With respect, that's been done. It was called Yik Yak. It was a disaster for the high school kids of my neighborhood; the geographic steering of messages allowed them to insult and stalk one another. The FOMO factor (fear of missing out) so carefully instilled in them by Instagram and the like made it very hard for them to just delete the app.

That's not a fundamental flaw with the idea though, it's just that the specific community Yik Yak developed was terrible. You could do the same thing but have it target, say, LinkedIn's demographic instead of old-time MySpace's.

There actually was a startup in DC that was doing something like this, called SocialRadar. They had a lot of funding but failed due to lack of adoption. They had a real name policy and didn't have any of the same problems that Yik Yak did.

As an interesting aside, that's how BBS's worked pre internet. Long distances calls were so expensive, BBS forums were largely localized. We would have get togethers and people's houses or at libraries, to meet each other once or twice a year, drink beer, play volleyball, etc.

Why do you think the parent was so heavily downvoted?

The NYC question did sound weird and somewhat like ad-hominem attack. You probably wanted to ask why OP found NYC better than SV?

P.S. I didn't downvote vote

Ah. I live in NYC and considered get together given the subject matter of the comment. I was asking the guy what kind of work he does. LOL.

No friggin idea.