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p/hoodmapsCrowdsourced neighborhood, maps to navigate a city
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levelsio

Hoodmaps - Crowdsourced neighborhood 🗺 maps to navigate a city 💫

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Hoodmaps is a crowdsourced map to divide cities up into hipsters, tourists, rich, normies, suits, and uni areas. Get painting. 🖌

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petruzzo
I guess I can't share a screenshot but you are seeding the user with a forced behavior - to categorize everyone as bromides, hipsters, etc etc. Let's start there - if this is a free zone to write whatever but why seed the behavior with anything like categorizing human beings...let alone did you ever think of how much your categorizing other humans actually sheds light on who you are for creating this product?
Bruno Lemos
@mikepetruzzo I see you categorized yourself as a product guy, I'm offended
petruzzo
@brunolemos it's the chance of someone getting offended at all that makes this a mistake. Regardless of your political or metaphysical affiliation
Mark Surfas
@mikepetruzzo are you saying that because someone *might* get "offended" this product is a "mistake"? Really? Golly.
Edin Vejzovic
@mikepetruzzo If I did this, I'd be proud of it. I may seem like an asshole to you, but why don't you look at your own bussines instead of me, I like me, I like to categorise people because that's an option. People do follow some stuff like sheep and deserve to be categorised, even me, I don't care how somebody categorises me. It seems to me you have too much time and frustration on your hands, so you're offended by light jokes and cool stuff. Don't just assume the maker is a bad guy.
petruzzo
@surfy yeah - I think that's something you think about when you make products. If you're product uses words like "suits" and "hipsters', you should know there is a history of these words driving arguments. They are often perceived as derogatory. Nobody agrees on what "suits" "norms" "hipsters" even are, so the classification gets messy very fast, and people get...irked and they decide not to use the product. Not many people who wear "suits" want to be called a "suit" and not many people who are "hip" want to be called "hipsters". This debate/argument could be considered helpful for marketing (hey, bad press is still press!) but you'd have to be creating a great deal of value to overcome the churn. And I think that if you break it down there's not much value yet because the classification system (words "hip" "norm") ****are words that are not mutually defined but debated****. And a map-key/annotations are something that visually show information that is accurate and you can rely on, these definitions/terms change dramatically inbetween each user who painted them so this map isn't going to be...accurate. So yeah there's lots of problems here.
levelsio
Maker
Hey Product Hunters! I made this new thing called Hoodmaps. Here's the problem I had, and the solution I thought of: 🤔 Problem The problem is that every time I travel to a new place it's hard to figure out which parts of the city to go. I very often end up in the tourist center. I'm originally from Amsterdam and I know 90% of tourists will never get any idea about the "real" Amsterdam because they just stay in the tourist center. It's a fake area that has nothing to do with Dutch culture. So what do I want? I want to get a quick overview of what a city is about. What are the cool "hip" areas? Where's the wealthier areas? What areas are more suburbian (and maybe boring 👅 for me?) 🛠 Solution When my friend @generic_dreams asked me where to go in Amsterdam I drew a map: https://twitter.com/levelsio/sta... I thought, maybe I can make this in to an app. So I made a Google Maps map, and you can draw colors on it. And every colors represents a different category. I have 🎅hipsters, 📸tourists, 🤑rich, 🏡normies, 👔suits and 🎓uni area colors. And it uses everyone's drawings as crowdsourced data. So if 5 people draw over an area that it's tourist, but 8 draw over it that it's hipster, it'll show up as hipster. I've also added tagging, so people can tag places with opinionated statements about an area. Tags can be upvoted and downvoted, which means it's somewhat self-regulating. 🤓 How accurate is it? Today I walked around in Los Angeles, to figure out if the concept actually worked and livestreamed it on Twitter 😊: https://twitter.com/levelsio/sta... Let me know what you think! 💖Special thanks to @reustle for bugging me to build (and finish it), @oskarth and @marckolhbrugge helping me with data questions, @andreyazimon, @flowen_nl and my brother for supporting me to finish it and everyone else who helped in any way!
