28DL and UE in the News The Daily Mail again

[Maniac]

Thought long and hard before weighing in on this debate, so here goes.

Lets deconstruct this a bit and ignore the silly issues like making money etc.

I've met you DL and the one thing you have against you is naivety because of your age and experience. This comes across in some of the comments you have made on this thread. Now what I would urge you to do is take a look at what you're doing, but not what you're doing immediately, think about what you might be doing in the next year 2 years 3 years etc. do you have any ambitions with your hobby or is this just a flash in the pan for you which you'll then move onto the next big thing after you've got bored?

The reason I ask this is for several reasons. One being if you have any ambition what-so-ever to pursue this hobby to a different level, what you're doing now will do you no favours. You will get shunned by a large proportion of the community that have been doing this sort of thing for years because generally speaking we don't like hordes of attention, it only leads to bad things happening which has been proven time and time again. This probably doesn't affect you much now, but what if you wanted to travel to somewhere else than London to do your stuff, you'd need to network and that is always easier when you're part of something rather than being the outsider.

The second thing to consider is drawing a large amount of attention to what you're doing (bearing in mind the hobby skirts round the edge of the law) is not necessarily a good idea. Think Matthew Adams and criminal behaviour orders and you kinda get what I'm saying - this could well happen to you if you're not careful because, quite frankly, you're embarrassing the authorities and they will want to do something about it if they can. If you get caught at some point, expect them to have a file on you ready and waiting - it will happen, trust me.

The third thing is remain level headed. Today's news is tomorrows chip paper and we've seen it all before with those that get their 15 minutes of fame on-line or in the papers or whatever. Sure you'll get your appearances in the papers, those few interviews about what you do and you'll make a few quid in the process, but eventually the media will get bored and you'll then be scratching your head with what to do next. It won't last forever, trust me on that one.

The one thing myself or anyone cannot say is what you're doing is out and out wrong because at the end of the day it is your choice what you do with your stuff. I know you find most places off your own back, but I also know you have asked certain people in the community for information on things before which prior to now has been fairly forthcoming. It's this sort of information source that will dry up as no one want's to give you information on their worked out access to somewhere in order for you to blast it all over YouTube or whatever you choose to do, it's quite disrespectful and it will make people treat you with trepidation.

At the end of the day, your videos are good and what you're doing is great, but the attention it's getting while it probably feels amazing for you right now (and I'm sure it's a bit of a buzz having that sort of attention) is a short term thing and I fear your age and naivety may cause you to end up being taken advantage of by the media and others along the way to extract what they can from you, before spitting you out the other end after they move on to the next big thing, which could then leave you in an awkward position.

I guess it depends what you want at the end of the day, but make your choices wisely all I say.

Also forget the 'tit for tat' arguments regarding theft and stuff, that's an entirely separate issue and doesn't even enter into this debate in the slightest.

 

[DyingLlama]

Thought long and hard before weighing in on this debate, so here goes.

Lets deconstruct this a bit and ignore the silly issues like making money etc.

I've met you DL and the one thing you have against you is naivety because of your age and experience. This comes across in some of the comments you have made on this thread. Now what I would urge you to do is take a look at what you're doing, but not what you're doing immediately, think about what you might be doing in the next year 2 years 3 years etc. do you have any ambitions with your hobby or is this just a flash in the pan for you which you'll then move onto the next big thing after you've got bored?

The reason I ask this is for several reasons. One being if you have any ambition what-so-ever to pursue this hobby to a different level, what you're doing now will do you no favours. You will get shunned by a large proportion of the community that have been doing this sort of thing for years because generally speaking we don't like hordes of attention, it only leads to bad things happening which has been proven time and time again. This probably doesn't affect you much now, but what if you wanted to travel to somewhere else than London to do your stuff, you'd need to network and that is always easier when you're part of something rather than being the outsider.

