multicultural so long that having to pretend we don't notice our differences creates resentment that wasn't there before and the complainers it mollifies don't really have much to offer in return. this is hilarious, I will use it often.
I'm so confused at so many people calling out racism on this site. I just do not see it and no one has yet provided a single example of the so called racism. Can someone show me what you're talking about?
[0] Freak_NL says: "OpenStreetMap meets 4chan"
What? Have you ever visited 4chan? It's WAY more offensive than anything here.
[1] amsterdorn says: "Yep, I don't like it. Amplifies racist and ignorant voices."
AFAIK there is no mechanism to artificially favor any particular view. There is only the thumbs up/down mechanism meaning what you see is what the userbase finds useful or amusing.
I am genuinely not seeing what the problem is. Can someone please explain? If you're going to say something like "Black people live here" is racist then I'm sorry I'm going to have to disagree. Observations are not racist, and if the labeling is inaccurate _then give it a thumbs down_. Not every site on the internet has to be a sterile, advertiser-friendly, corpo walled garden. Ever heard of having fun? I'm trying really hard to not pass judgement but it honestly seems like so many people commenting here have a stick up their ass.
Seems like a lot of focus on "fun" here and not much on "function". E.g., the city search is fine if you happened to live in a major metropolis. But good luck trying to find your city if it has a common name.
E.g., "Springfield" in the US drops you in rural Illinois with limited zoom or pan abilities to figure out what state you're in. And it won't even let you zoom out enough or pan to even get to that Springfield.
That was not the impression I got from his Twitter. He might be able to build stuff but his ability to explain social phenomena is really poor (especially for someone with an economics degree).
I've followed him for years. He's always interesting to read since he's successful while being contrarian on many things about business and tech, but he's turning into a mini Elon Musk talking about "mind virus", "libtards" and "soyboys".
Why can't the internet go back to people talking about what they know? I'm tired to everything being politicized
The examples you are making are about free speech, not democracy. As in, free speech is people saying things you don't like. And that's a good thing because it means you also get to say things other people don't like.
I think the meaning of "free speech" is critically important here.
Being free to say what you want without government reprisal is (and should be) a fundamental right. In the US, there is significant legal precedent around this, and the instances where your right to free speech is impinged is limited to things like directly inciting violence.
However, if you get "cancelled" by society for something you have said (i.e. you lose business opportunities, friends, your job, you get banned from a forum, etc) then that doesn't qualify as impingement on your "free speech". That's just other people exercising their freedom of speech to tell you that they don't like what you said. Having "freedom of speech" does not mean other people are obligated to listen to what you have to say.
Freedom of speech != Freedom from all consequence for anything you say
Hate speech is free speech. "Not being able to use other people's computers" is nice, but when private discussion forums make functionality changes that help to alter the outcome of elections, things start getting deadly serious, and we need to stop dressing up what we're doing in nice language like "not being able to use other people's computers/bandwidth". Just say it: we need to reserve the right to censor some individuals at will.
Basically, OpenStreetMap meets 4chan.