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I disagree. I'm 40, and had life pre-internet. Cell phones were still expensive when I was in school. A portion of my friends were too poor to regularly have home telephone service. I'm bisexual, and paid for that bit with a middle school not talking to me most of a school year. I lost friends because I dated folks with a different skin color. I didn't really tell folks I was atheist back then, but it didn't really matter because my parents required I go to church every sunday.

I lived in the midwest. The town sizes ranged from 3000 to around 50k. I've never really had more than 2-3 friends at once, and sometimes didn't have that. My ex wound up with schizophrenia, but that's another story altogether.

I started being lonely at 10 or 11. That's only gone away in the last 6-10 years. Regular internet meant I've met folks I can simply be myself with. I moved - across an ocean - to be with one of those folks. I'm rarely lonely anymore, even with the internet. Even with the language barrier. Even with my weirdness.

For the first time in my life, here I feel like I kinda belong, and it is a mix of offline and online stuff. I'm even in a country that is "difficult" for folks to make friends with - or at least they say it is. On the other hand, it actually fits my personality better.

I don't find it hard to talk to folks online. Male or female (I tend to have more male friends than female, and don't care about the distinction. My male spouse is the opposite). sure, some folks are simply there to flirt, but I can shut them down pretty quickly.

Familiar! Some of it, at least.

Asking the "wrong" people out in middle school ('90s) sure was a fast track to being an outcast. Paradoxically, the rising positive presence of LGBTQ+ people in media in the '90s made things worse. People were on the lookout for us!

I don't know if it was worse than the '80s where our presence in the media was almost universally negative.

Later, I found Twitter, and met a friend (also bi) who had lived mere miles away all my life. We probably never would have met without the internet. Having backup when we hang out has actually made me more social because I'm not worried about being alone up against a crowd who decides it's time to make an example of someone.

Hah. I didn't even get to asking the wrong person out. I was caught looking. Oops. :)

I feel almost ashamed for asking this, but are things really that bad for you guys?

You sound like you guys are half joking, but then, not really. So I can't tell.

If it is that bad, I guess people can be bigger arse-holes than I thought.

I was out for a walk recently and overheard a group of kids talking, and the f word was present. Not only are things bad, the next generation seems to be the same.

And that's with me being white and having the ability to pass as an ordinary dude most of the time. Trans women (especially of color) die every day, and that's just the ones who get reported on. Just as many get treated as "brawls gone wrong" or "tragic suicides" because their family didn't accept them and give correct information in the obituary.

There are more cisgender and heterosexual people willing to stand up against it, but that mainly helps when it comes to policy. It doesn't help much with the day to day for most.

edit: I do appreciate you asking. Way too many people assume things are fine now because there's gay people on TV, or some other arbitrary metric. There's still a long way to go.

I do think trans women and men definitely have the hardest time. Assault, murder, and freaking rape. And depending on the area, a male being raped might not be eligible for a rape charge if the police will even do anything about it.

I’m curious as to why you think kids using the f word means things are bad? Not trying to imply anything I’m genuinely curious.

Possibly referring to a different f word than you might be thinking of. Eg I assumed it wasn't fuck.

When folks are calling others slurs and insults based on sexuality, there is still a lot of taboo around it. If it isn't bad to be part of the LGBT community, it is harder to use any of the words describing folks like me as insults. It is in the same strand as using nationality or skin color references as insults: If it isn't a bad thing, you won't use the insult. Of course, you could be ignorant - especially at a young age, but that also means no one has bothered to explain what it means nor encouraged to be inclusive. They definitely weren't talking about the word "fuck" in any of its forms.

Ah, yeah I was thinking of a different f word.

I literally sat alone for most of 8th grade. I went to that school system two more years after that, and still heard stuff whispered behind my back. I can have half a sense of humor over it now, but it all makes me angry as well. I'd rather laugh than have rage about it all. The next school, I didn't tell anyone. Of course, this also meant that I didn't sleep with a woman until I was out of high school - oddly enough, it was girl I knew from school. I knew of a school official that didn't want gay teachers because he blamed a teacher for "making his son gay". I know this sort of thinking still goes around today. I can only imagine what folks in the 50's, 60's, and 70's went through.

