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Comment by normloman | Hacker News Reader

Love the screenshot. "Crazy sunset"

Like there's this great sunset, and you can't enjoy it because you're busy tweeting it. And there are a handful of others who can't see the sunset because their looking down at their phones, receiving the tweet.

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For better or worse, sunsets are just a social bridge. The value is, apparently, in sharing a moment with others. Both are ephemeral.

Sounds like you need to look at more sunsets.

This is a pretty useless and unnecessary attack. Sunsets make up a very large percentage of Instagram, Snapchat, and FB photos shared at my university, which shows apparent social value.

Sure you may appreciate the experience of watching a sunset live, but clearly the social sharing aspect may be more important to others.

Are you really gonna argue that sunsets aren't beautiful, and merely a form of social currency?

What? I never said sunsets weren't beautiful. That's why people share them. I don't think of them as just a social bridge as the previous poster, but I was merely stating that sharing them can be the biggest value seen by others.

My original remark was a bit tongue in cheek - here we really can define every life experience in terms of engagement metrics.

Aside from sharing, we like to photograph things as some sort of time-space marker for ourselves, even if we never do anything with it. "This is memorable, so I should take a photo to affirm that." That's why everyone takes a goddamn photo of the Eiffel Tower.

No, the branch of the discussion is regarding sunsets in the context of social media/apps. Outside of that, they can be any number of things to a variety of people.

Who doesn't? But I'm with you. I personally don't share photos of sunsets, or food, or anything that someone can experience themselves.

I was thinking about this after browsing through some old travel photos recently. Apparently when there is something that is memorable like a sunset, I'll take many photos of it over the span of time it is happening.

Did it change colors? 10 new photos. Brighter and more vibrant? Still more photos.

It becomes tiresome to choose which sunset photo is the best once I return, so I have begun trying to improve my photography skills so I can feel confident I've captured the moment in a shot or two.

And if I don't that is still okay because even a mediocre picture is able to conjure up the memories and feelings of the moment as I browse the photos years later.

I've seen photographer advice that said something like "take 100 photos and only show 5" so maybe the trick is to keep taking tons of photos and learn how to select the best of them.

Yeah, I've heard that too though I don't remember if that applies to taking 100 photos throughout the course of a day and show the top 5, or taking 100 photos of a single event and show the top 5.

If it is the latter, then it seems like I would miss out on experiencing the event.

Sometimes capturing the event is experiencing the event. I've seen many amazing sunsets. Some I've just enjoyed as is, some I've enjoyed the experience of trying to capture what I was seeing.

I'm more likely to remember the ones I've captured (at least to some degree) than the ones I haven't.

Not all sunsets and sunrises are equal...plus you can't easily witness sunsets at every corner of the world on your feet, yet you can on the internet. That's really powerful.

When can we get unlimited data plans btw?

You're presuming that the time it takes to tweet the sunset consumes all of your remaining time for relaxing and enjoying the sunset.

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