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When you find an amazing website, restaurant, or offbeat destination, it’s normal to want to tell the world about it. The problem is that popularity can soon cause pesky crowds to ruin your previously private awesome thing.
One Reddit thread posed the following question:
“What was a great thing ruined by popularity?”
Here are a few things that were ruined after they became well-known, according to Redditors!
10. Bothies (from Scotland)
“Bothies. Basically they’re small cottages in remote parts of the Scottish highlands that are left unlocked, free to be used for shelter by people travelling the mountains. They’re not well furnished or anything, but they act as a freely usable weatherproof shelter for anyone to use in a country where summer usually just means the rain is slightly less frigid.
It used to be that they weren’t too well-known; the hillwalking community used them, maintained them, and everyone observed an unwritten code of conduct where you’d make sure to leave it tidy, clean and ready for the next person to use. However, they suddenly experienced an upsurge in awareness, and a lot of them suffered for it. People would go to them so they could have a piss-up in a scenic location and leave them covered in rubbish and shit. Literal shit; they’re normally refurbished from long-abandoned houses and frequently don’t have toilets, so they’re equipped with a shovel to bury your waste. People seemed to think they were free holiday homes that they could just take over. Some people just vandalised them for the fun of it.
As a result, they’re suffered quite a bit. They should offer shelter from bad weather and a safe place to sleep, but now you have a bunch of entitled, lazy arseholes who go and wreck them.”
9. Amusement Parks Everywhere
“To some extent, Amusement/Theme Parks. They have to be popular to justify building new, state of the art attractions, but eventually get so crowded that you need to buy special passes and get on a ride in less than 2 hours and can barely even find a place to sit when you want to rest for a minute.
I live near Six Flags Great America, outside of Chicago. Anytime I’ve gone in the last 10 years it’s been a ridiculous mass of humanity. More rides then ever, but every decent ride is like a 2 hour wait.”
8. Utah National and State Parks
“Last year I did the Utah National and State parks during the early spring- off season- and the measures they are taking to try to accommodate the massive number of visitors during the summer is incredible. Parking, lodging, sanitation, and safety are all becoming problems, and I hope that these places don’t become victims of their own popularity.
Arches really seems to attract people doing stupid, dangerous shit. The iconic Delicate Arch is like a magnet for morons who don’t prepare for the trail, take risky selfies, vandalize and climb on things, and drink in places where there’s 360 degrees of cliffs around you.”
7. Songs That Get Too Popular
“Have you ever noticed there’s a threshold where a song gets too popular and will live on with the memory of everyone thinking it was overplayed and annoying.”
6. The Inspiration for Birth Control
“Ok I’m going to mix it up. Silphium, the plant used as a form of (likely very effective) birth control in the ancient Mediterranean.
For this reason (and because it was apparently delicious), it gained popularity as a spice, aphrodisiac, and general cure-all and became worth its weight in gold. Julius Caesar stockpiled the stuff, and it is one of the most plausible origins of the “heart” symbol (and the association of that symbol with romance and doing the sex to people).
Unfortunately, it only grew wild in and around Cyrene, and over-harvesting by the Romans after their takeover of the city drove Silphium into extinction by the time of Nero.
Aaand that’s why we had to wait 2,000 years for the pill.”
5. Cool Beaches
“Beaches. Once tourism starts, it usually has devastating effects on the flora and fauna. They had to close a beach off from the public in Thailand to give nature time to recover.
Edit to give more information: I was talking about Maya Bay, which was made famous by the movie The Beach (yes, the one with Leo). Despite its isolation, the bay attracts so many tourists there isn’t even any room to lay down on the sand. The bay is closed off until officials believe the coral has rejuvenated sufficiently.”
4. Iceland
“Visiting Iceland.
I absolutely fell in love with the country when I was there, but the popularity of it means, like any other trendy tourist destination, that it’s now ruined by tourists being jackasses.
I grew up near a national park that is ALSO now ruined by overcrowding, so maybe I have a lower threshold for that sort of stuff than most, but watching idiots stomping all over fragile geothermal features two steps away from the “no walking on this area” sign just boils my blood.”
3. Airbnb
“It’s difficult as an Airbnb host with a room in the house available. We get a lot of middle aged couples turning up expecting the whole place, and also expecting the house to be something else, they just don’t read the info.
It’s really frustrating because we’re up front about what to expect, and have a really lovely room set up, but many people’s experience of Airbnb is staying in commercial flats which has full time maid service, so they come here expecting to get that, despite being £30 a night.”
2. Mount Everest
“Mount Everest. Especially since there’s only one or two days a season that people climb (when conditions are optimal).
There are literally queues of people waiting to go up some sections and the overcrowding contributes to the number of deaths there each year.
That’s before you even start to think about the rubbish/trash left up there.”
1. Plastic
“Plastic, it is a great material but mankind does not know how to use it properly.”
It’s worth it to say that a lot of people also thought eBay and Amazon were also ruined thanks to their new ubiquity, but this is something we all knew. In the meantime, do you agree with the rest?
Feel free to let us know if there’s anything else that got ruined after it became popular.
