https://www.digital-web.com/articles/firefox_09/

I acknowledge the irony though.

As someone else said, the lobby is the lobby - eventually the Assembly starts to meet there once you make enough progress, but that is about it.

Instead of a real estate tycoon, you are an elected steward of the building, held responsible by the Assembly. Homes are allocated off a waitlist, dues are set on a sliding scale, and you face outside pressures from neighboring capitalist landlords.

The crown jewel is attracting a large grant to establish an observatory at the top of your tower, attracting scientists. To get there, you must make sure the people are fed, housed, healthy, and entertained. If the Assembly doesn't have confidence in your abilities, you get voted out.

It kinda works, and the potential failures in the game are pretty unique. I'd be interested to hear HN's take. An entire SimCity clone based on a different economy like this could be fun.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49195297

Points: 41

# Comments: 41

It comes from Don Quixote, as I recall, and suggests a fruitless effort. A waste of time.

Many people post photos of what they have spinning on their turntables on social media, and most never get any engagement. It occurred to me that people might want a better way to do this, and bringing them together in a niche social site might help.

So I made Wax Spinner. Connect your Discogs (the de-facto vinyl collector's catalogue) account, post whatever you're playing with an optional note, and it lands in a feed where people can like it and comment. You can also browse anyone's full collection on their profile, and filter the feed by genre, pulled straight from Discogs metadata.

The conversation and the discovery are the primary purpose.

The details this crowd might find interesting: every spin generates its own OpenGraph share card on the fly, with cover art, artist, year, and notes rendered server-side and cached. Getting it to actually display everywhere took way longer than building it. next/og (Satori) only outputs PNG, and the ~800KB it produced was silently dropped by some crawlers' image-fetch limits, so I re-encode to a ~95KB JPEG with sharp. Slack was the biggest hurdle, and as it turned out, my global security headers (X-Frame-Options, CSP) were attached to the image route too, and Slack's proxy refuses to embed anything that signals it can't be framed. Also had to serve the image from a clean static-looking path instead of a query-stringed API route, because Slack's fetcher is oddly picky about URL shape. It now unfurls properly on Discord, iMessage, Facebook, Bluesky, and Slack.

The stack is Next.js (App Router) on Vercel, Supabase for Postgres and auth, Discogs API for collection data. Known limitation: collection import uses an app-level Discogs token, so it only pulls public collections, no per-user OAuth yet.

It's free, no ads, not selling anyone's data. Side project, not a startup, so I'd rather have honest feedback than signups. It's brand new and quiet right now, and a social site is nothing without people in it, so I'd love to hear what's confusing, what's missing, or what would get you to actually open something like this on a Sunday afternoon when you put a record on.

I don't code full-time anymore, but I used to build dating websites in the early 2000's (php, mysql). I used Claude Code to build this as a side project.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48774122

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

As you allude to, there are always other explanations.

- Paying musicians cheap wages to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

- Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams: https://www.engadget.com/spotify-confirms-it-wont-offer-payo...

- Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-no...

"Google results are just AI and sponsored content anymore." We've all seen it.