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Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

theguardian.com

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Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#91

Post by [deleted] »

notjoemama wrote: post #85
marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

Can't be overstated how good having a setting centered on some common activity with low stakes social interaction is for building relationships, romantic as well as platonic. Hookup culture just isn't for everyone, and the notion that it is has been the cause of a lot of grief and agony.

Cool. So online activists can become more engaged irl? Sounds great unless the activism is the kind you disagree with. Imagine this brining together a collection of white supremacists or antifa. Or pro-life versus pro-choice. This is the problem with the tech world. They are so preoccupied with whether they can, they don’t stop to think if they should. Yes, that's from Jurassic Park.

[deleted]

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#92

Post by bradlys »

This article reads "we noticed certain apps have been increasing in users. Everyone is complaining about dating and dating apps. Maybe users have found love on these other apps!" But then doesn't show any proof or even anecdotal evidence of some users who would share their experience. "Yeah, I saw he would get the weekly record for the section between 14th and 34th. I just had to reach out... We're expecting our 2nd child this autumn - we're naming them Cassette."

No, this "article" as far as I saw was simply conjecture.

If there's any amount of this happening - it's hellishly small or limited to people who don't go out at all. If you didn't meet the love of your life in college, dating apps still seem to be the reigning king of the well educated white collar professional (HN audience). I think I've only met one couple that met at a club/bar - almost all others met through a shared hobby (where they met face to face originally) or at a party with mutual friends. By far the leading one though is college + dating apps. IRL meeting as a way to form a relationship after college seems pretty uncommon for my well off and well educated crowd.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#93

Post by marginalia_nu »

notjoemama wrote: post #85
marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

Can't be overstated how good having a setting centered on some common activity with low stakes social interaction is for building relationships, romantic as well as platonic. Hookup culture just isn't for everyone, and the notion that it is has been the cause of a lot of grief and agony.

Cool. So online activists can become more engaged irl? Sounds great unless the activism is the kind you disagree with. Imagine this brining together a collection of white supremacists or antifa. Or pro-life versus pro-choice. This is the problem with the tech world. They are so preoccupied with whether they can, they don’t stop to think if they should. Yes, that's from Jurassic Park.

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.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#94

Post by bradlys »

werid wrote: post #86
bradlys wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ac…

curious how that works out. you start dating, stop doing the hobby you're not really interested in, but she continues, and finds out you were only in it to find a date?

Super common. Seen this happen a lot with some hobbies that I've pursued. The men will show back up when/if said relationship dies (after all - it worked the first time). A lot of women do this too. They might've had a genuine interest but it wasn't sufficient to keep them going.

For some of the hobbies I have, you'll find that there's very few single women but a massive amount of single men.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#95

Post by Sebb767 »

nogbit wrote: post #69
eska wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The point that is being made is that you do new things you haven’t done before. Explore! For example, If you are a gym rat in the morning you can still do that yourself without the other person and then later in the day do the new things you never done before. The other person benefits as well. You don’t always have to be glued to the hip of the other.

So you argue that you should both enjoy exploring new things together in common.

No one is arguing that you should spend every minute with your partner, but if you want to spend time together, you should have an activity that you both enjoy (which might be exploring new things!), otherwise the relationship will be hard.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#96

Post by cjbgkagh »

morkalork wrote: post #82
dqv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TikTok is the only app I’ve encountered that gets this right. I’ve made connections with people from my town and places just outside where I live. I’d love to see more apps do what TikTok does.

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

By giving people what they want. A lot of this emergent behavior falls out of doing good search science. By optimizing other metrics YouTube etc are giving people less of what they want and more of what YouTube wants. YouTube would be useless if I couldn’t ban so many channels from my recommended feeds.

At the early stages of TikTok there was some controversy that diverse, disabled, marginalized etc people were being underrepresented compared to other platforms and we now see how that turned out.

I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea to give people what they want and I consider TikTok to be so addictive that I’ve avoided using it, but it’s definitely a successful idea.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#97

Post by tinybrain »

What happened to Meetup?

I moved to a new city in 2015 and made a handful of long term friend groups, all started from meetup. I moved to a new city in 2024 and it's basically empty... except for some Wiccan book clubs, or MLM pyramid schemes or whatever.

I don't get it. Seems like there would be competition in this space to replace Meetup, but there's nothing? Or did we all just collectively give up on meeting strangers.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#98

Post by peppermint_gum »

notjoemama wrote: post #85
marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

Can't be overstated how good having a setting centered on some common activity with low stakes social interaction is for building relationships, romantic as well as platonic. Hookup culture just isn't for everyone, and the notion that it is has been the cause of a lot of grief and agony.

Cool. So online activists can become more engaged irl? Sounds great unless the activism is the kind you disagree with. Imagine this brining together a collection of white supremacists or antifa. Or pro-life versus pro-choice. This is the problem with the tech world. They are so preoccupied with whether they can, they don’t stop to think if they should. Yes, that's from Jurassic Park.

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.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#99

Post by ToucanLoucan »

SR2Z wrote: post #90
notjoemama wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. So online activists can become more engaged irl? Sounds great unless the activism is the kind you disagree with. Imagine this brining together a collection of white supremacists or antifa. Or pro-life versus pro-choice. This is the problem with the tech world. They are so preoccupied with whether they can, they don’t stop to think if they should. Yes, that's from Jurassic Park.

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

Ummmmmmm gonna need some kinda citation there. Radicalized groups that meet increase one another’s radicalization as they bounce off of one another and egg each other on.

I want people to get together more, it’s absolutely good for them, but I think there’s certain groups that should absolutely be discouraged. Like sorry if the only thing that gets you going is fantasizing about obliterating ethnic groups but you might have to take one for the team and stay depressed. Or take up something better like model railroading.

Re: Have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks?

#100

Post by skhunted »

tinybrain wrote: post #97

What happened to Meetup? I moved to a new city in 2015 and made a handful of long term friend groups, all started from meetup. I moved to a new city in 2024 and it's basically empty... except for some Wiccan book clubs, or MLM pyramid schemes or whatever. I don't get it. Seems like there would be competition in this space to replace Meetup, but there's nothing? Or did we all just collectively give up on meeting stran…

In my area Discord took the place of Meetup. Meetup went downhill when WeWork bought them.
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