This is a social problem in need of a technical solution. I'm waiting for a startup that can be accurately described as "Uber, but for real friends." Eventually they can phase out the contractors in favor of an ML/AI/ELIZA solution. /s
My company, https://www.thawd.net, is working to solve this problem. We help people meet up and have fun.
Creating lasting friendships is a hard problem though. There are only two things that seem to work:
1. A lot of time. On the order of 120 hours spent together to solidify a friendship.
2. Going through a prolonged stressful situation together.
At least 1 of these needs to be present for a long lasting friendship to form.
Combine these two and it is why so many people make great friends in college, lots of time spent together with a small group of people, and the stress level is jacked sky high.
People working at together at startups bond for the same reason.
I am pretty sure of my solution for getting people off the couch, away from Netflix, and talking to each other. What comes next? That is a much harder problem.
Come on, there's room to ask questions and be skeptical while still assuming good faith. That's what the site guidelines ask you to do. Please don't break them while posting here.
"I insert myself in friendships to market targeted products and services to you."
One of those has bad faith built in at the core. Taking a friendship and converting it to discrete monetary transactions for some VC/founder cheapens the very thing that friendship is. And it tries to erect a paywall as a default normal for "friend interactions", or at minimum normalizes such behavior.
If there was any good faith, it was dismissed like the way this founder did to the root sarcastic comment. We all should have known there would be some entrepreneur to throw friendship in the pit to gain a bit more money/power.
That's deeply uncharitable, and therefore you're still violating the site guidelines.
It's possible that someone has sincere intentions of developing a startup to help people make friends. Maybe that's naive, but that's no reason to flame them and make them out to be a sinister asshole. Could you please just take the spirit of this site more to heart?
> I'm pretty sure that user:CharlesColeman was saying that in a sarcastic jest, and not as a open petition for someone to actually do that.
Right now technology gives us all sorts of easy ways to be entertained. A lot of those forms of entertainment aren't long term psychologically sustainable (social media, binging streaming TV), but give a short term burst of entertainment/happiness.
Thawd makes getting up, leaving the house, and going out with other people, really easy.
It doesn't replace friendships, but if you and a friend want to go to an escape room, we can help you find another 2 people to fill out the reservation.
> I'd hate to see how you sabotage friendship so you can make money.
The plan is to make money from partner companies, such as the aforementioned escape room.
Lots of types of businesses lose money if there is a hole in their schedule. From that side of things, we fill those holes up. We also aim to help businesses run local community events on a short notice, as soon as a few days in advance.
Events with no money coming to us are the majority of what is on the platform, #1 goal is to help people have fun and socialize more, and the event suggestion algorithm is completely unbiased in what events it selects. (especially since we are pre-launch and don't have any partners!)
Technology can be used to help improve people's lives, it doesn't all have to be bad.
> It doesn't replace friendships, but if you and a friend want to go to an escape room, we can help you find another 2 people to fill out the reservation....
> The plan is to make money from partner companies, such as the aforementioned escape room.
So, in conclusion, your startup isn't so much about helping people make friends; it's about giving businesses another advertising opportunity and reducing some barriers that keep customers from giving them their money. The friendship stuff is the aspirational, feel-good wrapping paper around the real product.
Edit:
> Thawd makes getting up, leaving the house, and going out with other people, really easy.
"Going out with other people [and spending money together]" is an optional and frequently minor part of friendship. You claim that you're "working to solve this problem [of loneliness], but this the kind of definitional distortion I was referencing in my other comment. The meaning of friendship is twisted to overemphasize its most economically significant aspects.
I feel that ethos of business is a big part of this problem, and it won't be part of the solution.
> ..your startup isn't so much about helping people make friends; it's about giving businesses another advertising opportunity..
> I feel that ethos of business is a big part of this problem, and it won't be part of the solution.
You're so right to point this out. Your original comment satirizes the narrow mindset of reducing a social and cultural problem to building/selling technological solutions.
Often the latter is not a solution at all, but merely another symptom of an underlying illness, the mentality that exploits society and human relationship as a business opportunity. On the theme of friendship and loneliness, Facebook is a prime example.
> So, in conclusion, your startup isn't so much about helping people make friends; it's about giving businesses another advertising opportunity and reducing some barriers that keep customers from giving them their money.
I had to find a way to fund it somehow!
Original inspiration was when I was traveling, I wanted to meet up at a bar with some locals. I came back to Seattle, friends told me that the idea is great, but that they'd love to see it done here at home!
