Just like work or school friendships, if you don’t shift those hangouts to other contexts (meals unconnected to the activity, family introductions, travel, etc) then they won’t stick outside of that initial context, however deep they feel at the time

Could that be a good filter-function? “How gracefully does this person handle our skill difference” seems like a nice thing to know about somebody.

I have that feeling at work. I've spent years talking to people daily but never gotten to know them. But for stuff like hobbies I've never had trouble filling the time talking about the hobby. You don't find it interesting to talk about why you're both learning the language, or what books/media in that language you enjoy?

Language courses generally have a clear end date so it's not surprising that many people wouldn't be super invested in making or maintaining new relationships in them.

Easiest way to meet someone is for them to be a friend of a friend. I rarely date someone outside my extended circle even if I was trying to. We inevitably happen to know someone in common.

That said, bars are a great way to expand that circle. Dating is just one aspect of socializing. People who go to bars specifically just to "pick up" are creepy.

It's not about common interests, it's literally just about showing up and being exposed to the same people for a prolonged amount of time. The activity is just an excuse.

Sure, but there must be at least some common ground. Otherwise how are you going to spend time together?

It's not about common interests, it's about having a third place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place).

A lot of interests need a common space.

fully agree with dagelf here. me andmy wife share nothing in common but the fact we enjoy eachothers presence. imho its really important to have your own thing. if it all revolves around some external commonality, its bound to fail once that thing is gone for either.

Look, even if it's white supremacists, it's still good for their mental health to meet up irl.

So we shouldn't make it easier for people to meet each other, because some of those people might be white supremacists?

I'm sorry, but I think you may be spending too much time online.

Yeah that's actually largely a good thing. A big problem is the political echo chamber these people live in online. In neutral activities that are not strongly politically coded, they'll meet people from outside that echo chamber, and will inevitably face contradictions to their world view.

What's the problem exactly?

That might have been cited as the reason, but I think we all know the real reason is that France is fighting against Russian troops in their former African colonies, and Russian troops mainly use Telegram for their communications.

It’s one thing to list yourself as being in Atlanta and quite another to basically publish your exact location.

Strava has features to make this safer, e.g. allowing you to hide the first n meters of an activity, though a dedicated individual could eventually determine your route.

Honestly, though, there are easier ways to determine where you live and your routine, e.g. address books + parking a car outside of your house & observing.

Wasn't it also Strava or a similar app that revealed military bases by the staff on patrol having the app on?

I mean given sattelite imagery is a thing I doubt army bases are secret, but that was still a bit of a whoopsie, on both the personnel's part and the app's.

Good gravy that sounds like a stalkers dream

Airtags are very near you. Knowing someone is within 50 feet/a couple of meters is much different than knowing someone is within 30 mins drive of you, in a dense urban environment.

All you did was describe the feature. That is the entire point.

How does Tiktok do it? Edit: I meant how does Tiktok help person above meet people locally?

Same, I met one of my friends on TikTok, commenting about an event nearby.

> My suggestion is get a hobby that you explicitly are interested in, but don't go in with an expectation that you'll find someone, or make that your primary goal.

The issue here is that you need to have hobbies that are explicitly good for finding partners. For instance, I love riding motorcycles. I am happy to do group oriented aspects of the hobby like track days or group rides, etc. The amount of women in that activity is near zero. The same is true for cars. It's almost entirely men. Even if you say there's 10% women showing up - that's still a horrific 9:1 ratio.

I find it super annoying because my hobbies are so masculine and male dominated. I have to actually go out and do things that I'm not really that passionate about or interested in as a way to meet women - and then I have to be really good at said hobbies.

Fortunately, I am someone who is able and willing to suffer through things that I don't enjoy for a goal but it is going to contradict all the most popular advice out there of "do what you love and love will follow". It's just simply not true. All the women I've met were through activities or hobbies that I had no real interest in doing. I was simply doing them to improve my odds in regards to dating women.

Who cares if you're interested. Just do the fucking work.

And even for those with better intentions, the low stakes interaction will become high stakes as attraction and expectations increase. When rejection almost inevitably happens at some point, bringing feelings of innability and jealousy, it will be tougher to deal, specially for the less experienced following this path.

In this sense hookup culture can relieve such pressure and allows for decoupling the sexual needs, and romantic ones even - personal note: I think it's weird how people online talk as if it's mandatory to mistreat/abandon the people you hook up with. I build a small but nice network of "friends with benefits" which for me are simply friends who enjoy a specific activity. Like, exactly the inverse of what everyone is recomending and it worked for me.

For me a hobby group is for doing that hobby. I want to focus on that and not on building potential romantic relationships. If it is something I am really passionate about I am basically in asexual mode and don't even "see them that way".

I am sure many people's brain are wired differently and things "just happen" for them but I need to be more explicit to make anything happen. It also feels boundary crossing, especially with activities where there is physical contact. And even if you take a rejection well, I imagine it doesn't feel great for the other side to get unwanted romantic attraction. It has so much potential to create unnecessary drama.

I wish there were places you could just got to find romantic partners. Not like speed dating but where you can casually hang out. Sure bars and clubs do work for a certain crowd but are not that great if you are not into the "party scene" and lots of people there don't really want to meet other people but just party with friends.

> For many of us I don't think this is true

Probably depends on the details of the online communication.

A video call, a synchronous one on one text chat, an asynchronous one on one text chat, and a public broadcast like HN or Twitter all create very different experiences.

HN’s format makes it easy to show aloof, professional detachment and conceals my age and looks. For dating, though? That ain’t an advantage.

> There’s a ton of them but you don’t see younger people joining them as much today.

