Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?

When NextDoor first came around, I recall walking down the street to help a lady move her couch down to the ground floor. She then gave me some cookies she'd baked. Fun! The notifications it sends me these days are less enjoyable so I send them to spam because unsubscribing doesn't seem to reliably work for me.

Helping people like you are seems like an amazing start. Maybe try to get a pyramid structure going where you teach people to help other people and then they teach people and then it’s a movement? But at all times a low level of effort so there is no pressure other than just holding up a sign or a marker.

I’ve found the hardest thing is breaking the ice and the sign / marker normalises a low stakes interaction where one participant can walk away at any time

I like this poster thing. Anything that gives people a little connection to those around them.

I sometimes sit on my front step and play guitar. 9/10 people ignore me but usually I'll have one or two nice conversations with a neighbor, and have made a couple friends this way. It helps that I live in a dense walkable place with lots of people who are similar to me.

There is an old joke or trope of an evil scientist creating a worm that destroys the Internet and everyone ends up thanking him for saving the world.

I think part of the problem is that social media is normalized and it is easy. It is way easier to engage socially (or at least you feel like you're engaging socially) with likes and lurking and stuff. It is way harder to put on pants and go out and it is normalized to do so (phrasing like bedrotting is super casual, whereas it is actually really hard to maintain an eating disorder because you have to be constantly hiding it from people).

Also I think there's more groups whose social norms online teach you to be repulsive offline and again there's not enough social pushback against it. We do need to be harder on casual edginess online because it is teaching habitual behaviors that make it hard to engage socially. Your 50 year old hiking buddy is not going to understand your soycuck joke you are trying to show him on your phone. Your average wine mom at women-only book club is not going to love if you insist on talking about banning trans people from the club because they're "men invading the women's spaces" especially when there's very likely 0 trans people to exclude in the first place on account of trans people being rare.

Lastly there is usually a ton of stuff happening but the instructions on how to engage with it is nebulous. People who know the algorithm find it easy, the people who don't know the algorithm find it super hard. And IDK how to solve that because there's so much going on in people's heads that they don't realize the people around them seriously aren't scrutinizing them that much. There's like a socialization death spiral where every small awkward interaction hurts way more when you don't have enough experience to know that the small awkward interactions are normal. So you can't tell someone "just go to book club" because they'll go, have 1 normal situation like mishearing someone and then decide they are so embarrassed they can never go to book club again-- but since it is so normal it happens at every social event and they end up lonely.