It was weirdly easier being in a mixed "race" relationship back then. I got harassed by cops at times, slurs when out in public, and remember churches stating it was against god. But at least everyone didn't avoid me.

It was pretty normal to be minimally ignored and still find that I'm cautious of who I tell - women sometimes avoid me and men will sometimes make me an object. I truly think gay men have it worse simply because men are more likely to get beaten up by some groups. I think that it sometimes depends on where folks live as well on the severity of it all now.

Edit: I just came back to say thank you so much for asking about it :)

I’d disagree, too. Like yourself, half of my life was with any internet or devices. It was still very awkward to just walk up to people and starting talking to them. I believe there are two things at play here: these things get measured nowadays, and, people get more picks who to be with. A lot of people are looking/waiting for the perfect partner and don’t want to put too much energy into keeping a relationship, that’s maybe where devices play a larger role than before.

I think if you want the world to be this way you should just do what you want to do anyway. Life is too short to care what some random group of strangers at a concert thinks, anyway. You're not hurting anyone and I think you're normalizing good behavior. Nobody is going to call the cops on you for complementing their jacket.

I've stopped letting myself be bothered and it's actually done wonders for my social life. And most of them are staring because they wish they could be that open.

I think this hits the nail on the head: who cares?

Who cares what these people (who are judging you for meeting someone in public) think?

They're very unlikely to be anyone meaningful if they're doing that, since being a good conversationalist is a trait that most successful people possess.

Fuck that yeah, do what you want, fuck what people think about who you are or what you're doing. You'll at least give them a good story to tell about that nut who walked up to that guy on the subway and said, "I dig that jacket, wanna get some coffee together?"

I'm a very socially inept person and in recent years I took to practicing striking up conversations with complete strangers on the street and in the park.

Some will get a sour look and resolutely look away, but many will smile and say something back.

I haven't had a bad experience doing that.

I do think people tend to engage with strangers a lot less often than they had "back then," but I cannot agree modern society stigmatizes that kind of interaction at all. You can see people interacting with strangers on college campuses, at music events, and at grocery stores all the time.

This still happens but it can be geography-specific.

Chicago is one of the few big cities that is still relatively open to these types of spontaneous interactions.

London on the other hand is not.

As a current Chicago resident of 2+ years, I agree. Although I always thought this was just a Midwestern thing, as I grew up in Ohio and this was pretty common there as well.

Agreed. While I get the fear of interacting with strangers, I’ve never gotten more than mild annoyance from someone when I actually do it. I have never felt like I was overstepping bounds—people rarely mind being spoken to with respect, even if they don’t respond and engage.

Camaraderie is harder, and making jokes others don’t like can be stigmatizing. I wonder if one’s culture of informality is just less assumably universal than it has been in the recent past. I also wonder if living in a city can desensitize you to how exhausting it can be to invest in a social interaction with no clear payoff.

But, still, it seems to be a big enough difference that I could see it easily engendering a lot more loneliness.

Even 10 or 15 years ago - at the time I had a job that was 100% travel time, and found I could generally bootstrap a decent social life in a new town by just going to the nearest cafe and striking up conversations with neighbors.

Nowadays, though, most people are engrossed in some piece of electronics or other, and seem more inclined to regard attempts at socialization as an interruption.

Frequently the phone is being used as a shield. Otherwise people feel that they are looking bored/lonely. A good percentage of the time people will put the phone down if you start talking to them though.

(not that I disagree the phone as shield makes the problem worse).

Modern society doesn't overtly stigmatize social interaction, it encourages social isolation at a structural level. Car dependent suburban sprawl is designed to minimize the number of necessary interactions you need to have with strangers to get through your day. As a society we've gone to great lengths to avoid other people. The miracle of modern civilization is that you no longer need to be a part of a community and cultivate a series of interdependent relationships to get through life.

