Here’s an analogy: Imagine your favorite restaurant that you go quite often. It’s a simple place to have a nice meal & relax in. But it often feel like you’re one of the few people who knows about the place. So you begin to tell your friends & family, and then they begin to tell more people. And this restaurant becomes more & more well known & gets more customers. Happy ending, right? However, getting a table begins to get harder, the place has more rules that they didn’t have before, the food isn’t as good as it used to be, and it’s often too crowded to even relax while enjoying a meal. The place you once go to for a simple lunch, becomes a hassle to go to.
That’s the analogy I wanted to go with to explain what I’m asking.
As for my real answer: Going to Little Tokyo & a shabu shabu place around my county.
Back in High School, I used to save up my allowance to take train to Little Tokyo. I would often go shopping for Gunpla & Japanese snacks, and then stop by my usual Ramen spot (I usually alternate between Mr. Ramen & Kouraku) before coming back. However, years later, Little Tokyo (let alone the train I take to get there) became way more crowded. The model kit shop I used to go to (Jungle), began enforcing a line policy, Manraku & Nijiya Market got more packed, and I often felt like stuffed sardines whenever I walked around the Japanese Plaza. Both my favorite Ramen spots remained fine though. Otherwise, I don’t go as often as I used too, because it’s usually packed (that and I’m often broke)
As for that Shabu Shabu place I talked about, I often go there back in college. Back then, it was only $30 on the weekdays. And for that, I would get a choice of 2 meats, a drink, and access to the buffet. But once more people came, they constantly change the rules. Weekdays now only included Mon-Thurs, Friday being treated like the weekend (which would cost $40) and then you would have to pay for your own drink separately. Luckily, it isn’t as bad as Little Tokyo, but it’s such a shame for the constant changes
Cars.
Honestly, owning a car should be a hobby, not a requirement. I’ve never owned one, but I have a healthy appreciation for the people whose eyes light up when they talk about the engines they’ve fixed or the skills they’ve gained. For them, cars make them happy. Why would that piss me off? I have niche hobbies that make me really happy too.
For the rest of us, cars are just… there. A means to an end, that end being surviving the modern infrastructure designed to accommodate the least efficient means of transportation ever.
Fuck cars. If the only people who drove them were the people who honestly actually liked them, the world would be a much better place.
Thrifting.
It disgusts me to go to those Goodwill buy-the-pound stores, with the bins, that people get very competitive as to what they get. Thrifting is supposed to be the last line of affordability for people who can’t afford the latest of anything. To get a vacuum cleaner for their home or apartment that they can’t spend even $20 on. To get a toaster oven that they don’t want to throw $50 down on.
But, they’re now having to compete with dozens of hyper-competitive people who’ve been groomed from years of Storage Wars, Pawn Stars, American Pickers, Hardcore Pawn, Auction Hunters .etc Where, they believe that almost anything that they can find, can be and will be flipped for profit. It’s like running into micro-capitalists, is exactly what it is but these people disguise themselves as “passionate collectors” or “aspiring bargainers”.
And thrift stores for a while now, have been catching on to this behavior. To where, they’ve remodeled their business to reflect it, so that’s why you see absurd pricing, color-sale discounts and the like. It’s just gotten ugly. So, thrifting is almost no longer for the struggling and that last line of affordability is but non-existent.
I can say the exact same thing for the used video games market, something I used to have been involved in for 9 years. 2007 through 2015 was to me, the optimal time to have gotten into the used games market. Where things felt sane. But thanks to WATA, thanks to YouTubers/Streamers alike, they’ve corroded the market to now there being many used video game nerdy stores that hyper-inflate the value of any old games.
Which is why it makes me scoff at those who shame people who pirate old games by telling them to “go buy them on ebay!”. Yeah, with those awful prices? Get real.
Those people competing to buy are the people who are struggling.
Literally everything.
It’s “too many people,” so that, by definition, is past the optimal amount.
Exactly.
In the begining, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry, and is widely regarded as a bad move.
This
It was the same with Little Tokyo where I used to live. When I was in University 15 years ago we went there all the time to buy Mangas, children’s books and our textbooks for Japanese class. There were sometimes Manga fans who obviously didn’t speak Japanese and just bought a little souvenir or something. Otherwise it was a normal bookstore with a selection of all kinds of books in Japanese. I’m not sure what exactly changed as Manga was popular even back in 2010, but nowadays the area is full of people in cosplay, even if there isn’t an event. They dress up just to stroll through Little Tokyo and buy random food and stuff as a souvenir. The bookstore is now 70℅ German language Manga, figurines and merchandise. There is one small shelf with Japanese language Manga. Also something similar happened to the restaurants. A Japanese friend of mine told me they are all owned by Chinese or Koreans now and there are only two left with real authentic Japanese food.
