I really wish social media would "peak" to towards meeting people in real life semi-spontaneously.
No profiles, no media uploads, no digital showboating. The best relationships I have with other people fall in this category. Real life,common interests,no digital uploads.
Just add attributes of your geolocation and hobbies [biking, yoga,tensorflow,etc] or let it crawl your digital profile(s) to autobuild your attributes identity.
The system will group people with similar personalities/attributes.
Every once in a while, "the system" it sends you a text "Free at 9am? Mountain biking at X park for an hour with beer after with 3 new people? Text yes to opt-in"
Get revenue by having businesses bid on being the beer spot.
Refine the algorithm by having an anonymous rating system after the fact.
I like Meetup but it must be taxing to always manage the organization/logistics of a meeting.
Yes. I just realized I blended the show Betas,an episode of Black Mirror, and the 2016 movie Nerve together.
Heh, this makes me think of this anti-viral startup idea I had - which I'm not going to make because it's... Anti-viral and thus not something I think I could pull off. Anyway, the idea was pretty funny: a meetup-like website where you'd sign in with e.g. Facebook, and then you could only see and attend meetups that none of your Facebook friends are attending. In other words: everybody goes to these meetups with the expectation of not knowing anybody and getting to know new people.
That said, I think there's only so many people interested in actually meeting new people, at least of a certain age, and even those who are, are only interested in getting to know a small amount of new people.
Still, I quite like the idea. I don't even think you need to group people based on interests (though of course the subject of a group allows people to self-select); just being open to meeting new people can probably go a long way.
Haha, absolutely; especially since you quickly make friends with the kinds of people that go to these events, with the consequence that you're no longer able to go to these events.
But who knows, maybe enough people end up in a position where they want to make new friends (I'm thinking failed marriages, lonely elderly people, etc.) that there's a steady enough flow of new members.
This does seem like a powerful idea. The problem of networking friends, family, and co-workers has more or less been solved, but the problem of putting together complete strangers with shared interests and coincident physical locality really hasn't even been attacked except in very constrained use cases (i.e., dating services).
It's possible that the next big wave of social networks will be less "Facebook" and more "Spacebook."
That's not entirely true (your first point). Both my wife & I have met all sorts of acquaintances and what became good friends through interests that started with coincident physical locality: gyms, clubs, church, children's sports & school, etc. I don't think the problem exists completely in the way you seem to think. One potential mental block could be that spontaneity is a key piece of the equation. I argue that the vast majority of humans are not spontaneous and that's a hugely overrated attribute, if so.
I 100% agree with your second statement, though, that the future of social networks will focus more on the social and less on the spam & social signaling.
"the problem of putting together complete strangers with shared interests and coincident physical locality really hasn't even been attacked except in very constrained use cases (i.e., dating services)."
When clearly Meetup have both attacked and been very successful in "putting together complete strangers with shared interests and coincident physical locality". That's exactly what they do, would you not agree?
I'm honestly not that familiar with Meetup. I thought it was basically just a calendar for keeping track of local events. Do people maintain profiles or personal pages on it?
Agree 100% with this. I believe we should really utilize the internet more as a bridge for offline interactions. I've been trying to build something similar for sports called Reclub. https://reclub.co
We seem to be on the same wavelength. I might be giving up a viable idea here, but for a while I've been thinking about a sort of hybrid between Meetup and online multiplayer matchmaking where groups of people can meet up and do stuff without the need for an actual organizer.
Here's how I envision it:
- A user joins and provides a materials used to perform a background check.
- People with accounts sign in and are automatically grouped based on distance, interests, etc.
- Users cannot see who is in groups until they join one. This should help prevent people from backing out of matching because being lazy and skip over lots of people they don't like for minor superficial reasons. In other words, if you don't like fat people, guys who aren't cute, women who aren't hot, etc., you can't game the system without being punished. If a person really doesn't like someone they've met, they can set it to never put them in a group with that person again.
- Once a sufficiently-sized group has been formed(let's say between 6 and 8 people), they are given a time-limited choice between a list of activities. These activities can be autogenerated and evergreen(e.g. go see a movie, bowling, eat dinner, etc.) or be brought in from a list of actual events happening in the area(e.g. comedy shows, local bands, group painting classes, etc.). If consensus is not reached in 10 minutes, a random activity is picked.
- Once a group has formed, you can still back out but it will drastically deprioritize you in future meetups until you have actually attended enough of them that you appear reliable.
- When a group meets up, the app pops up with a unique QR code for the user. Each person in the group should scan each other's QR codes to verify that not only they showed up but that others showed up. This can be cross-checked with GPS proximity and motion, in case a user ever claims that the QR scan "doesn't work". By having your QR code scanned, you make yourself more likely to be grouped faster in the future, be given more interesting events, and be grouped with fewer flaky individuals.
I feel like there must be a reason why nobody has done something like this yet, especially since there's already an algorithmic model for this in games like Halo. Maybe autogeneration of meetups exposes a company to liability?
One thing I want to avoid, which is a part of your idea, is the notion of having users rate each other. I think that can lead to a lot of abuse and isn't really fair. I can only picture people downrating others because they are Jews or "she wasn't that hot". It would be much better to have a system where people are only judged on whether they show up(people are flakes) and if they have been reported for being creepy or worse.
> Users cannot see who is in groups until they join one. This should help prevent people from backing out of matching because being lazy and skip over lots of people they don't like for minor superficial reasons.
I'd worry more about being rejected in person, than beforehand. Ideally I'd want to never know I was rejected. Instead I'd like to notice when I wasn't (i.e., I'd rather never know there was an event of which I was never invited).
Also: the biggest challenge must be to prevent the whole system becoming impopular because of commercial abuse, i.e. "I went to one of those once for mountain biking, and of the 8 people there, 5 were bike salesmen pretending to socialize but constantly trying to advertise new bikes".
I believe we humans should raise our resilience to rejection instead of shielding ourselves from that information and therefore lowering that resilience even further. However since the first option is a human problem and the second one a technical problem, the second option scales better and is easier to implement (maybe towards our own downfall).
Don't worry about QR codes, it kills the vibe of an "organic" meeting. Just do it via GPS.
I wouldn't worry about liability, look at the physical contact Tinder is promoting :)
I think the rating should be on the group overall, and not on an individual level.
Negative individual ratings should only be done with consensus, if everyone says Bob was a bully. Then Bob's a bully. But if only Debbie says Bob was a bully, then maybe Debbie just overreacts.
If Debbie constantly negatively rates against the consensus, then Debbie probably isn't a good fit for group situations.
This would need a shitload of personal data to reach the point of "it just works." This means that it's most likely one of the tech giants that will do this right
No profiles, no media uploads, no digital showboating. The best relationships I have with other people fall in this category. Real life,common interests,no digital uploads.
Just add attributes of your geolocation and hobbies [biking, yoga,tensorflow,etc] or let it crawl your digital profile(s) to autobuild your attributes identity. The system will group people with similar personalities/attributes. Every once in a while, "the system" it sends you a text "Free at 9am? Mountain biking at X park for an hour with beer after with 3 new people? Text yes to opt-in"
Get revenue by having businesses bid on being the beer spot. Refine the algorithm by having an anonymous rating system after the fact.
I like Meetup but it must be taxing to always manage the organization/logistics of a meeting.
Yes. I just realized I blended the show Betas,an episode of Black Mirror, and the 2016 movie Nerve together.
Edit: Grammar