[krishan711]

I always try and imagine how big things became that way. We watch football in huge stadiums, but I like to think back to a time where people would just get together on Sunday and watch a match - and as they got more and more interesting, people decided that we need more space and built bigger and bigger stadiums.

It feels like this with all this 'sharing economy' stuff. Restaurants probably started off (many, many) years ago just being people inviting others over to eat - over time the best hosts started to charge more and more, and bought bigger and bigger places to host more and more people. Soon there were enough people doing this that it needed to be regulated.

It's like we're going in a circle.

[xlm1717]

This being the internet, you don't have to wonder about such things.

Here's a page with a lot of history on several different food topics: http://www.foodtimeline.org/restaurants.html

One interesting tidbit is that oldest dining menu comes from ancient Sumeria. They list a proper meal for the gods. Since the king was considered a living god, this could be considered a menu for the king. (So restaurants likely started off as a formalized meal "ritual" for the king.)

It also says that, broadly, street food can be traced back to military mess units. It's likely that during peacetime, the people who prepared food for military units went on to prepare food for the general public.

I also like to imagine that we have football stadiums now because of the Roman use of the Coliseum for watching live sports thousands of years ago, and the Coliseum was just the largest amphitheater, a structure which the Romans borrowed from the ancient Greeks. This would significantly predate the development of football.

[krishan711]

Ha, I should have thought to dive a bit deeper. I think the thought still makes sense though - I was just using football as an example, it can be extended to why did the Greeks build amphitheaters in the first place. It's not like one day they decided 'huge audiences must be great' - it must have started with smaller audiences and iterated into the big structures designed to hold larger audiences.

My point was we seem to be starting this iteration from scratch for a quite a few things.

[davidgay]

Well on the timeline of the development of large stadiums, I offer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circus_Maximus (and it's worth noting its size in relation to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stadiums_by_capacity)

[deelowe]

There has to be research (anthropology? business theory?) on this topic. Everything seems to go through these cycles.

Just to pick an example:

- Single developer is smart, hard working, and produces an excellent concept (minecraft alpha) - Interest grows, sales increase and a team is formed (minecraft beta). Things improve even more. - Product grows too big and sales start following the right hand side of the bell curve (microsoft involvement, minecraft story holo lense...). Seriously I think we are past peak minecraft.

In fashion and culture, we call it a fad. In investing, we call it a bubble. In business people make comments about corportism and monopolies. However, time and time again, we see this cycle.

[bgilroy26]

Speaking of football, it's funny to think that college football teams were once simply clubs of students who were enthusiastic about the sport

[krishan711]

Exactly! Although I was talking about 'soccer'