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Frame from Sasquatch music festival 2009 - Guy starts dance party Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Sasquatch music festival 2009 - Guy starts dance party

dkellerm
Other
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this video1 month2009–2022 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Used as the classic example of a lone first follower turning one person's action into a movement, in threads about bystanders and group behavior.

Amateur footage from the 2009 Sasquatch music festival in which one person starts dancing alone and a crowd gradually joins in, turning it into a dance party.

“I think the most amazing/hilarious example I've seen of one person starting something by making the first move” (HN, 2019)

1 recommendations · 3 citations · Other

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@pkrumins Sep 2009 Cites it
on HN thread
Seems staged to me. It seems unnatural how those 4 people started dancing at exactly the same time at the first wave. Ps. This is similar to an event where a guy started a dance party [this video]
Similar event where a guy started a dance party
@pkrumins Sep 2009 Cites it
on HN thread
Seems staged to me. It seems unnatural how those 4 people started dancing at exactly the same time and at the same beat at the first wave. Ps. This is similar to an event where a guy started a dance party [this video] Damn it: I don't understand why this submission went [dead] two times.
Similar event where a guy started a dance party
@wizardforhire Nov 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Undetectable very-low frequency sound increases dancing at a live concert
Read more
I can confirm this. It’s also nice to see a new paper on this. I’ve been using this knowledge professionally for the last 24 years as a front of house engineer. Anecdotal story time: You’ve may have seen this video, or some variation of or maybe even the TED talk inspired by it… [this video] …what few people know and most don’t because I have not shared this publicly (in media at least) is that I was mixing this show. We we’re on in the middle of the day and a few bands had been on before us. By this point in my career I had already been to the gorge several times and the hill has always been a problem. On this particular day during the already frantic pace of a festival changeover with no sound check, the system tech is talking up the new delay stacks they beefed up for this year. This was great news and were geeking out and he’s showing me where they’re at on the console which is of course buried under some convoluted series of navigation and button presses to get to, given the atrocious UI design of digital electronics. Now generally given these circumstances, convention holds that the delays are set to some arbitrary value and the guest engineer generally need not concern themselves as the system techs will be monitoring them. To my horror were getting to the dancy part of our short set and I’m doing my due diligence and looking back at the hill and wondering whats up, why isn’t anyone dancing!?! The delays were not turned up! None of the previous engineers that day had though
Commenter mixed that show; anecdote about delays and dancing

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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