Earth
RRFM (Really Really Free Market)
Early 2000s. At the first market, everyone had a chill time on a rug in the park.
Then it got featured on the nightly news. The next one had a hoard of 200 frantic ‘shoppers’, ‘buying’ at zero price. A hilarious mad rush to grab-and-go.
I didn’t mind, because along with our clothes and other items, I’d burnt and packaged about 30 TTCS-OSSWIN CDs, and they went in record time.
Other people were pretty annoyed, and it wrapped up for a while after that.
EDIT: I just checked, and it is alive and well, with RRFM events happening this year.
I find it strange how tiktok people all imitate each other. Someone posts a video of a “hidden” tourist spot and then suddenly there’s loads of people waiting in line to take a selfie at the same spot.
It isn’t strange at all because it is literally how advertising works by spreading awareness and getting people to want the thing.
Maybe I’m too old for this but, especially when on holidays, I have better things to do than to stand in line to copy a selfie I saw some influencer make.
Like when I was younger, people came to a waterfall to experience it. Now you got to stand in line to take a selfie
Tourism! Many sites, forests and towns used to be great to visit but are now completely overrun (Paris, London, Venice, Dolomites, sites in the alps, Yellowstone, …)
I come from a touristy area and I’ll never forgive people for what they did to the place during COVID.
For context, I don’t want to name the place but it’s one of those areas where it’s packed in the summer and deserted all winter. As in, there are entire towns that are almost totally empty in the off-season, because they’re all second homes. It’s at the point where locals can barely afford to live there anymore, which is why I left. ANYWAY
During the COVID lockdowns, we had one of the lowest rates of infection because there was hardly anyone there, and amongst the locals we have a pretty big elderly population, who tended to not go out as much. At a certain point they eased the travel restrictions, and so everyone started descending on the place all at once, to use it as their COVID bunker because they’d seen on the news that we had not as many cases.
Now, we’re also pretty neglected in terms of funding and infrastructure, so we have ONE hospital for the whole region, and not a super well-equipped one. And as stated, a lot of elderly people. It was absolute chaos. There were mayors of towns on TV begging people not to come. They came anyway, COVID skyrocketed, they absolutely trashed the place and left garbage everywhere. One of them was interviewed about it on the news and they said the locals should stop complaining because “we need the tourism money.” Never mind that it was lockdown and most places were closed anyway.
I don’t know how many locals died of COVID because of that, but it can’t have been zero. Luckily my family was okay, but still. Fuck everyone.
Nowadays the best tourism experience is in your own area. Unless you live in a city, then it’s a bit of a bus ride first.
NW Florida here. I won’t set foot in the tourist areas. Gross. There’s SO much more to do even in this little shit area.
One example: I can throw a kayak on my truck and be in the swamp in 20 minutes. From there, I can see things that only a handful of people know about. In 15-minutes, I can pack up all my shit and hit the trails outside the local Navy base. I’ve never seen another human out there.
Tokyo trains. Because jobs and opportunities keep disappearing in the countryside, it’s getting more and more packed and there’s not really much that can be done; trains already run every 2-3 minutes during rush hour.
They could drop all the green cars (JR can fuck right off and should be nationalized), but that’s not going to buy a ton.
Businesses all want to be in the same trendy areas with name recognition so spreading the load that way isn’t working.
I moved to the countryside for a “work from anywhere in Japan!” company, but now they’re trying to kill that and make me come to Tokyo and give up on my community. This is why no one trusts deals like this (and yes, I am in a union and they are fighting for me).
something to do with the new Far right pm in japan.
Not particularly, but she’s not helping.
They need to enforce employers to actually follow the law and get rid of their anti-remote-work bias for jobs that really do not need to be in person. That would at least build some confidence. Japan is quite backward in a number of ways, so who knows if that will ever happen. Corona is the only reason a lot of places went remote at all and many kicking and screaming crying that their employees were “essential to have in person in the office” and that “there is no IT infrastructure to allow remote work” yet they mysteriously made it happen. Japan IT infra is shit, to be fair; I’ve had my info leaked from insecure sites 1-2 times a week for the last 4-6 weeks as everyone is getting hacked.