That's because they're primarily filled with old people, with "old" interests. Short of a coordinated visit, you'll always be in the minority. Heck, I'm in the minority, and I'm in my 40's the few times I accept an invitation to go to one of these places.

There's also the occasional left-over haughtiness about the value of being let into the club. Left over from when they were exceptionally popular. This can push people away too.

If you think dating apps skew male…

I have a crush on dang but it hasn't gone anywhere yet

For certain values of 'love', perhaps...

I’m not seeing what’s so bad about the popular reviews. I guess my one complaint would be that no one is writing reviews and so they should stop calling it reviews when they’re really tweets about movies, but I think if Letterboxd were actually 100% in-depth reviews I’d log off immediately. Usually people writing a short quip about a weird/funny thing they noticed is way more enlightening than trying to go through some intellectual exercise after every movie you watch.

“Me when I used Rust at work” 500 karma

“Yeah I’d let Jim Keller design my CPU” 200 karma

Strava has "Privacy Controls" section in settings. There isn't a single global off switch, but it's not too hard to set everything to private either.

Garmin Connect is actually fairly decent. Tracks activities (also sleep, which I find pretty useful), fairly detailed stats, little to none social features and a little gamification with challenges and achievements.

Also the watch reminds you to move from time to time.

Komoot is great for planning of "trips" and "stealing" other people's routes. I've done couple of them and you kind of never know what you're gonna see there (hopefully not agressive dogs), all of them were pretty enjoyable. It has a bit of a social aspect, but barely anyone uses it where I live, so IDK how it is.

One thing I miss from Strava are segments (or whatever they're called) - short parts of your route with it's own leader-board. Has "speedrun, but IRL" vibes, which is pretty cool IMO.

Meetup.com in large cities has become a money-grab, spawning a bunch of semi-professional “event planners” who charge much more than the cost of putting on the event. Feeling like you’re paying for the privilege of talking to other people is demoralizing. People want a place to meet other people that doesn’t feel like they’re paying to be “set up”.

Yeah definitely, gives you something to talk about at the next group ride too haha.

The solution is to not pursue sex or relationships, but to simply have enough of a social life that it happens anyway. That completely gets rid of the leisure suit larry energy that going out hunting for a partner inevitably gives you.

I mean if you're creepy about it, sure, but as long as you can pick up on social cues you can feel it out without rubbing anyone the wrong way.

A happy, long term relationship can be an end in and of itself, otherwise couples with fertility problems presumably should just break up.

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I'm definitely open to adding profile photos. So far I've mostly been developing based on what I personally want because I do enjoy using the service myself. Description has been on the backlog for a while. For location: you can currently set a flag to show up on your profile in your settings, but I agree it would make sense to expand it to a full location. Messaging will definitely be coming.

Right now the only way to see if you have common discs with someone else is to directly visit their profile and a "Discs In Common" section will show up. But that's sort of impossible to stumble upon since user discovery is non-existent at the moment. Will be improving this in the near future (others who've collected this disc, etc).

I'll come up with an actual roadmap this week, but here's a few ideas that will be on it:

- Bio, messaging, full location, profile photos - Album reviews (only after collection) - Improved empty state and onboarding - Folders to organize your collection - Readable profile links

Appreciate the great feedback!

Oh this is super cool. I actually started designing another project that's very similar to JQBX last week. Perfect time for me to see this. And the connection with Discollect will be that you can only queue tracks from albums you've collected, which hopefully encourages music discovery.

Thanks! Got the motivation to finish up the onboarding after seeing this article. Still adding features all the time so let me know if you have any ideas!

> Lrf, guvf vf n cha.

And here with the birth of broadband I thought we'd moved past the age of line noise.

Hey thanks for the tip. I searched my local subreddit and found some Discord invites, maybe I'll find better luck there.

I don't think this is necessarily the case. All the gyms I've been to have been majority men, like 80%+.

I think the "activities" part plays a role. I think a lot of men today struggle with socializing, especially with groups that have a good chunk of women. They feel like they don't belong and are acutely aware of how they can be perceived.

The gym, on the other hand, is a pretty isolated thing.

It probably says more about how men socialize tbh. And we know that fewer and fewer men are "having fun" in the dating world, which extends to antisocial behaviors like for example, not joining a run club because of perceived awkwardness.

Hence the arbitrage.

A very attractive mild acquaintance was either bored or lonely or whatever and set up her own run club, one guy showed up. Without wishing to think like a PUA these are good odds.

Go into most gyms and it’s the opposite phenomenon. Men know that some types of physical activity (weight lifting) actually get them laid and others (I.e running) are the equivalent of what food does to get away from predators. The men who get good at that type of physical activity tend to be treated like the food is.

You start out as strangers but I can say, after attending my local parkrun for a few times I got to know the other runners. Often it's half an hour of chatting at a nice tempo. Though I didn't meet any of them anywhere else, which isn't my intention anyways and I barely ever meet up with people.

You do the activity - you run and chat with some folks if you can. Otherwise, you just go to the social after. A lot of them meetup at a bar or something as the final destination to socialize post-run. Same with socializing before everyone is together and starts running.

Is it? I always thought the uttermost definition of "Free speech" is that you have the right to have a stupid, ugly or wrong opinion? And as long as you don't violate any ToS (e.g. Hackernews, as a private enterprise or organization) or laws (kill XYZ type of people) you are within the rights of "free speech".

What's that go to do with online dating and Strava?

You can do both at the same time ;)

Go out into more rural areas.

At a time I was thinking with a buddy (and someone from HN) to make an up where you (speak women) can only date me and my friends. For men it would be invitation only.

Supposed name was my name K: kandfriends