The Members of the Dull Men's Club
43 comments
·June 16, 2025ecshafer
gambiting
I had to block it because I realized it just completely overtook my feed and 99% of it was in that "interesting but ultimately forgettable within 30 seconds of reading it" zone that's filling up social media. I mean it lived up to its name - it's very "dull" if vaguely interesting.
skeeter2020
this is the part of the internet that everyone would be better off avoiding: not bad but no long-term value. When the internet was novel and your engagement limited these were rarer, cool things to share (often face to face!). Now this content is internet sugar that will be the health crisis of a generation.
kalleboo
Isn't that most of Hacker News as well? "Oh that's an interesting technical solution - which is completely irrelevant to the work I'm doing"
RajT88
It's a bit like reading this site...
Gentlemen, have you heard The curious tale of Bhutan's playable record postage stamps (2015)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44054775
_fat_santa
This is a cool concept but I have an issue with one being "dull" on a conceptual level. Personally I think that every single person on earth is both the dullest person you have ever met and the most interesting person on earth, it just depends on your perspective.
I have friends that play DnD which I personally find very dull but hearing them talk about it, it's clear they do not see it the same way. Conversely I love cars and talking about cars and I can talk with another gearhead for hours on the topic, but the times my wife has listened in on my conversations she said it was the most boring thing she has ever heard in her life.
kergonath
> Personally I think that every single person on earth is both the dullest person you have ever met and the most interesting person on earth, it just depends on your perspective.
You are most certainly right, but I don’t think that this is in contradiction with how the Club works. Everyone is dull and interesting depending on the situation and the audience. The Club is for when you found or saw something interesting and important to you, but your audience disagree, does not notice, or does not care.
Nobody is fundamentally dull, but everybody is being dull at some point.
romanhn
Reminds me of the Dullest Blog in the World (https://dullestblog.com), which I frequently checked out more than 20 years ago. Hilarious to see a new entry just a couple years back.
frakt0x90
Reminds me of the proof that all natural numbers are interesting. If there is some set of uninteresting natural numbers, there must be a minimal element of that set. It being the smallest uninteresting number is interesting which is a contradiction.
rzzzt
Why aren't all numbers in the set uninteresting? Did someone make a mistake when defining it?
Perhaps the minimal element should be removed from the set; there will be plenty of members that still remain.
Cerium
Serious response? In that case the set still has a smallest member which can then be removed, if we keep going eventually there will be no uninteresting numbers remaining.
leereeves
The problem with that is the explanation of why each number is interesting becomes:
the smallest member of the original set of uninteresting numbers
the second smallest member of the original set of uninteresting numbers
the third ...
...
That version of "interesting" quickly becomes "not interesting". The concept simply defies mathematical logic.
Tade0
My algebra 101 professor made this exact argument.
zh3
I will exclude myself from this club by finding it interesting enough to comment on.
andyjohnson0
> I will exclude myself from this club by finding it interesting enough to comment on.
I immediately thought of the interesting number paradox
kergonath
I find some posts interesting, but most comments utterly stupid and a huge waste of time, although there is an occasional gem.
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danielodievich
One of my most favorite places in nearby oregon is the community of Boring, OR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring,_Oregon. Exceptionally lovely place. I've yet to visit it's sister town of Dull in Scotland, but I hope someday to remedy that, albeit with measured levels of excitement
thinkingtoilet
I laughed out loud at this line. It feels like something out of Futurama:
>Australian member Andrew McKean, 85, had dullness thrust upon him.
sandworm101
I think once you are features in a guardian article, you arent dull anymore. Building model airplanes in a shed is dull. Being so good at building them that journalists take time to visit you is not.
chubot
I don’t think building model airplanes is dull. I’d say doom scrolling and para-social behavior are the modern dull things
BizarroLand
This is pretty true. Brilliance is marked at many levels by not doing what everyone else does, after all.
It's also marked by doing what other people do better than they do.
Lonerly contrarianism is not a cornerstone of brilliance.
kergonath
> I think once you are features in a guardian article, you arent dull anymore.
Come on, the Graun is the epitome of dull middle class.
rramadass
This seems to be a riff off of the "Diogenes Club" invented by Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes Stories - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_Club
"There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere."
calvinmorrison
if you're interested in the opposite, finding the intrigue or fascinating in the seemingly mundane, you might be a candidate for the RR&R. The most recent topic was an elaborate history of a Oklahoma state senator based on some old telegrams found in a junk shop.
notnmeyer
> The over or under toilet paper debate raged (politely) for two and a half weeks.
i found this particularly confusing because we all know that “over” is the only sane choice.
wccrawford
Only if you don't have cats. If you have cats, "under" is the only sane choice.
GianFabien
Don't you love all the punctures in the paper?
robocat
There must be a confounding variable: are you an engineer-type?
What traits are correlated with overing?
Do underers look at the world differently?
And it is a false dichotomy. Some people just don't care what direction when they replace the roll - what's a suitable name for that clade? And then there's the people who use the floor and ignore the holder.
Volundr
Mine is in the under configuration, due to being near an AC vent that will sometimes unspool the whole roll in the over configuration.
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TacticalCoder
[dead]
The Dull Men's Club group of facebook is actually oddly interesting. I would classify it more as a group who point out the very small oddities of every day life that are not very interesting. There is a post where someone saw two geese with 42 bay geese, another where the rental company fixed a door with a piece of pool noodle. Its more like a "huh that's kind of weird I guess" group.