Ahmad Awais ⚡
@levelsio Amazing work! I stumbled upon it when you asked for the feedback in Slack. Incredible stuff. I think it is going to be an awesome startup! I have already started to read a few funny but true things about states/cities I have plans to travel to! 💯
Kartik Jain
@levelsio i totally feel your problem, and this is an interesting way to address it. this seems like it would be most useful while I'm walking around a city. Considering that use case, what do you think about creating an AR experience, like Yelp Monocle, that guides you to the desired parts of town?
Garrett Norvell
@generic_dreams @reustle @oskarth @marckolhbrugge @andreyazimon @flowen_nl @levelsio Awesome product! I'd love to see "danger"/"ghetto" categories -if you walk around some of the "Normies" areas of Los Angeles long enough, you may well get robbed or worse! (-:
Ricky Lee
@levelsio Great story and love creative people as yourself to help create useful tools like this, hope the best. I'll be in contact with you in a few weeks as I'm the founder of Find.Exchange (www.Find.Exchange a London and Moscow based fintech company offering a powerful aggregator, a search and comparison engine for foreign currency, money transfers and travel currency cards). Your heat type of map can be very useful for us on the section of finding the central areas for Exchange Bureaus in our "Cash Section". We'll be publishing our platforms on Product Hunt next week bit by bit for feedback of users.
Leanne Beesley
LOVE THIS! Also laughed so hard at how accurate the Chiang Mai one is so far... "prostitutes" and "dropshippers" are in the exact correct locations! 😂
Justin Cranshaw
@leanne_beesley I don't find people who are struggling to get by that funny, actually, but to each their own.
Leanne Beesley
@compurbanist Wait, are you saying the dropshipping courses out there don't generate the riches they promised and their users are struggling to get by? Daayum i think you just blew the lid on an entire industry. Good call.
Justin Cranshaw
@leanne_beesley Sorry, I got a bit too emotional and shouldn't have singled your comment out. That wasn't fair, and I apologize. 😞 I do get why people think it's funny. On some levels, it is funny. Maps like these are also interesting, and instantly familiar. Urban designers have long been studying these kinds of "public images" of cities, and in skilled hands, these mapping techniques can reveal a lot about the collective wisdom of the places where we live. But there's also a huge risk. I hope folks realize that these kinds of labels have lasting impacts on real peoples' lives. I hope @levelsio and other designers of systems like this can take a moment to realize that when you build affordances that allow people to express these kinds of biases, there's a huge potential for damage. Put yourself in the shoes of the middle-school aged girl who lives in a neighborhood people marked as "prostitutes." Imagine how she might be teased at school every day. Imagine how painful that might be. A little bit of empathy goes a long way.
Eithiriel DeMerè
@leanne_beesley @levelsio @compurbanist Hi Justin, I also actually don't find it amusing. Your last paragraph above is spot on.
Garet McKinley
It's been super awesome following your progress on this, enjoyed seeing your QA video tweeting series as well. Very awesome project, will definitely be using in the future 🔥
levelsio
Maker
@garetmckinley Thanks Garet! I tried to build it as open as possible :)
Andrew Ettinger
Sunday AM launch thooo 🔥🔥🔥
Archie Hicklin
@levelsio Absolutely superb to have seen the progress on this via Pieter's Twitter. Congrats on the launch. Probably the first real attempt at a crowdsourced digital implementation of psychogeography. A few questions: 🏀 Which of your platforms brought the most initial users? 🚀 ⚾️ Was this influenced in any way by the Situationist maps? 🗺 🏐 Is there room in the future for an AR version? 📱
levelsio
Maker
@suparchie 🏀 Which of your platforms brought the most initial users? 🚀 Definitely Twitter and Twitch while I was building it! Twitch early on a lot, then more from Twitter! ⚾️ Was this influenced in any way by the Situationist maps? 🗺 I don't know the Situationist. 🏐 Is there room in the future for an AR version? 📱 Yes! I thought about this. My brother said it'd be cool to have a 3d visual of a city with building heights colored like Hoodmaps. I'd love to fly through it or indeed use it while I walk through a city!
