Item — HN Reader

Soranews24 is one of the best websites on the internet! So weird and looks like spam but it's not. This Dododo Land is so weird. Seems like Meow Wolf or Museum of Ice Cream but featuring little things that bother people instead of creative fiction or photo ops.

fta: "'dododo' is the kanji character for 'anger' (怒) written three times in a row".

Do other countries have websites like this covering them?

6 comments

Is this another one of those weird bot posts I've been hearing about? 3 paragraphs, low-content but apparently interesting, ~50 points new account?

@dang what's HN's position here, I feel like my paranoia is going to ruin the shreds of authenticity that underpinned real engagement on this site. It's a giga-eternal September, and idk how one can moderate this in a way that earns trust and buyin from the humans among us (I swear I'm a human, look no third paragraph).

Definitely not a bot or ai touched at all or ESL. And reading the comment as I wrote it, it definitely read oddly to me too! Maybe I’ve accidentally created a mini dododo land here with the comment..

I take a little offense to the low content. Maybe low effort, but I feel like the references were worthwhile and for a reply-less post (at the time) I thought soranews24 deserved more attention. It is a very weird and good site to me. And I guess I wanted to address the content of the article at least a little with my comment. I read dododo as the bird.

I appreciate the comment saying Meow Wolf is a cash grab. I kinda agree but I’m glad it exists. And the cracked citation, I agree it’s a kindred spirit. (What’s the deal with 3rd paragraphs?)

I didn’t think it was a bot, but I think a good rule is when in doubt, just move along. There are times when it’s necessary to verify the authenticity of the things you read, but this is not one of them. Certainly nothing worth getting paranoid about.

> I feel like my paranoia is going to ruin the shreds of authenticity that underpinned real engagement on this site.

That’s a you problem.

You can either tell or you can’t. I don’t know what to say other than some people have this way of thinking intrinsic and some do not. I’m not sure it can be trained. The moderators of HN do appear to have it, Dan certainly does: I’ve had a few direct interactions with him. Tom I don’t know, never interacted with them.

Insightful comment!

But -- It's not a me problem, it's an us problem.

Let's be honest here, the erosion of trust spans across this and other sides. And your strong beliefs that you have 100% predicitve precision and recall smacks of self serving reasoning. Inspect your own priors and move forward, fellow human.

errr, is dang's name Dan? That makes... so much sense.

I don't know what you saw but the post you're replying to seems pretty human to me.

But then i see a comment below saying that the post was edited multiple times, so I'm late to the party.

Of course anything is possible, but I don't think bots typically edit their comments multiple times.

I don't think SoraNews24/RocketNews24 isn't that interesting in itself, but I'd be interested to know how these are popular as a phenomenon - there have been tons of these small shop couchsurfing news blogs on Japanese WWW since mid-2000s. It was obviously trivial to find a few college kids that could Google random stuffs and write up blogs that collect enough AdSense revenues, in Japan and in online ja-JP sphere.

Is it another one of those 7-11 sandwiches, or do there exist like, the webring and jump cushions and individual blogs and hosting colocations and all that infrastructure for each of all major languages? I suspect Chinese WWW might have some, but what about e.g. Indonesia, major Western European languages, LATAM as a region, or, most importantly, en-US?

I hear about meow wolf all the time and I seem to be the only person in the world who thought it was an underwhelming cash grab that is beaten by a half dozen events a year in nearly every major city in the US. Am I just missing some huge piece of it?

I quite enjoyed their Omega Mart in Vegas. Was there for work and gambling, shows, and gun ranges are really not my thing, glad there was something different. (I did wander round the strip but enjoyed the hike in Red Rock Canyon more)

When we went we got the priority tickets (can't remember the exact name of the deal) because there were no normal slots left that day; that does get you discounts on stuff but awkwardly the discount is at the gift shop _outside_ and it wasn't clear whether there were things at the fake supermarket checkout _inside_ that you couldn't get outside. It also gets you the card you boop for the scavenger hunt which makes you more involved in the whole thing. So yeah, they got us for some extra cash but it wasn't so bad as a one-off.

Which one did you go to?

The one in Las Vegas.

Not a perfect match but I instantly thought of ianVisits for London stuff. It's a similar vibe to this but is mostly transport-related: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/

Thank you! I think this fits the bill. I'll check back in on it periodically now. I love the double decker bus sale notification and the moquette doormats. It feels like it's straddling the content farm/blog well.

BrandoElFollito's legorafi.fr reference seems more pop-culture content farm-y some how? Maybe if I read french I could articulate/notice the ways it's not better. The two headlines sound like The Onion though, 328 steps to improve attention is pretty funny.

Edit: Ha. I went back to IanVisits and saw "Derelict shops in Aldgate to be redeveloped as horse stables for the police" and reference to "Boundary Dragons". I think this site gives me the same joy SoraNews24 does.

We have legorafi.fr in France which is a reference. To the point that some foreign papers quoted it :)

Some articles:

- resolve your attention problems in 328 steps

- according to studies, humans use only 10% of their smartphone

There are others that are very good but to close to France to be understandable abroad

My other hangout is cracked.com. Another corner with really niche and weird content.