#crowds — Public Fediverse posts

https://www.fogolf.com/1364315/players-feed-off-it-st-louis-drawing-golf-crowds-like-never-before-with-the-bmw-championship/ ‘Players feed off it:’ St. Louis drawing golf crowds like never before with the BMW Championship #BMW #championship #Crowds #drawing #Feed #Golf #GolfBellaVideos #GolfBellaVlog #GolfBellaYouTube #GolfBelle #Local #Louis #news #Players #sports

Eroding the true spirit of beauty
Social media attracting ‘unmanageable’ crowds

* "The issue is "the algorithms ruining the mountain environment by funnelling crowds into beauty spots.The mountains are not a playground."

"Hundreds of people overwhelmed a mountain hut in the Italian Dolomites, not for the panoramic views but in search of a creamy pastry, reigniting the debate about social-media-driven tourism."

“The main problem is those who visit the mountains without knowing or respecting them. Until five or six years ago we did not witness overtourism in precise points or at certain moments in the Dolomites. Now there are iconic places where it is no longer possible to appreciate the beauty as we’re surrounded by dozens of people who take selfies and are only there for that.” >>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/19/italy-krapfen-friedrich-august-dolomites-tourists-social-media-influencers

* "Italian town clamps down after TikTok star draws ‘unmanageable’ crowds...It also happens, and unexpectedly, in less renowned destinations which are not accustomed to huge flows of visitors..." >>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/30/italian-town-roccaraso-clamps-down-visitors-tiktok-tourism
#crowds #OverTourism #tourism #harm #algorithm #FunnellingCrowds #SocialMedia #selfies #quest #experience #loss #pollution #traffic #landscape #environment #NeverNever #Bellingen
Image: Bellingen mountains before the tourist season

The power of the signifier: why the power up sign is actually doing something real

After weeks of niggling injuries I returned to distance running this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I’d been widely assured that despite my catastrophising it really wasn’t possible to have lost much fitness and strength in eight weeks. Yet in practice it was newly exhausting to run a distance I could have done pretty casually back in May. It left me pining for something I saw a lot at the last competitive race I did:

I really like these signs. Once I got over feeling silly about doing it, I found that tapping the power up does indeed make me feel powered up. What’s going on here? If you accept my experience that this is, at least mildly, energising then the obvious explanation is that it’s energising because it’s fun. But what does it mean for it to be fun? It’s fun because the signifier itself carries traces of past fun. For anyone who spent years playing Mario Kart the idea of a mushroom that you tap to go faster resonates with diffuse memories of hours playing a fun game, individually and in groups. The sense of acceleration in the game, particularly when you’re falling behind and a judiciously timed mushroom leaves you rushing back ahead, translates into the context of the race.

A sceptical voice in me points out that I actually start accelerating before I tap the mushroom. Part of the fun is rushing to tap the power up, before rushing forward newly powered up. But this in itself is a response to the signifier. It carries the capacity to induce a response which is in a real sense causal. It makes me think of Mari Ruti’s description in The Creative Self of “tiny morsels of jouissance latching themselves onto the underbellies of select signifiers so as to give them the kind of boost that enables them to resuscitate the domain of signification” (loc 1225). Each of those countless games of Mario Kart is a little barnacle attached to the underbelly of the mushroom on the sign, perfectly attuned to the libidinal economy of the race itself. It’s good to get a power up in a half marathon for pretty similar reasons to it being good to get a power up in a game of Mario Kart. The fact it’s offer in a spirit of support, such that solidarity is expressed through making and sharing the sign, amplifies this but I don’t think it creates it. I can’t think of another sign at a race that has had this effect. Occasionally good jokes make you laugh, which can in turn cheer you up if you’re feeling exhausted and miserable. But that’s more a situational response to occasional feelings of “why am I doing this to myself?” rather than something which directly acts on you in a libidinal sense.

I find the idea that the signifier itself as a causal power, albeit dependent on the individual’s past history of engagement with that signifier, vastly more plausible than a sceptical reading which suggests that at best this just people responding emotionally to a supportive crowd. Without engaging with the signifiers through which that support intervenes in the race, these are just general platitudes rather than specific claims about identifiable effects which forms of support have on particular runners. I find it interesting to think this through in relation to the mushroom sign because transposing a signifier from a racing game to a running race makes it easier to see the causal forces at work. It leaves the prior influences more easily legible than they would otherwise be. But one of the things I’ve learned from Lacan is that signifiers are working on us constantly, in often profound and idiosyncratic ways, in a manner which much sociology (particularly the school I was trained in for all its other virtues) is pretty incurious about and unresponsive to.

"We live not just amidst the #madness of princes, but the madness of #crowds. It might be nice for classical #liberals to start thinking - and talking - more systematically about what this means for their understanding of the world." www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-politi...

The political economy of billi...