> "Going out with other people [and spending money together]" is an optional and frequently minor part of friendship. You claim that you're "working to solve this problem [of loneliness], but this the kind of definitional distortion I was referencing in my other comment. The meaning of friendship is twisted to overemphasize its most economically significant aspects.
V1 feature set is around helping people find things to do at local businesses. Future planned features focus on helping people organize their own events, but the startups that started off in that space initially have all failed.
I'm trying to do something morally good, but at the end of the day I have to pay for to keep the servers on somehow.
> I feel that ethos of business is a big part of this problem, and it won't be part of the solution.
Only a small % of events that are listed are even from partners, and as many non-commercial events as possible will be added, e.g. hiking, public gardens, and the like. But the other side of this is, when it comes to meeting new people, the vast (vast!) majority of people surveyed say they feel safer in public spaces. For high density urban areas, that mostly means commercial spaces.
Finally, I don't think helping people find things that they want to do is inherently bad. I do not believe that fulfilling a someone's request to "find me a group to play laser tag with" is an inherently immoral action to undertake just because it is facilitating a commercial activity.
"Should I make this thing? What does it mean for me to make this thing?"
We've told you the implications you've made in doing this. You choose to devalue friendships by wedging commerce into it. And thus, you cheapen the thing you tried to create.
> I'm trying to do something morally good, but at the end of the day I have to pay for to keep the servers on somehow.
'I'm trying to be moral, except when I can't afford to be'
And with that idea, lies the grain of "truth": if you want friends, you have to buy them things or time.
Is this "service" going to recommend going to the park to watch free movies? Or how about free concerts? Or how about meeting up at hackerspaces on open house nights? Or encourage the hundreds of free things happening in a city at any one time? Or what about someone hosting a house party, and staying away from bars and club style events? You can't make money on free. I'm sure it'll be given lip service. And there's juicy data there that can be siphoned, correlated, and sold to the highest bidder. What's the chances of this complying with the GDPR?
This is how you degrade friendship to tit-for-tat in a business deal. It's just another adtech business that attempts to attack and hijack friend relationships by sneaking in the back door.
> And with that idea, lies the grain of "truth": if you want friends, you have to buy them things or time.
My thoughts exactly. Sorry I preempted your point with the edit to my comment.
> Is this "service" going to recommend going to the park to watch free movies?...
Or to take it even further: taking a walk in a park, stopping by to say hello, meeting to chat. I'd say some of the most important components of friendship aren't even "things to do."
> Is this "service" going to recommend going to the park to watch free movies? Or how about free concerts? Or how about meeting up at hackerspaces on open house nights? ... Or what about someone hosting a house party, and staying away from bars and club style events?
#1 goal is to keep people on the platform. Without users, there is nothing. To keep the lights on, only ~10% of what is on the platform needs to be revenue generating. Everything else is about bringing people together.
Open house nights are harder, people tend to feel unsafe when an app leads them into someone else's personal space.
As I mentioned in another reply, v1 is about externally created events, future features are around what you are describing. But an existing user base with enough critical mass has to exist before it becomes possible to have people successfully create their own events.
> What's the chances of this complying with the GDPR?
Very high, I am super paranoid about privacy.
As an example of this paranoia, when user's join a pre-event chat room, they are all given a unique UID for that chat room. A mapping table is created in the DB, tracking their real user id to the chatroom's user ID. The user's actual user ID is never sent to other users.
After 30 days, the entry in the mapping table is deleted.
Everything is like that, end to end, when a user taps "delete profile" every trace of their existence is removed. The only thing kept around are the aggregate review scores they contributed, the "+1" ratings on some particular event is fun, which has no connection to the user.
> It's just another adtech business that attempts to attack and hijack friend relationships by sneaking in the back door.
I'm boot strapping this myself because I believe an alternative to sitting inside on a Saturday night watching streaming pixels fly needs to exist.
And in Japan, Gatebox.[2] Gatebox is like Amazon's and Google's home "speakers", but with a more personal AI and a display that shows, inevitably, a cute female animated character.
That is basically what AdultFriendFinder started as. I realize your comment was for humor but it has been tried several times and seems to always move in the direction of a hookup app.
> But I didn't realize that it was satire until I got to the "/s". Which is scary.
Yeah, I'm only starting to really come to terms with how much technical culture has really twisted many important concepts to suit itself (and only itself), and has so normalized those distortions that your eyes just glide over the contradictions they create.
I recognise the sarcasm, but technology isn't completely incapable of helping. Instead of trying to solve the "matching problem" which has all kinds of issues, there are apps (I work for one) that are helping people have more authentic relationships with people they already care about but just don't have the time/schedule/location to spend time with.
