I just met someone at the park - they added me on whatsapp and invited me into a local community group.

People the age as you were then are not having that problem now.

Nobody wants that stalker product, and I hate having to play with Gen Xers fawning for the vestiges of that product once per year with new Facebook account just to coordinate with a Burning Man camp.

How is this definitively true? Not everyone is great at socializing or having lots of friends or acquaintances where they’ll have other people’s info on the networks mentioned above.

Because the current/younger people all have the different apps that provide that already

People understand that their social graph is optionally transportable

They can recreate it on any app just by putting in their phone number or letting the app access their contacts

Right so this is all assuming you have people’s numbers. Which was my whole point. You may not have that. I said “other people’s info”

This is no different than when gen X or older millennials were kids on different apps too like IM apps. Which weren’t the same as FB early day either.

its assuming that you have one person’s contact info who is tangentially associated to the other people (number or username or email etc) or that they have yours.

Then you get recommended all the same people and can also browse the same people’s friends.

The recommendation and browsing is the same as Facebook’s early days, the same as now, and very different from instant messaging apps.

None of these apps are intended to solve your loneliness crisis. Recreating the mid aughts wont do it either. You have to be proactive in getting a variety of people’s contact info by interacting with a variety of people.

That’s not how IG or TikTok work. Not as well as FB’s recommendation system years ago. For example I had to gather everyone together from an online community on both platforms even though everyone was linked on Facebook. People weren’t finding recommendations to connect with other community people themselves on those platforms.

> None of these apps are intended to solve your loneliness crisis

What do you mean? Are you okay?

Recommendation engines break or change every sprint on every app, so I am surprised your community had this issue, but not sure your conclusions are really the direction of these platforms.

Either way, I don't see those as problems or a market gap people want.

Many groups just share a google form or spreadsheet. Accurate observation that this is something that would work even if we were just using old instant message apps since a list of screennames could be shared just as well. But since you already had an existing community to transport, its not a problem there and not a problem I see in my own communities.

The community didn’t have an issue themselves. They weren’t going out of their way at all to find one another. I have an interest in connecting the community members though. What I saw from many years for myself and based on who others follow/are social media friends with is that the FB connections were far higher than the IG or tiktok ones.

Not all communities or links of people will be the same. For example if someone is a 20-something who went to university, they won’t run into any issues yet, they are too young and experienced the world mostly being with a ton of other cohort people.

> None of these apps are intended to solve your loneliness crisis

> What do you mean? Are you okay?

There is a well documented loneliness epidemic. Thought you were referring to it inadvertently by fawning over an old form of technology.

Yeah I agree there’s a documented loneliness epidemic. You used “your” the first time with me. Which I found strange. Looking now, I seem to have engaged in assuming bad faith. My apologies.

Tho no I wasn’t referring to it in terms of comparing the aughts with now. I do believe in the loneliness epidemic. However not that it has gotten so much worse in 15 years.