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Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

This is more complex than you might thing. First, there's far more places to meet people - rather than having them over for coffee, we meet in a coffeeshop. Networks have provided a "together in time" alternative to "together in place", so people can game, talk, ... via voice and video rather than traveling to a common location. There's far more 2-working-member families than previously, so the ability to organize household events is reduced. Finally, there's far more organized sports activities that consume both child and parent time. These pull everybody out of the house.

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I’ll never forget a conversation I overheard on a plane years back: a caricature of a man in his 20s failing repeatedly to explain to an older lady what a “gastropub” was. Each time, he rephrased his description, and each time she responded, “that sounds like a pub.”

“No, not exactly...,” he replied in an increasingly exasperated tone. I could hear the struggle in his voice as he recognized the cracks forming in the thin veneer of his identity. “It’s like a pub, but it serves food. Like, real food, thoughtfully considered by a gastrochef.” She returned the serve, now teetering on boredom at minute four of the flight. “At our pub we call him Kevin. He makes the best pot pie.”

He regrouped and they found truce in talking about the weather in Toronto. I resisted the urge to twist around to ask if they knew any good restaurants downtown.

A pub must serve drink. It doesn't need to serve food.

In Ireland that distinction matters. It generally will affect other things, like what time and how loud music will be played, how the tables and chairs will be organised and what type. It will often affect opening hours and the price of a pint. Gastro pubs also tend to be much larger.

In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs, possibly why that lady couldn't see the difference. I personally love micropubs and they never serve food other than crisps and maybe a toastie.

I feel like a pedant but I get that dude in his 20s and had to speak up.

> In North America it seems the vast majority of "pubs" are gastro pubs

To be fair, at least in the US, anything calling itself a "pub" is already going down a marketing/branding road and it almost certainly means they're going to try to evoke an Irish or British sensibility.

In my state you can't get a license to serve alcohol without also serving food.

Decline in religion + third spaces combined with socioeconomic system expectations of a 40 hour work week + two incomes needed to live comfortably. Places and time for community and social activities has declined, and so social activity has as well.

If more social time is desired at the macro system level, people need to have more leisure time (shorter work week, higher wages, good quality of life with more free time broadly speaking) and more third spaces to meet and socialize.

Citations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644650

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644302

Is there a citation for the decline in third spaces? I read such a claim often. But in my part of the US (Brooklyn NY) the number of third spaces like coffee shops and pottery studios is booming.

legister's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50091295 mentions it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

Additional citations:

https://ibs.colorado.edu/new-research-on-disappearing-third-...

https://www.aei.org/domestic-policy/americas-third-places-ar...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13538...

https://esl.uchicago.edu/2023/11/01/third-places-what-are-th...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/business/third-place-mean...

NYC is a thriving city of 8.5 million people and one of the most economically active cities in the world, so your experience may be different than say, Gary, Indiana.

Thank you! I skimmed these citations and I remain unconvinced. But I think really answering the question would be a real research project, not a HN back and forth :)

The first citation's relevant highlight is "All categories of third places experienced widespread closures from 2019 to 2021" which is obviously a COVID phenomenon and not a cultural trend. They admit so much. Data from that period I would say is generally irrelevant to discussing wider cultural trends. In fact a query to Gemini says that the number of independent (not chain) coffee shops is growing at 3.2% across the country and it gives this citation: https://www.locationscloud.com/research-report/us-coffee-sho...

The other Science Direct article says "Third places _may_ be closing in neighborhoods across the United States" (my emphasis).

The remaining articles seem to be opinion articles without hard data. They focus on the hypothetical problem of third places going away. In fact the AEI article talks about zoning which cannot possibly be of relevance to any decline in third places given that zoning is becoming less restrictive over time in the last decade.

Does it count as a third space if you have to pay for it?

Coffee shops and such don't feel like good third spaces to me, because I don't always want to spend money just to exist

> Does it count as a third space if you have to pay for it?

Yes, third spaces/places include places you need to pay for.

You were downvoted but you are correct. Some classic examples of third spaces are English pubs and Dutch coffee houses.

That third spaces include commercial spaces does not imply that “free” (tax or donation funded) third spaces should not exist. Parks and museums are also great third spaces.

While in many countries cafes and pubs served as real third places in the past, rising rents (and other costs) have led many establishments to discourage people from lingering. At my old haunts, loud music is now played to get customers moving on, and the very second you're done with your drink the wait staff will swoop down and ask if you want to place another order (i.e. a hint to pay more or get out).

Compare this to earlier times when it might have been common and socially acceptable to sit for hours on a single purchase and just shoot the shit with fellow townspeople.

This is also true, especially in busy areas, but sometimes going to a different neighborhood changes things (depending on the city).

Home is the first place, work/school is the second place, the third place is everything else.

When I was a kid kids used to just hang out. We'd take a bus, ride bikes, or walk to the mall, the park, the woods, fast food restaurant, record store, dollar store, etc and just loiter. Nobody had any money to buy anything, but boy we'd browse and loiter. Sometimes we'd just walk for hours. We'd walk miles and miles and miles just to sit at a table at Burger King with a single small fry between our group and hang out there.