The second thing to consider is drawing a large amount of attention to what you're doing (bearing in mind the hobby skirts round the edge of the law) is not necessarily a good idea. Think Matthew Adams and criminal behaviour orders and you kinda get what I'm saying - this could well happen to you if you're not careful because, quite frankly, you're embarrassing the authorities and they will want to do something about it if they can. If you get caught at some point, expect them to have a file on you ready and waiting - it will happen, trust me.

The third thing is remain level headed. Today's news is tomorrows chip paper and we've seen it all before with those that get their 15 minutes of fame on-line or in the papers or whatever. Sure you'll get your appearances in the papers, those few interviews about what you do and you'll make a few quid in the process, but eventually the media will get bored and you'll then be scratching your head with what to do next. It won't last forever, trust me on that one.

The one thing myself or anyone cannot say is what you're doing is out and out wrong because at the end of the day it is your choice what you do with your stuff. I know you find most places off your own back, but I also know you have asked certain people in the community for information on things before which prior to now has been fairly forthcoming. It's this sort of information source that will dry up as no one want's to give you information on their worked out access to somewhere in order for you to blast it all over YouTube or whatever you choose to do, it's quite disrespectful and it will make people treat you with trepidation.

At the end of the day, your videos are good and what you're doing is great, but the attention it's getting while it probably feels amazing for you right now (and I'm sure it's a bit of a buzz having that sort of attention) is a short term thing and I fear your age and naivety may cause you to end up being taken advantage of by the media and others along the way to extract what they can from you, before spitting you out the other end after they move on to the next big thing, which could then leave you in an awkward position.

I guess it depends what you want at the end of the day, but make your choices wisely all I say.

Also forget the 'tit for tat' arguments regarding theft and stuff, that's an entirely separate issue and doesn't even enter into this debate in the slightest.

You make some good points! I definitely plan to continue doing urbex but not so much in London (I'm more into high stuff than tunnels). I'm going to university next year and it's most likely not going to be in London, or UK for that matter. For example, I might be going to NYC (yes I know rooftopping is crim). I went to NYC a while back for just over 2 days and had plenty of people willing to meet up with me. And these aren't just idiots, they actually know what they're doing. Yes I may be ignored by a lot of the older guys, but the majority of the scene there "whores" on social media. Hong Kong is similar.

And no, I doubt I will get a CBO here. To get a CBO you have to first be brought in front of a criminal court for a criminal offence. I haven't even been caught for civil trespass and police don't seem to give a shit about that. I'm not really a fan of his, but why didn't anybody give James Kingston a CBO?

In terms of the money thing, I'm not making it by selling out to the media and what not. I just turn on ads on my youtube channel similar to how ads are put on 28dayslater. All my old videos keep getting views while I make more videos, so my income would only ever increase. It's passive income. My following only ever increases, so therefore my view count would only ever increase, and my income would increase.

When have I ever asked for access...? I don't ask for access and that's just something I live by. Give me an example. Maybe I've asked somebody about a site and what it's like but I don't ask for access.

I don't really care too much if the "media" decides to move on. Right now I have around 190,000 subscribers (and I get plenty more every day) so I don't need anybody to help me out by sharing my content and writing articles. Besides, this isn't going to be my main source of income until it becomes dependable (which it most likely will). That's my plan for the future. Even if it doesn't become dependable, I'll be making money doing something else.

If all this theft and breaking in is a separate issue, then why isn't anybody bringing it up? I haven't seen it brought up anywhere publicly.

 

[Six]

No one is bringing up theft etc because it's old news and you're about 5 years late to the party. I'd suggest you leave it that way rather than trying to dig up old stuff that you know absolutely nothing about.

Christ, you sound egotistical.

 

[DyingLlama]

So go bitch at the people doing it then? Or rather, keep your nose where it isn't wanted and let people do whatever they wanna do.

You're being pretty hypocritical...

 

[Ojay]

Keep it on topic

 

[m9]

Can no one see the absurdity of a bunch of people who break the rules telling someone who breaks the rules that they should follow their rules?

