Renting a Friend in Tokyo

Re:Renting a Friend in Tokyo by mathattack on Friday March 25, 2016 @05:21PM (#11362763)

This article doesn't pretend that the friendships are real. They are 100% commercial. They exist because of a personal void that must be filled. If there were non-commercial (free) alternatives, people would be using them.

For better or worse, once I got into my mid-30s, I started wondering about dollar signs in people's intentions in general, unless I met them in the context of a hobby.

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Re:Renting a Friend in Tokyo by sago on Friday March 25, 2016 @08:42PM (#11363812)

I used to travel to new cities pretty often for training work, and people I was training would be good at taking me out once or twice. But a few times I thought it would be cool to be able to hire a 'guide' to show me some cool places in the evening: good food, drinks, music. Someone who'd even be up for teaching me a bit of the language, when I'm out of the anglophone world. I wasn't interested in anything romantic, so I never felt brave enough to hire an escort.

I think it would be cool to have this kind of thing: AirBnB for Friends, but I don't think my need was a 'personal void' to be filled, just a function of being a social person with a socially unconducive job.

It may be a personal void for many (perhaps most), but shouldn't have to be.

[Edit:] Also, "wondering about dollar signs in people's intentions", yeah, same, but another reason that a specific transaction wouldn't be a bad thing.

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Re:Renting a Friend in Tokyo by Tiksi on Saturday March 26, 2016 @04:22AM (#11364884)

I think the issue with a service for finding friends is that it will inevitably be used by people looking for "friends" of a more romantic nature and either by reputation or officially becomes a romantic service as that's what the majority of the users seem to want.

A service to find someone to hang out with and show you around while traveling would end up becoming "Uber for Escorts" or some kind of Uber-Tinder hybrid.

For example Adult Friend Finder was started to actually find friends:

>In 1994, Andrew Conru created the first online dating site, WebPersonals. After selling that site in 1995, he launched FriendFinder.com, an early social networking site intended to help people connect with likeminded activity partners, in 1996.[3] Days after the site went live, Conru found that people were posting naked pictures of themselves and seeking partners for adult-oriented activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_FriendFinder

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Re:Renting a Friend in Tokyo by mathattack on Friday March 25, 2016 @08:59PM (#11363868)

There could be a market for it. Or a system that facilitates it. A friend of mine once visited Hong Kong, and crashed on the couch of a friend of his. That friend said, "I'm going to be out of town, but here's your phone, here are the friends of mine that you'll be hanging out with while you're here." I thought that was very cool.

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