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Ask HN: How do you meet new people?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you meet new people?

#3

Post by exabrial »

Volunteer work! I just spent my morning playing guitar for a local church. In the past, I've helped design and solder some LED strip displays for them, produced Ableton live sets, and assisted with sound production. I also spend a time at local charities playing music, serving meals, office work, fixing computers, setting up networking equipment, and even running people to get groceries.

Re: Ask HN: How do you meet new people?

#5

Post by WhitneyLand »

It’s strange there’s no service to aid in this process, or maybe there is and I haven’t seen it? Meetup has become to much work to sort our sellers.

Tinder for plain ol’ friends you are not trying to date or sell something to, but might have things in common with?

The one thing that messes it up for me is a few people I have known a long time who turned out to be lifelong best friends yet I have almost nothing in common with them. It’d be tough to have matching criteria for that, then again it also sounds like something tailor-made for machine learning if you could get the right data into the system.

Re: Ask HN: How do you meet new people?

#6

Post by pavel_lishin »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #5

It’s strange there’s no service to aid in this process, or maybe there is and I haven’t seen it? Meetup has become to much work to sort our sellers. Tinder for plain ol’ friends you are not trying to date or sell something to, but might have things in common with? The one thing that messes it up for me is a few people I have known a long time who turned out to be lifelong best friends yet I have almost nothing in com…

> a few people I have known a long time who turned out to be lifelong best friends

I help moderate a local subreddit dedicated to local meetups, and I see this a lot - people are looking for best friends, and I think this is a mistake for two reasons:

1. You don't need all the people you regularly socialize with to be best friends. It's okay to have people you see often with whom you're not super-intimately connected. Not everyone has to be a platonic spouse. You ought to have a range of good friends, acquaintances, buddies, regulars-you-only-see-at-this-one-bar, etc. Seeking deep relations exclusively is a mistake, partially because...

2. ... you can't really farm out "find me a best friend" to an algorithm. As you mention, your best friends might be people who you appear to have nothing in common with, so you already know this.

People say that dating is a numbers game, but it's easier to filter out potential dates than it is potential best friends. (For one, most people can easily eliminate ~50% of the populate from the pool.) There are obvious dealbreakers, but really it's just a matter of meeting people and seeing how your personalities mesh, how your conversations go, and how you both feel after awhile.

Re: Ask HN: How do you meet new people?

#7

Post by gitgud »

I'm not the most confident person, but i reluctantly became a volunteer at a sporting association and have met a ton of people through it.

In my experience, people are nicer to you than you think, especially if your interests are aligned.

Re: Ask HN: How do you meet new people?

#8

Post by xchip »

I like people and I like listening and asking questions about their stories, if you give them enough time people will tell you the most amazing and surreal stories you can imagine, I always end up laughing and so do they.
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