Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I think the premise here is wrong; the market is perfectly capable of coming up with communal spaces. Some of the nicest buildings in a small town can be the churches, for example.

The issue is creating a space for a group of teenagers to exist in would be a legal hornets nest that anyone touching it would get stung by. It is a sex scandal waiting to happen, a fight waiting to happen, a drug den waiting to happen and all sorts of other problems.

Ie, the issue probably isn't the market, it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space because whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community. People sorely underestimate what regulation does to someone who isn't making a commercial return - it is all hard downsides with no possibility of upside except some social reinforcement. So they stop.

View on HN

> whoever provides it is eventually going to be dragged over the coals by their community

Something deeply wrong here. Both that this level of antisocial behavior is expected, and that liability would be placed on people who were not meaningfully responsible for it but just happen to have their name on the lease.

> regulation

I suspect what people are actually scared of in America is not regulation (from the legislature) but litigation, which is not the same thing even if it can have the same effects.

An example of how to destroy a community through outside litigants pursuing the culture war is what's happened to the Women's Institute, a pretty old organization, in the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/14/womens-insti...

This is litigation itself as a form of antisocial behavior.

"it is that in practice there is probably going to be a soft ban on this sort of space"

I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?

Soft bans are harder to determine than actual written law. With law you can say "This kind of place doesn't exist because the law says no". With a soft ban you are disincentivized in some other way, for example the thread of civil litigation or being harassed by law enforcement on a regular basis.

The US for example is a litigious culture and just having to deal with suits is expensive and can prevent a lot of things that would otherwise occur in other cultures. For example injuries occurring on a property.

What happened to Tornado Cash, Session, GrapheneOS and others is a soft ban on creating privacy tools.

Churches are funded by donations, not sales. They're a prime example of what the article is talking about.

The article is drawing a contrast between the market vs the state funding things. Donations are part of the market from that perspective. They don't stem from the state.

You didn't read far enough.

> Three: teach the economy to do it on its own. This is the one I actually want. Instead of the state hand-picking which good rooms deserve a cheque, you change the rule underneath, so that the people who would run the rooms can simply afford to.

He's talking here about giving people enough economic breathing room that they can afford to donate.

Yeah, and his premise is that the market won't do it naturally without central planning to overrule the pricing mechanism (in that section he's hypothesising that a UBI would help). That premise is wrong - the market is already perfectly capable of coming up with communal spaces. And who knows why he thinks a UBI will help, if people don't value something enough to pay for it and they get given an arbitrary sum of money they will probably continue to not pay for the thing. Teenagers can work, even I worked for money when I was a teenager and I'm pretty lazy by nature.

You:

> his premise is that the market won't do it naturally

The author:

> Instead of the state hand-picking which good rooms deserve a cheque

If donation-funded churches are a market mechanism, as you seem to insist on, the author is also advocating market mechanisms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com