Car dependent suburban sprawl maximizes the time that members of the same family spend together, at the expense of interaction with strangers. Both have their place in different phases of life. Many parents gladly give up interactions with strangers on public transit in exchange for the extra hours with their children that fast personal transport enables.

It’s a terrible place to live alone when young and single, but that’s not what it’s for.

Cars don't save any time. Mass transit, cycling and walking in a city optimized for those modes is just as fast. It's also safer, cheaper, better for mental and physical health, better for the environment, upward economic mobility, and aesthetically nicer. The personal automobile is for signalling status and avoiding poor/black people, which is worth more than all those other things.

No amount of bike lane makes you pedal 60mph. That assertion is clearly absurd. Of course there are tradeoffs other than time, but people aren't evil for valuing it.

To replicate the 25 minute commute times that are completely normal across America's car-centric sprawl into a dense and transit-centric area, one has to live in the most central and premium real estate. Great if you can afford it. Most can’t.

When everyone is going 60 mph, going 60 mph gets you nowhere fast. Going that fast takes up a lot of space. To go that fast in cities we had to rip out the places to go to make room for the means of getting to those places at 60 mph, and for room to store your giant protective metal shell when you're not using it.

We stopped building the sorts of places where you can still get somewhere going at a reasonable speed around the end of WW2, and made it illegal, so it's now very expensive to live in a sensible neighbourhood, there aren't many left. It's a simple supply and demand problem, though not so simple once you attempt to unpack the reasons as to why we have this simple supply and demand problem.

There's a banality to true evil. It's a quirk of human social psychology that when everyone is doing the wrong thing, it stops being the wrong thing. This why rape=bad, and destroying the planet=pretty alright if you ask me.

San Francisco's many single-family-home neighborhoods have all you really need to accomodate car storage: garages instead of living space on the ground floor. Houses still come right up the sidewalk and squeeze wall-to-wall against each other.

Typical American suburbia takes density way lower than that. People here seem to value that separation for reasons above and beyond their parking needs. For example, not hearing the neighbors' footsteps through the ceilings or their TVs and family disputes through the walls. Giving each child their own bedroom. Having room for play and gatherings in the backyard. This suggests that, even without cars, we'd still insist on a pretty low densities. (Since it is homeowners in the center who control land use in the center, the frustrations of outer-ring commuters under such an arrangement don't make a difference).

I'm fortunate that I can afford to live in a high-rise district and commute in reasonable time by train and elevator. But even with so many places a short walk from home, it's a big metro area - there are many more I want to go which are not so close. Without a car, I felt isolated and trapped. It's great to have neighborhood businesses, but you get tired of the monotony after a while.

I feel like these interactions go through phases of 1. Being ok and acceptable and even enjoyable at first; 2. People abuse it more and more; 3. Gradually turns into a negative experience in general; 4. The ordinary person will then avoid it and that becomes the norm.

Taking your example of meeting people online. I was on the internet in the late 90s as a teenager and it was incredibly easy and fun to meet people on IRC or ICQ and just chat. Some of those people I even eventually went on to meet in person. There was no motives, no romantic interests, whatever gender people were. Fast forward to now, these things seem unthinkable to do now both for adults and adolescents, safety concerns, predators, etc.

Take real life neighborhoods for example too. Growing up in the 80s and 90s in both Asia and America, when someone rings the door bell, you open the door and see who it is and talk to them. Nowadays this is almost not the norm anymore. In the past 2 years I have been assaulted and robbed as close as a block away from my house. I'm not opening the door to any stranger ringing my door bell, even if 99% of time they are harmless solicitors. There's far too many incidents of people abusing the trust and trying to cause harm when you let them in. I am not risking that.

I don't know what the answers might be to all of this. Is society actually getting more dangerous? Is it just that we're hearing more thanks to more news and internet? Is it overall income inequality in society that causes more crimes to occur? I have no answers to any of these.

Isn’t violent crime (particularly from strangers) at historic lows, at least in the USA? “Stranger Danger” is blown way out of proportion. You’re less likely to be attacked by a rando walking on the street than by Uncle Phil, and far less likely than “back in the day.”

