51–60 of 168 posts
Where I come from, it's common practice to follow-up before an event in an effort to give the other person an out. I.e., "are we still up for lunch tomorrow?" Do other people not do this?
Next up, an AI to send you friendly texts, because you have no real friends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do people send calendar invites when hanging out with friends? Personally, if a meetup did actually make it into my calendar, I would not ship it to a friend.
I did wonder that. Personally, I put social events in my calendar but don't specifically invite the other people to it. I'm still validating the concept, but am initially leaning towards this being more of an integration with calendar services, particularly facebook where people probably do have common invites
Robocaller: "Hello is this $FIRST_NAME $LAST_NAME?"
Happy customer acting surprised: "Why yes it is. May I ask who is calling at such an hour? I'm hanging out with my friends."
Robocaller: "Yes this is $AUTHORITY. We need you to do $MANDATORY_TASK immediately.
Happy customer acting surprised: "Oh my! Okay, I'll be there soon."
Happy customer to friends: "Guys, this is so crazy, but I've got to run!"
Then you leave the party or whatever. Side-effects: you can't sleep at night because you're thinking about how weird you are.
Some folks I knew who rented an apartment in East Village to do their own startup had this exact same idea with this exact same name back in '14. I don't think they lasted very long with it and all ended up getting jobs, but this did at least make me check if this was the same folks. Edit: That said, I would pay to use this if it were done well and if I could get all my friends to use it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the reason. Telling a friend you want to cancel is hard, and depressing, and so you oftentimes go just to not bail on them. And hate it. But what if your friend is feeling the same way? What if you both want to cancel, but neither of you wants to hurt the other person. Well, with something like this, you can bail without letting them down; they only know you wanted to bail -if they also want to bail-. That…
Maybe its a cultural thing. Around here we grow up and learn to state our preferences honestly and understanding its not hurtful to be truthful but rather the opposite. Weaseling about is something you correct small children on.
Back of envelope total addressable market calculation: I’m guessing this will appeal greatly to people 3 or 4 standard deviations to the “introverted” side of the introvert/extrovert bell curve. So maybe 0.15% if it’s as high as only 3 sigma. It’ll be useful to people who’s friendship circles overlap in that 3 standard deviations of introversion. Let’s assume Dunbars much discredited but widely quoted ideas are right…
999/1000 people feel nothing when they have to renege on a social engagement?
I can't imagine being friends with someone who is this incapable of communicating. The solution to this problem is sending a text that says, "Hey, I'm not feeling like coming out today after all. Rain check?" This app is a worse solution than the obvious solution. Trying to be empathetic: if you feel the need to use something like this, I'm not qualified to diagnose you as having social anxiety, but I would suggest y…
A) the number of degrees of discomfort between, "I can talk about this any time with no effort", and "I literally can't talk about this".
B) how normal it is for certain types of people to struggle with this kind of interaction in general.
On the first point, I am perfectly capable of being frank with friends. I am perfectly capable of telling them how I feel. And when I need to have confrontational conversations with friends, I do. But that's not the same thing as feeling no aversion or worry at all about disappointing someone. And if a crutch exists that mitigates part of that problem, I just don't see the harm in that crutch.
There are dozens of tiny, inessential affordances everyone gives themselves every day to help manage non-crippling problems. That's normal. It shouldn't be weird to anyone that people with even mild anxiety around friendships might want similar affordances. Sometimes it's not about necessity, people just want a tool that makes their life easier.
On the second note, I'm not going to go in depth here, but people who don't struggle with social anxiety usually don't understand how many other people do, or what their experiences are actually like. There's a pretty wide range of different annoyances or aversions that people can have about this stuff, and I really don't want to pretend to speak for other people. Some introverts don't struggle with this at all, some struggle in completely different areas.
I am speaking in very broad generalities. But I consider these to be very common situations for someone like me:
- going to an event I'd rather not just because I don't want to disappoint a friend or make them think I don't enjoy their company.
- actively not inviting a friend to an event because I'm worried they'd only come out of obligation and would resent that I asked.
- feeling like if I just express interest in changing plans a friend will accommodate me even though they had their heart set on something.
I'm not going to say people like me are a majority: we're definitely not. But we're not that rare. If you've never had even a casual acquaintance like me, you're not looking very hard.
> I can't imagine being friends with someone who is this incapable of communicating.
I realize this is somewhat blunt and a little uncharitable, and I don't mean it as an attack or as a character flaw -- but in the general spirit of being confrontational and open: when I hear this, my immediate thought is, "this person probably doesn't have many introverted friends, and they probably don't have many deep, honest relationships with the few introverted friends they do have."
Your perspective definitely isn't uncommon, and it shouldn't surprise me when I hear it, but I'm always surprised anyway. :) It's like seeing someone who lives in a completely different world, to the point where when they see the world I'm familiar with it's not just unexpected to them, but so unexpected that they think, "there must be something wrong with that."
Back of envelope total addressable market calculation: I’m guessing this will appeal greatly to people 3 or 4 standard deviations to the “introverted” side of the introvert/extrovert bell curve. So maybe 0.15% if it’s as high as only 3 sigma. It’ll be useful to people who’s friendship circles overlap in that 3 standard deviations of introversion. Let’s assume Dunbars much discredited but widely quoted ideas are right…
I think more than 0.15% of people feel guilt/anxiety about wanting to cancel plans last minute. I don't have any data to back that up, but it is a fairly common emotion. 999/1000 people feel nothing when they have to renege on a social engagement?