Don't get me wrong, internet social media showboating has, more than anything else in the past 5-10 years, totally fucked the scenes of the worlds major cities. I hear the same thing same everywhere I go, and it's normally explorers in their late twenties and thirties sounding off about parkour teenagers and kids in their early twenties who 'just don't get it', and need a lesson in how they should be doing what they're doing. I've been one of those moany old men on a few occasions, and it's fucking well annoying when you want to go back to a good spot with your mates that you put loads of time into finding, only to find out that it's been on instagram for the past 2 months and some little shit has made a thousand quid off your hard work before it got locked up. You can't blame em though can you?
We're a group of people that pride ourself of taking advantage of open doors, those slight lapses in security policy that we all use to get what we want, so when someone like nightscape or our good man llama sees an easy win by taking advantage of the fact one of us was dumb enough to share a spot in an open forum or website, how can we have a go when they've run with it and taken financial advantage? Before the days of youtube ad-money, thats exactly what many of the members on here were doing, either by selling thier photos to the papers before they realized they didnt actually have to pay us anything, or by collecting ad revenue via google ad-sense when the big posts landed (blackpool tower v1, demo of paris metro, big-brother house etc).
I'd argue, pretty strongly, that the template set by some of the still-respected explorers of yesteryear is pretty much what the youth of today are running with, its just that they can be much more aggressive about it as the tools are there to enable them to be. Why go via a paper or a web-forum when you can just publish it yourself and cut out all the middle men?
I think it's pretty patronising to be talking down to these kids, no matter how much you hate it, as they're just gonna do what the fuck they like and in their eyes and to their standards, they're absolutley bossing and we're nothing but a bunch of old men that do more moaning than exploring, be that a fair criticism or not. We're also not the only one with a community, there is a totally parallel worldwide network that exists next to ours of the insta lot, they don't need our comminuty to travel, and again, I think it's pretty presumptuous to assume that without us they've have absolutley nothing.
If your sole goal is to get 'sick' gopro footage of rooftopping then as we all know, its fucking piss easy and you don't need any locations advice from anyone, least of all us.
So what are we going to do?

We can give up, just throw in the towel, switch off the server and let the whole thing sink under its own self glorifying narcisism. Most of us are already checked out, at least in terms of posting what we actually get up to on the web, so I don't think this would be too far fetched a solution.

We could try to get a handle on our scene, overhaul NP and maybe be a bit more selective who we let into NP, and be more aggressive with booting people when they rock the boat. That seems to work for the Cave Clan, although they've got their own problems atm and loads of people have been booted for mouthing off to dougo (the CC OT for those not in the know), but their iron fist approach seems to work in some respects.

Or, we could carry on as normal, and see the drain of enthusiasm and decent explorers to instagram or total obscurity, cos if we continue to assume that the 'gentlemens aggreement' that most of us go by of not sharing anything 'too soon' or 'too much' is going to be abided by the masses of cash-strapped free runners then we're dumber than they are. The only people that come into urbex via 28dl nowadays are derpers, so expecting the more active kids to know 'the rules' when all they've seen are people on the internet doing what the fuck they want with basically no consequnces is pretty short sighted.
We need a fundamental chage if we actaully want to do anything about it.

 

[PatientTheory]

Can no one see the absurdity of a bunch of people who break the rules telling someone who breaks the rules that they should follow their rules?

Don't get me wrong, internet social media showboating has, more than anything else in the past 5-10 years, totally fucked the scenes of the worlds major cities. I hear the same thing same everywhere I go, and it's normally explorers in their late twenties and thirties sounding off about parkour teenagers and kids in their early twenties who 'just don't get it', and need a lesson in how they should be doing what they're doing. I've been one of those moany old men on a few occasions, and it's fucking well annoying when you want to go back to a good spot with your mates that you put loads of time into finding. I think it's pretty presumptuous to assume that without us they've have absolutley nothing.
--------
We could try to get a handle on our scene, overhaul NP and maybe be a bit more selective who we let into NP, and be more aggressive with booting people when they rock the boat.
--------
We need a fundamental chage if we actaully want to do anything about it. Either way, see ya at the parties..