IRC in particular was great for this, as it was rooms not P2P, and quite often one could find quite local rooms. ICQ and IM in general ruined that, IMO, as it was more invite based.

You forget that IRC has person to person messaging too. It was pretty easy to start a side conversation with people on IRC that wasn't public.

> Nowadays this is almost not the norm anymore.

A couple years back I knocked on the door of a stranger's house. A man answered it with "what the f*ck do you want?" I replied "the car in your driveway has its lights on." He softened up immediately and thanked me.

I was sitting on a bench waiting for the bus in Denmark one day, and a very attractive young lady came up and said she'd like to give me a hug.

I'm old, and I was instantly very suspicious this was some sort of scam, or she had a partner that was going to rob me, or whatever. I couldn't believe she was just trying to be nice.

She talked with me for a while, and was not put off by my suspiciousness. Eventually I agreed to the hug, and it was very nice, and then she left. That was it. She didn't want anything from me, she just wanted to give.

It's a unique experience in my life. And a much appreciated one.

I was once walking down the street in the middle of the day. There were 3 young men very cheerful and little bit drunk walking towards me. As I was preparing to pass them, bit worried if I'll have any trouble with them one of them in drunken cordiality looked at me and opened arms for a hug. We briefly hugged smiled and continue going our separate ways. Experience was very weird but pleasent. I think bit of positive human contact with no strings attached is missing from my usual daily life.

Part of that is social interaction being less necessary. My dad made many friends asking random people on the street for directions to a gas station or for a restaurant recommendation. Now we get that all from our phones.

indeed, Steve Jobs should have called it the iFriend, the only friend you need...

Do you see internet social interaction as being a sufficient replacement for meatspace social interaction?

Not at all. I’m a much worse person on the Internet than in meatspace.

Oh, I see. I misread "not necessary" in your post as saying "people don't need as much social interaction anymore." Glad to clarify.

I see it as a poor substitute. I'm in many many Discords and 95% of the active users refuse to join voice chat. Text is inefficient for resolving miscommunications and it, at least for me, is aggravating when 30 seconds of fast talk could have sufficed

Yeah, agreed. I'm also in plenty of Discords, yet I still recall my most meaningful online social interaction involved spending hours just chilling in a Vent server with my WoW guild.

I think this is an underappreciated feature of "grinding": it gives players a great excuse to put in time and build social bonds.

For some people like you, theres no mental cost associated with speaking on the phone. For the rest of us, the mental barrier is huge. Imagine the amount of mental effort required to, say, pack and move your house - the dread is on the same level. Why? I don't really know. I'm very social in person.

I don’t think they are a replacement in that they work on a different level.

In a way we deeply lacked the level of discussion we get now online, a lot of opinions couldn’t be discuss effectively with neighbours (for better and for worse). I see them as a lot more genuine than any interactions we had before.

Ideally we need both of them, but I think from now on there will always be a split between very personal online interactions and softer “human” interactions IRL.

I think virtual life will never be able to fully replace real life. Even more, I think active virtual life can harm your real life socialization.

It's not a sufficient replacement, it's just a much lower effort replacement.

I think we can learn a lot from kids in this area. My six year old is so much more open and tolerant than I. Her thought process: “you look like my age, let’s play and be friends!” And now the parents are arranging playtime next week. Just like that! We adults could learn a lot from that outlook.

I've tried going up to women that look my age and asking if they want to play or arrange a playtime, but they keep turning me down :-(

You made the mistake of not being George Clooney.

And then a few years later X don't wanna play with Y because Z don't like them etc etc etc...

Seinfeld did a bit about this:

>Of course when you're a kid, you can be friends with anybody. Remember when you were a little kid what were the qualifications? If someone's in front of my house NOW, That's my friend, they're my friend. That's it. Are you a grown up.? No. Great! Come on in. Jump up and down on my bed. And if you have anything in common at all, You like Cherry Soda? I like Cherry Soda! We'll be best friends!

