Apps do bring people together, but by aggregating potential partners in a large area most matches go to the top 10-20% of men. In person, women are a lot less selective. So the absence of in person venues to meet partners really curbs opportunities for most men.

What the parent is really talking about is that people in close proximity for extended periods are going through shared experiences. If you spend time with people and experience similar things then you will start to form emotional bonds with them. The parent could have also replaced partners with friends and the statement would hold true for the same reasons.

On the other hand, let's do the same analogy and replace partners with friends for the goals of apps. I think it would be obvious to many that these wouldn't be good platforms to build strong friendships on. If Tinder is the equivalent of asking someone out at a bar it is also similar to approaching someone at a bar and asking them to be your best friend. It might happen, but odds likely aren't in your favor, and especially not if you're not someone that likes to go bar hopping.

I was thinking of social networks mostly. Tinder is an antisocial, hookup app

I honestly don't believe that social networks bring us closer together. They can, but in practice they don't. Instead I believe they give us the illusion of feeling closer and more involved, but that is likely cognitive dissonance (akin to thinking ChatGPT is smart because it speaks). The only way to build relationships is through shared experiences. This can be done online btw, but these experiences are not doing things like liking peoples posts or occasionally commenting in threads. They involved personal and/or group conversations/activities. That's why you're more likely to find friends playing videogames online than through a social network (assuming pure online).

> I would contest this. Don't apps do exactly this, on a global scale? They bring people closer at all times, have regularity, and even have silly competitions, self-promotion , and all ways for people to 'hook up' with each other.

No. "Same place" means here "same people, repeatedly over prolonged periods of time". Dating apps are, AFAIK, not making same people to keep in contact "until the spark comes".

I think they were talking specifically about dating apps. You either go on a date right away or never talk to the person again. There is no room to slowly build a relationship after "bumping into each other" over time.

In large scale social networks, you're interacting with a lot of different people, relatively superficially. In contrast, if you have a relatively small group that spends a lot of time together, close relationships will form. An example is the Discord server I'm on (started off as an invite-only Among Us group, ended up just a general group of decently vetted friends who play games together), in which several relationships have formed (with the downside of there being an inconvenient amount of distance between parties, but plane tickets aren't that expensive).