Ask HN: What are your thoughts on an app to help introverts make friends?

What are your thoughts on this business idea.

App that helps lonely introverts build a circle of 3 to 5 close friends.

It will work as long as Gender is anonymous. As soon as it appears, same age old game of cat-mouse begins. Guys will chase girls. It is so fundamental to us, maybe you can find a way to escape this :)

15 years ago such 'app' used to be called a message board. There were many of these in existence. A lot of them were small enough that after a while, you would start to recognize usernames. Many had moderation relaxed enough that you could have fun threads about nothing in particular.

Anonymity was encouraged, which was great - it made absolutely no difference what one looked like, what gender they were etc.

There was no specific focus on making friends. In my opinion, joining something that has a friend-making purpose immediately makes it a bit awkward and makes interactions somewhat forced. Much better if friendships are forged 'accidentally', which happened a lot on those websites.

Threads and replies would be sorted by latest post, not by any notion of 'rating', and threads would never really expire. These made conversation more natural and discouraged people from just posting what they thought would be popular or risk not being even noticed.

After a while, people might have exchanged instant messenger contacts, which also had the benefit of being anonymous. People also were not online all the time, so could 'disconnect' any time, which also helped with feeling comfortable about it.

Search engines would show these message boards in search results, which meant that like-minded people would find them in similar ways and already have something in common.

Then antisocial media came along and made us all less connected.

In general I say these friends are found as we suffer together through school or summer camp. For those less-fortunate, or who fall out of friendship, I can see an app like this being useful for some. I’m more likely to make friends incidentally, doing something where the focus is not to make friends. An app whose express purpose is connecting people like this might be trying too hard? Maybe not—-dating platforms are useful, for example. I made some temporary friends during my MMORPG days, time I now consider unhealthily spent. I hope your project works and helps people find friends—-good luck!

Thanks for the feedback. I never considered the "trying too hard" aspect. If I understand you correctly, it might be hard for people to broadcast the fact that they are having trouble making friends. Sorry to hear that the friends from the MMORPG days were temporary. Thanks again for the advice.