Archie Hicklin
@levelsio Thank you for using my preferred ball emoji bullet format 😂 Super interesting to learn that Twitch played a large role at first. Seems like it'd be awesome when Google Earth makes their photogrammetry stuff into an API - future 3D Hoodmaps is going to be insane 💯 🌎 Congrats again on the launch. Fantastic implementation of an idea.
levelsio
Maker
@suparchie There's a few implementations by Open Street Maps of 3D: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wi... I tried a few but they're quite basic. Might have to write my own implementation that's easier!
Zac A.Ahmed
I feel a bit torn about it, at its best it could become a perfect guide for different areas, at its worst, it could be a reminder of where to avoid ala. Sketchfactor, an app that was called racist and was shut down later http://www.newyorker.com/busines...
Mattan Ingram
@zackya89 The problem with Sketchfactor was that it was based on user input and not on actual statistical data of crime rates. I can see Hoodmaps having the same problem.
gi¡!○
cool stuff dood! would love a search bar tho 😬
James Futhey
@gise11e @norbertdragan @levelsio Yeah, just a bit hard to find specific cities (especially since the list is only likely to grow larger)
James Hunt
Initial thought: who would update this? Then I checked out my hood and I'm like "wtf is this?" and then spent an hour updating it 😂😂 I would maybe make it less easier to colour large areas of map, try and get people to zoom in to streets, blocks. Too easy to generalise a whole area when you're zoomed out a bit.
levelsio
Maker
@thetwopct Haha! Yes, it's addictive right? Many people said that too. The brush size is a bit weird now, but in fact it doesn't color as big as it shows. If you reload the page, you'll see it only saves the brush coordinates. Not the size. I'll fix that!
Andrey Azimov
Great idea and cool implementation! Added some cool places for Kiev https://hoodmaps.com/kiev
Leandro
Been following your progress on this and it's great to see it officially launched! Already checked out some cities I know well and can say it's pretty accurate.
levelsio
Maker
@leandrobthomas Thanks Leandro! Which ones did you check?
Leandro
@levelsio London, Bangkok, Miami, Berlin, Hamburg, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Going to start drawing also. Again, great execution and am looking forward to seeing how hoodmaps grows and where you take it. I like that this is a living a breathing thing, where areas can change.
Greg Cohn
I wrote my graduate thesis on the decreasing heterogeneity of urban spaces in the 19th century and the impact of literature on it... so, yeah, I have mixed feelings about the underlying social geography that this app is surfacing. But I have been tracking @levelsio and his work for a little while and think this is super interesting and cleverly done. And per his note, the LA stuff is pretty on point. Can't wait to see how it evolves!
Maxim Leonovich
Like it! Being able to "crowdsource" categories would be great though. Could be like tags on many services: there are thousands of them and you can add more, but they are pre-moderated.
Amy Truong
haha, yay! I remember asking you in 2015 and it was soo helpful to have in Amsterdam at the time.
levelsio
Maker
@generic_dreams Haha yes! You were the start of this. Thanks Amy!
Dainis Kanopa
how accurate are these maps? How I can trust them?- if no, where is the value of these maps
levelsio
Maker
Today I walked around in Los Angeles, to figure out how accurate it was, and it was pretty spot on, see: https://twitter.com/levelsio/sta...
levelsio
Maker
@dainiskanopa Thank you Dainis! Obviously crowdsourced apps like this will never be accurate. More like opinionated and highly subjective. But it might give ONE perspective that helps navigating a new city!
Sebastian Kinz|inger
Great stuff. Two things I'm missing: - use space to switch from pen to hand so you can drag the map around (much like photoshop) - make pen size user selectable in some zoom levels they just don't match otherwise I guess
levelsio
Maker
@derkinzi I'll add space drag tomorrow, thanks! Brush size is dependent on zoom level, but a bit unintuitive now I agree, will fix tomorrow.
Steve RAFFNER
Brillant - yeah I have traveled a lot and know what you feel - Tokyo for a few days... and I spent a lot of time planning my visits - this kind of map would have been very useful. Great idea !
Craig Davison
Love this! It's hard for tourists to sometimes escape the touristy areas and discover the little known city secrets that only the locals know.
Kasper Dolk
congrats on the launch Pieter! 🚀
Hoang Pham
Great idea! Though I was confused with the thumbs-up/thumbs-down since it didn't always show correctly to which word. And is it a question whether I agree with it or not?