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518

#HackerNews #Memoirs #Extraordinary #Delusions #Madness #Crowds #Gutenberg

Photochrome of a street in Sidi Okba, Algeria, ~1900

Photochrome of peasants in Bosnia, then-part-of Austria-Hungary, ~1900

https://piefed.social/c/historyphotos/p/2175807/photochrome-of-peasants-in-bosnia-then-part-of-austria-hungary-1900

#Satire #Humor #Trump #Health #Crowds #Obama #GreatAmericaStateFair #alt

BOROWITZ REPORT 6/29/26 SATIRE
Trump Boasts About Crowd Size at His Medical Appointments

Tokyo Weekender: Tokyo Metro Launches New Website To Help You Avoid Crowded Trains. “On Tuesday, Tokyo Metro Co., Ltd. launched Metro CrowdNavi, a website that lets passengers check congestion levels across all of its rail lines. The service provides average crowding data from the previous five days by station, time and train service, while a heatmap shows congestion levels across an entire […]

Something to remember the day by! 😊

https://piefed.social/c/historymemes/p/2132898/something-to-remember-the-day-by

Something to remember the day by! 😊

https://piefed.social/c/roughromanmemes/p/2132894/something-to-remember-the-day-by

Destroyed bridge in Portugal, 1909

https://piefed.social/c/historyphotos/p/2127761/destroyed-bridge-in-portugal-1909

Anglo-Saxon Village Fair (Mike White)

https://piefed.social/c/historyart/p/2107627/anglo-saxon-village-fair-mike-white

#FotoVorschlag

“Ordnung im Chaos” / Order in chaos

#photography #streetphotography #crowds #comiccon #nyc

Scene just prior to a beheading, Qing-dynasty China, 1867

https://piefed.social/c/historyphotos/p/2100643/scene-just-prior-to-a-beheading-qing-dynasty-china-1867

New tractor examined by a crowd in Odesa, Ukraine, 1925

New Zealand & South Seas Exhibition - Amusement Park, 1925-6

DCC Archives, New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition Series, Special Pictorial History, 3/2, page 106
Dunedin City Council Archives via DigitalNZ

http://api.digitalnz.org/records/38733378/source

#Dunedin #Historic #Exhibition #Entertainment #Crowds #DunedinCityCouncilArchives

Turkish Bazaar (Amadeo Preziosi, watercolor illustrated 1854 AD)

https://piefed.social/c/traditional_art/p/2072301/turkish-bazaar-amadeo-preziosi-watercolor-illustrated-1854-ad

Turkish Bazaar (Amadeo Preziosi, watercolor illustrated 1854 AD)

https://piefed.social/c/historyart/p/2072297/turkish-bazaar-amadeo-preziosi-watercolor-illustrated-1854-ad

Firetruck being observed by a crowd, Yokohama, Japan, 1907

https://piefed.social/c/historyphotos/p/2048899/firetruck-being-observed-by-a-crowd-yokohama-japan-1907

There are two ultimate fears, the annihilation of solitude and the annihilation of the crowd. We lose our identities if we are alone with no one to reflect us back on ourselves... or we lose our identities if we are in a mass of others; anonymous, corporate, overwhelmed by the babble.
-- Ian McDonald

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #IanMcDonald #Crowds #Solitude

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Canyon #SlickRock #IcebergCanyon #LakePowell #Utah

Reconstruction of the Roman amphitheatre at Amiternum, Italy, and gladiatorial spectacles (Giorgio Albertini)

https://piefed.social/c/historyart/p/2032603/reconstruction-of-the-roman-amphitheatre-at-amiternum-italy-and-gladiatorial-spectacles

Follow the Data! If you do, AVOID prediction markets like the plague.

Researchers examined EVERY trade on PolyMarket from 2023 to 2025 >> 1.72M accounts and $13.76B in trading volume and discovered that ~ 3% of traders account for most price discovery aka these traders consistently predict outcomes and move prices in the right direction. The rest - the remaining 97% of traders mostly do not, and are on the losing side of trades.

This analysis indicates that prediction markets DO NOT work because of "collective wisdom" of crowds, they work because of who is informed > also known a Insiders! https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/26/only-3-of-traders-drive-prediction-markets-accuracy-not-the-crowd-study-finds
#PredictionMarkets #PolyMaket #Kalshi #Betting #Gambling #InsiderTrading #MarketForces #Luck #Crowds #Wisdom

Anti-bra protest, San Francisco, USA, 1969

https://piefed.social/c/historyphotos/p/2030716/anti-bra-protest-san-francisco-usa-1969

Veiled women boarding a train in Tehran, Iran, ~1890

https://piefed.social/c/historyphotos/p/2020210/veiled-women-boarding-a-train-in-tehran-iran-1890

Procession at the royal palace for New Year celebrations, Tehran, Iran, ~1885 AD

https://piefed.social/c/historyphotos/p/2019260/procession-at-the-royal-palace-for-new-year-celebrations-tehran-iran-1885-ad

Scene (and dog) of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, ~1890

https://piefed.social/c/militaryporn/p/2010863/scene-and-dog-of-samarkand-uzbekistan-1890