At least some of us 'young one' do try to stick to the fundamentals of not bringing too much attention to ourselves. However with this community running along the edge of the law its quite hard to contain the enthusiam of some people who are doing it not only for fun but learn about other things they can gain like fame. Its the way media portray us that makes the new kids decide thats what they want. But we don't know if these are just the small fractions of the freshers starting out because media bends our perception to a whole new level.
To bring to view how some of us feel with the 'parallel network of 28dl', telling someone to piss off because they leaked information and photos isn't going to help the community, it only exacerbate the problem. Its frees the leash on some people who failed to follow the rules and allows them to go complete mayhem. This is not the fault of those who appreciates the rules because its something that hard to control. But with how we patronise the people who do go for the fame only makes things worse. It ends up with some just doing it to piss off those people who tells them to stop.

 

[Ojay]

Actually what I Will do is tidy up the crap from this thread and off topic stuff and leave it running rather than bin it, some valid points and it's about time this lot surfaced

 

[The Kwan]

Dyingllama, I think that your videos are really cool man and you are doing something that you enjoy which is always good but in the cold light of day it is basically a trade off between how much you crave the attention and money as opposed to being part of the community and being inside the circle with like minded people.
Top and bottom of it is that there will be stuff being done that you wont even hear about because you are on the outside , and believe me it matters because no one will tip you a nod or a wink anymore, and when you cant find another blockbusting feat for your veiwers you will try to do something predictable like colab with someone to share their internet fame like JK or even worse, push yourself too far and possibly kill yoursef.
Its a trade off, but in reality how many of these mavericks earn a decent living and I mean decent (not a couple of K) given the risks that they take, and long and short of it is that they are only touting marques that lads and lasses on here did long before.

You seem like a savvy lad to me and obviously not stupid and yes your videos are good but as maniac said earlier, you may be a bit niave and it is easy to see the draw of the mulah, but just think, standing on the outside and looking in wont be any fun unless you are a trail blazer and super original.
I know that the damage seems to be done already but I would say to pull your horns in and take stock of the situation and as someone once said "when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging"
The media will love ya and leave ya..the mates you make on forums like this will be around for a lot longer

 

[Ojay]

Ok, thread tidied up

It's clearly a bone of contention and has been for some few years bubbling below the surface this lot

Fishy is right, with much of what he say's and in the last 18 months or so I've started to accept more and more of what goes on myself, although it leaves a sour taste

YES, It is absurd to try and make rules and expect people to adhere to, equally it's more absurd we keep harping on about stuff that is clearly happening and escalating it to the extent people keep getting bent out of shape on a weekly basis!

Insta/YouTube/FlickR etc has been rife with the sort of stuff we'd rather not see out there for a long time now, it's just something we have to accept

The community is far greater a reward than any likes & shares and there are a few people commenting on here that need to realise that this is also an absurd position to be in

I'd happily throw all my Tb's worth of RAW'S & GoPro's down the nearest interceptor if it was a choice between medium and actually some of the best people I've met over the years doing this silly hobby..

NP serves it's basic purpose and nothing more, I don't need to spell that out here; maybe something more 'trusted' needs adding on, as I quite enjoy a decent tea time read and I know many are reluctant to post stuff these day's due to this very issue

@DyingLlama I've met you a couple of times and you are sound enough, your videos are decent and not cringeworthy like the majority of your peers

Like others have said you come across a little naive, but you are keen like Maniac has said, maybe look ahead to the bigger picture with regards to any future direction

Nobody makes the rules, as we are all too busy breaking them, sometimes a little discretion is all that is needed

I'm leaving this thread running, and feel free to contribute/challenge as long as it's constructive, anything that is deemed irrelevant or un-accpetable will be removed

 

[stranton]

hows about arranging a draining meeting?

 

[Ojay]

hows about arranging a draining meeting?

FFS! How is this relevant did you not read my last post!!

 

[stranton]

you mentioned community, so thought be nice meeting folk

 

[stranton]

error

 

[Ojay]

as it's you I'll let that one go