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
A cooking party.
Sex
The Isle of Skye.
Memes
Earth
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
Reddit. In the early days it was a lot like Lemmy/Fedi is now. There was even a push to get more “normies” on board. Then they did. And now… look at it.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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, …)
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.
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.
“Sex with my wife” (shamelessly stolen from another commenter on the other hellsite)
Jensen Huang disagrees
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.
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.
