Yeah, if you ask me, it's pretty legit to take a selfie when you reach a goal, particularly when it's something ultra-scenic like the summit of a mountain!
It's not the selfie taking that's the problem, it's the showing up just to take a selfie and promptly leaving.
When that escalates into a flow of people arriving and immediately departing just to take selfies it's now become a sort of thoroughfare and the natural environment is entirely disrupted in the interests of giving everyone their own bespoke copy of the same view.
At that point you may as well just pave the trail and install a Starbucks at the overlook.
I was talking to a distant cousin in Europe about hiking and how here in BC, you can (with some effort) go up in the forest and be completely isolated from civilization. Heck, you might even lose cell service! He mentioned how he was so frustrated when he'd go on ambitious hikes, feel pretty "alone with nature" and then, at the summit.. there's a pub. There are a couple mountain summits here like that (e.g. Grouse Mountain) but luckily quite a bit of reasonably-"untouched" stuff.
That said, as time goes on you have to go further and further out to experience that "untouched" nature, and I don't see that slowing down anytime soon. The spread of humans is seemingly inevitable, thus the seeking of selfies isn't really a noteworthy aspect. IMO it's a "drop in the bucket" compared to stuff like hyper-available trail map apps/websites with ratings and comments and up-to-the-minute video clips from fellow hikers/offroaders reporting conditions of every possible trail in existence. Stuff that wasn't even known to anyone suddenly becomes the hot new thing overnight because someone added it to one of those apps and called it "the region's best-hidden gem".
and how long do you have to watch the same scenery before you can be classed as not a problem?
besides, the problem is the hoarders that want to take hours watching from the few good spot, preventing access to anyone else because they don't "enjoy it" if they don't transform a spot place into a whole experiencial journey
That's a good point actually. I hiked 20km recently and got to a very scenic waterfall, but not only were my photos of this momentous occasion full of some people who were having lunch with their group right by the waterfall, but also of course I could not access the spot they were at (since they were taking up the whole plateau/rock that acted as a nice plaform). We hung around, drank some water, messed around on the radio, but those people were there before we arrived and stayed after we left. With all that considered, obviously the reality is there are just lots of people who want to see the same cool stuff -- I don't think one can reasonably argue it's "selfie-takers" nor "hoarders", since it's quite subjective what amount of time or experiential indulgence happens to be the optimal acceptable level.
