Online dating is still not as successful it could be because all data is not used. Everyone has smartphones, partners could be matched up based on the generated sensor data. There's also the low cost gene sequencing services, daters could be matched up using it.
The friendship problem cannot be tackled the same way. Women might be more open to actively seeking new platonic friendships in dating service kind of fashion, but they are less likely to be lonely anyway.
To solve the male loneliness problem would require focusing men around an issue. Men build good friendships over shared forced activities (school, work, military, political meetups, dinners with their wives's friends husbands).
To solve the loney man issue requires more of the same. Greater efficiencies in organizing economic/volunteery groups.
Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding is the answer here. Sites like mechanical turk and kickstarter with better social networking features, and finding ways to physically get people meeting together. For example, a component of kickstarter campaign might require doing a thousand man march in the capital city. Part of a mechanical turk task would require holding a protest. Similar ideas to get people excited about a shared cause meeting up at the same place.
Also, governments should consider creating an army units for elderly or otherwise lonely men. If your old and you're wife/husband died, you should be able to join the army to help in some capacity, even sitting at a desk at the barracks and filling in mechanical turk tasks.
Dating in the context of dating sites and such is inherently targeted at lonely people; fake profiles, trying to invoke feelings of 'belonging', and that there are people like you out there.
Which are all sales techniques to get you to get a subscription. It's worse when you're a woman, put your picture up there and you get a dozen messages a week from guys suggesting you should have sex with them.
To solve loneliness, people need to talk. Not try and find people that 'match' according to some obscure algorithm on an impersonal, protective online cocoon in the form of a dating site.
Also, aren't veterans an army social club of sorts? Annual meetups and the like.
I just moved to San Francisco a year ago. I know no one any more since I quit my last job to do my own business. I've been feeling really lonely, so I googled "finding friends in San Francisco." This lead me to Craigslist, and soon I was reading ads in the strictly platonic section where men are looking for other men to hike shirtless together. Hiking is cool, but it didn't take me long to realize this wasn't really what I was looking for.
So I've been scouring Meetup, and I've been having a lot of trouble finding things there, too. Here I live in the East Bay, literally I'm at the most ideal place on Earth for finding the kind of people I'm interested in, and struggling. The problem is me, of course! But still, there is opportunity here for the right kind of startup or community.
Online dating is still not as successful it could be because all data is not used. Everyone has smartphones, partners could be matched up based on the generated sensor data. There's also the low cost gene sequencing services, daters could be matched up using it.
The friendship problem cannot be tackled the same way. Women might be more open to actively seeking new platonic friendships in dating service kind of fashion, but they are less likely to be lonely anyway.
To solve the male loneliness problem would require focusing men around an issue. Men build good friendships over shared forced activities (school, work, military, political meetups, dinners with their wives's friends husbands).
To solve the loney man issue requires more of the same. Greater efficiencies in organizing economic/volunteery groups.
Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding is the answer here. Sites like mechanical turk and kickstarter with better social networking features, and finding ways to physically get people meeting together. For example, a component of kickstarter campaign might require doing a thousand man march in the capital city. Part of a mechanical turk task would require holding a protest. Similar ideas to get people excited about a shared cause meeting up at the same place.
Also, governments should consider creating an army units for elderly or otherwise lonely men. If your old and you're wife/husband died, you should be able to join the army to help in some capacity, even sitting at a desk at the barracks and filling in mechanical turk tasks.