Children don't do that anymore; they basically don't leave the house because they have the Internet. They communicate through texting and Discord so they don't even have to "hang out." Beyond the social change, when I was a young adult most malls went 18+ (unless accompanied by parents/guardians) and most other businesses nowadays allow teens to loiter the way we use to. Businesses want people in and out once they are done.

Even if business allowed it, most parents don't allow their kids to leave the house unattended anymore.

Part of it may be high rents. I read that rents increased a lot because of fashion stores. They make so much revenue per hour that more traditional stores (like the laundry, the washing machine store, the sewing store, the tabletop games store, and maybe cheaper cafes and restaurants just can't compete.

Brooklyn isn't very representative of the majority of middle America

there's diners and bars in every corner of middle America. What's changed, I think, is the level of striverism among young people.

In this thread you have multiple people saying they can't go out without paying 200$ or ordering 8$ beers. If you're in your 20s or 30s just go bar hopping in whatever the rundown part of your town is like people used to instead of going fine dining.

A movie ticket, inflation adjusted, costs the same as it used to for decades. Normal people just took it for granted that they had to smuggle some beers into the cinema rather than turning the whole evening into some hundreds of dollars spending spree.

> A movie ticket, inflation adjusted, costs the same as it used to for decades.

Maybe so, but it doesn't feel like that to people. A lot of things are actually way cheaper than they used to be inflation adjusted (we complain about an $80 video game, but inflation adjusted they used to be well over $100, cheaper now even with all the microtransactions, we just remember a sticker that said $50). When I know that a decade ago I could see a $5 matinee and for $20 have drinks and popcorn too, knowing that $40 (albeit for a smaller drink/popcorn) isn't really twice the price doesn't stop the sticker shock, especially for people whose income didn't go up at the same rate as inflation.

The 40 hour work week is most assuredly not new in the past 30 years.

The households where both parents work full time probably have increased in that time, but I'd say you have to go back closer to 50 years to really get to a time where it was still somewhat common for a housewife to be home all day with the kids.

Dual income earners hasn't even increased that much, 44% in 1967 to 53% in 2011 - https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm

Yeah I think there's this fictional idea that families in the past didn't struggle with money and need both parents to work. My father worked full time and my mother worked about 30 hours a week when I was a child (1970s).

We have a lot of fiction about the past. I'm one of those assholes that points out fictional narrative are actually just fictional any chance I get

Example - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973149

This 40 hr/week need to be combined with

1) Increasing job/economic insecurity.

2) Prices rising faster then income for majority of population.

3) increasing commute time around employment, activity hubs

4) kids activities/sports are now taken as seriously as work project deliverables. Previously it could be just gifted kids in school teams now with pay-to-play a lot more kids are involved in "serious sports".

I don't know about the sports. It's probably more serious now. Youth soccer is a whole thing that didn't exist at all when I was a kid. But lots of kids played Little League or basketball or football back then (1970s). "Travel" teams were probably not as common, but I was not a sports kid so I don't have a lot of direct experience. There were also swimming lessons, music lessons, Cub Scouts, a lot of other kids activities. It wasn't all just hanging out at home.

Youth sports are pants on your head crazy these days. Like most things you don't have to go nuts but so many families do.

regarding the 40 hour work week, I wonder what "always on" is doing to impact social activities. Meaning, you work 40 hours in the office, then you go home and get online and work a few more hours each night.

The constant aggregate dopamine demand and chasing activities is certainly not helping, imho. "Work, home, doomscroll, repeat."

An enormous portion of my social life is through my church. Bible studies, committee, small groups, Sunday schools are the main structures things, and then you make friends through it and start having other people over and hanging out with them. I don't know what my social life would look like without it.

At least in the US, people are leaving the church (at least the more conservative ones) in droves. I saw recent numbers that over 40% of people who were raised LDS are no longer in adulthood, for example.

Tying religion to politics was probably a bad idea for both religion and politics.

https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/catholic-schools-and-w... (“Just 58% of People Raised Catholic Are Still Catholic”)

https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-lds-church-has-a-r... (“Just a bare majority of kids raised LDS are still LDS as adults (54%)“)

I can assure you we had "coffeeshop"s in the ancient times.

Wait until they find out "coffee shops" preceded "coffee at home"

Wait until they find out that commodities markets started off as coffee shops.

And Lloyd's of London. Formerly Lloyd's coffee shop.

For the last century (and still today) we called them cafés (in Germany). Coffee shop was the term we used for joints in Amsterdam where you could buy ... well, joints.

Works for me. If you are in America are you said "Let's go to the café", you'd go get some coffee.

Weed here you get at a "dispensary", which is a very unsexy term but apparently we also need to protect the ears of the innocent.

Out east you'd go get beer and wine at the "package store" or just, "packy"

smart shop?

Yeah, but they weren't as common as they are today. There were pubs and eateries before also, but again, not so common. My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere. Some, of course, aren't done and I'm not sure they're quite so popular.

And I assume the pertinent discussion is what happened/changed in the western world post WW II.

> they weren't as common as they are today

We have a lot more people these days and we're a lot more urbanized.

> My point was that much of what was done "then" in one's house are now done elsewhere

Yeah, and I don't think I believe that.

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