Does anyone else get the sense while some people will claim they desire more social interactions, the're also very quick to judge each action, looking for indications of in-authenticity or hints that they're dealing with someone nefarious.

All people have defense mechanisms that cause this. They judge the very things they wish they themselves had the courage to do. It's overwhelmingly natural and very hard to realize in the moment.

What's the point of such defense mechanisms?

You can't get anxiety over missed experiences that you have convinced yourself to despise, I suppose. Too many rejections after trying to make new close friends? I don't need them. Too many rejections trying out for an improv troupe? I don't feel like doing that anymore. Etc, etc the list goes on and on.

I'm learning elixir and ios/android development to try and conquer this problem via friendly geolocation games which include lots of mandatory icebreakers like talking about favourites colors, current books being read and other harmless dumb stuff that helps get that social brain muscle pumping.

I like that. Would be nice with more games like that.

I'll ping you when I have a rough mvp :)

In the past you had to interact with other people more. In today's world you can do nearly everything without needing to talk to a single human being or even leaving your house.

In public people wear headphones while walking, on public transportation, and even in grocery stores.

Just this morning there was a new item in my feed, "Axe attack: Woman guilty of trying to kill strangers". Now, is it likely that I'm going to run into an axe-wielding stranger today? Statistically no. But after being fed daily news stories about the crazy people that are out there... well, better safe than sorry. If you are a stranger you'd better not even make eye contact with me or I'll be bolting in the opposite direction.

> "Modern society stigmatizes that kind of interaction, don't talk to people you don't know if you don't want to be ostracized..."

I agree there's some truth to this. But even more so think it's simply a lost art. Why strike up a cheap quick chat when all you have to do is stare at your device.

I'm old school (read: over 50 y/o white male) and I interact with people all the time. But it a skill to read someone and ideally make them laugh / smile.

I think you also have to have a certain amount of empathy (which I feel most ppl lack). "Hey. Nice shoes." or "I like you jacket" goes a long way. But that's more than clicking an icon. And it means you're taking a __small__ risk to engage someone else instead of waiting to have your own ego stroked.

I think you have to be a regular somewhere (gym, your kid's soccer games, dogpark, neighborhood bar, etc), people generally won't warm up to you until they've seen you a few times. Of course we've made it really easy to stay indoors.

It's because people now see each other mostly as competitors; socializing is a tool for manipulation; the purpose of which is the acquisition of material resources and procreation. Only fools think it serves any other purpose.

I don't think it is any harder to meet random people today than it used to be. But then again I'm under 30 and so don't know what it "really" used to be like.

But I deleted my Facebook (really only social media I had) and I haven't had a hard time meeting new people. Really I'm doing a better job. I think this is more because I'm not using Facebook as a crutch. I used to just say "Oh I'll add you on Facebook" (which ironically is way more invasive than a phone number) and then never message them. We'd both like each other's posts and whatnot but it felt really disingenuous.

But since I haven't had that crutch it actually makes me work and focus on building real relationships. This even includes plutonic relationships with the opposite sex.

I'm not saying go out and delete your Facebook and other social media (at least for this reason), but that a lot of us just rely on it as a crutch and real relationships require work. I just think social media makes it easier to be a hermit and kind of tricks you into thinking you are building relationships when you aren't. I often here "I'd delete my Facebook but there are so many people that's the only way I can keep in contact with them." Liking somebody's status and photos isn't keeping in touch nor is it relationship building. But I think most people think treat those actions as if they were.

And I feel like now because of this people think it is weird to talk to someone they haven't talked to in even a few weeks. Hell, I'm okay if I haven't talked to someone in a few years. Life is busy. Life is strange. It is okay to not have to keep in constant and instant contact with people. And I think we forget this because we have technology that no longer makes this the norm. Because in the past instant and constant contact with someone meant you lived with them or extremely near them.

tldr: Relationships take work

>This even includes plutonic relationships with the opposite sex.

What happens on Pluto stays on Pluto, right?