The japanese work culture is self-defeating in many ways, and destroying their economy. it’s a shame they can’t right that ship, but it’s a cultural problem. i wonder how bad it will have to get before they decide working 80 hour weeks 65 hours of which are unproductive is a stupid thing to do.
centralization is efficient.
the only way to get companies/people to distribute is for the government to offer them a financial incentive to do so that outweighs the benefits of being in Tokyo.
just like how the USA got people to populate the frontier by offering them ‘free’ land. you need to incentivize folks to live in smaller cities, because pragmatically there is no reason to do so in a modern economy.
it’s a problem all western countries are facing, except maybe Germany, who has been been able to get Berlin to grow as much as they want and historically has never really been that centralized.
Remote work is more efficient than physical centralization.
The Internet. It was fine before 2005ish.
It was ruined by corpo cancer.
The internet itself was probably worse overall, but there was a luttle barrier that protected it. That barrier was a computer and a modem and some general knowledge. That barrier is gone and now it’s three social media platforms in a trench coat
That’s true for the end users, plus corporate and government heads were all tech illiterate grey hairs still and didn’t yet know how to ruin this new fangled thing to further their own interests. Be it control, greed, narrative, power, etc.
Miniature Wunderland in Hamburg. I used to go at least once a year, usually on a whim. Then they blew up on social media and you have to book months in advance. Haven’t been for ages.
There’s a place in northern Australia where I’ve watched this happen (and, as a tourist there, I’ve been part of the problem of course).
It’s a river with warm (something like 30 °C, I don’t know the exact temperature) water and a little bend, so you get in one side, float around the bend, and then walk back to the start.
It has some facilities built nearby, a toilet, and a campground in walking distance, so its not “secret” or “hidden”. Its just off the Stuart Highway too, so not really remote. I think it was just unknown to most people for a while.
I was there once in 2019, and again in 2024. Nothing major had changed, but it was starting to get a bit crowded, the campground had grown, and much of the plants in/around some parts of the river where broken.
I was initially gonna write this without naming the place, but after thinking about it, what little attention it might get from the few people here won’t really change what’s happening to it, so I looked it up again: Bitter Springs, near Mataranka, but its not the Mataranka Thermal Springs, those are something different. Apparently, its also part of a national park.
Great! I just got a ticket to your beautiful country, and I will certainly visit. Thanks for the tip!!!
I live about 2 hours from Centralia, PA
If there’s anyone here who hasn’t heard about it, a coal seam under the town is on fire and so the town has mostly been abandoned. The internet would have you believe it’s a real life silent Hill or something, full of abandoned houses with smoke and steam billowing from the ground.
In actuality, it’s a lot less dramatic. If a house becomes vacant, it gets torn down because it’s not safe to live on top of a fire. And there is some smoke and steam and the ground is noticeably warm in some places, but at this point the fire has mostly moved out from under the town. If a building is still standing, it’s because someone is still living there.
And I’m not gonna say it isn’t/wasn’t worth the visit, it’s pretty cool to drive through and see the grid of streets where a town used to be, but it’s not exactly the urban exploration wonderland a lot of people imagine it to be. It was really only good for maybe an hour or two of walking around, and probably best enjoyed as a quick detour if you were in the area on your way to somewhere else.
And one of the bigger draws is what became known as the “graffiti highway” a stretch of highway that was bypassed because of the fire. It was blocked off, it has some areas that are all cracked and warped because of the fire, and as it became more popular it was covered in graffiti.
I first visited Centralia as a pretty young kid, before the internet discovered it. My parents made a stop on our way somewhere else. There was little or no graffiti on the highway then. One of the locals saw us and came out to chat with us, and pointed out a couple things for us to check out. I don’t remember seeing anyone else around at that time.
Fast forward 10 or 15 years, the internet had discovered it, and a couple of my friends wanted to check it out, so I went with them.
The highway was now covered in graffiti. There were more people around, it wasn’t exactly crowded, but it wasn’t empty like it had been when I first visited. We saw some people walking around in places they probably shouldn’t have been (the ground can be kind of unstable in places, tends to happen when the bedrock underneath has just burned away) and we saw some people doing stuff like driving trucks and dirt bikes onto the abandoned highway. There was also a decent amount of trash just sort of left around.
So I wasn’t exactly surprised when a few years later they decided to bulldoze over the highway and generally discouraged people from visiting. It had just become too popular, and people were being dumb and disrespectful.
And that’s sort of the way of it for abandoned places. If they stay relatively unknown, a handful of people can get away with visiting them as long as they’re not being dumb. Once they get popular though you can’t keep the idiots away and they become a problem that needs to be addressed.
This is why I dont tell anybody about my spots.
“Sex with my wife” (shamelessly stolen from another commenter on the other hellsite)
Jensen Huang disagrees