Everything plutonic is platonic.

(This is my favorite autocorrect mistake of the week. Thanks for catching it)

Movies, news, media all push the message bad things happen if you talk to strangers.

It's weird we are told not to trust anyone online but for some reason started using our real names/address/geotagging our events publically.

I think a huge factor is the growing theme of social interaction being unacceptable

Does this actually exist? Could it be that it's become more acceptable for people to be dicks to each other, so why risk it?

I dont think is less acceptable. I do think that previously people waiting in a line probably had nothing to do and were more likely to talk, where now they're on their phone.

Outside of specific venues, no one I encounter has similar interests. Really disincentivizes me to talk to them.

To counter that, I try to keep up with the local sports, as a base for small talk.

To be fair, social interaction with people whose faces have been buried in their phone all day since they were in kindergarten is unacceptable.

I think you hit the nail on the head.

I would also add that the whole minefield of communicating with someone of the opposite sex, especially if you are a man. It seems that you have a high risk of being called up for harassment if you want to start a friendly conversation with a female as a male for example. This is a direct consequence of the whole metoo thing.

Over the last 15 years, society has been more and more strict into defining what is an acceptable social behavior. You are supposed to stay in your lane and not talk to anyone basically, except in accepted places like a bar, sometimes.

I think in 20 years nobody will talk openly on the streets. All the interactions will take place in well defined "apps" or in defined places like a bar. Everything outside that will be looked down as weird.

This is already half happening with dating. You have a higher risk of creating an incident in real life so everyone is now using well defined dating apps with a well defined flow and a well defined experience.

The world is becoming more and more tasteless. Everything has to take place into well defined boundaries.

Hm. As a woman, I can't say I've ever thought of harassment when men have started friendly conversation with me. Is that not a bit of an exaggeration? If a man catcalled "nice tits" or something, then yeah, that would be harassment. But conversation? Not nearly the risk your describing, I don't think.

I agree with you, but I think people avoid even the possibility//higher risk associated with the awkward start of the conversation.

I work in tech and some of my male coworkers privately tell me that they avoid talking to womens they don't know at networking events or at conferences because of the way it might be interpreted nowadays.

I think there's a difference between initial awkwardness or fear of rejection -- which are totally valid feelings in social interaction, and not just limited to men -- and fear of being accused of harassment for making polite conversation.

I also think that it's easy to get sucked into circle-jerks that promote and exaggerate these fears of being accused of harassment. As long as you're considerate and respectful, no reasonable person would think you're harassing them. There are always unreasonable people, that shouldn't divide us into men vs women, into groups that fear interacting with each other.

Most women would not consider such an ordinary social interaction to be harassment, but suppose a small fraction do - being perceived or accused of harassment is such a negative thing that it can be a strong deterrent even if there's a low chance of it actually happening.

My following reply to ironjunkie is a reply to your comment as well -- I think what you said would be such a shame.

Most men aren't psychopaths, but a small fraction are. Perceiving all men as such even if there's a low chance of it actually happening...

If you're accused of harassment as a guy, that has huge negative social and career effects that are close to impossible to fight. Everybody turns against you and you're ostracized from your community. It's a big deal.

Of course it's a big deal. I never disagreed with that to begin with. Some people understand ostracism. That's why they don't do the things that cause ostracism.

If you find this to be the case, then maybe you’re not being as polite / kind as you think. Because from my experience this simple is not the case. I’ve seen this argument made a few times and it’s pretty rubbish. You are free to talk to anyone of any sex if you treat them kindly, politely and with respect.

How much of that is in your head though? I learned a lot from a friend of mine who is completely and entirely unabashed when it comes to talking to anyone and everyone in public. Most people responded positively. My friend would compliment random people's clothing, ask random questions to people point stuff out randomly. Any time i'm out with this friend we end up talking to random people and 99% of the time it ends positively.

I take public transit a lot and I always see people start random conversations with strangers over little things. People usually don't even respond too badly to the crazy people who talk to everyone. Unless they're being rude or agressive the worst reaction I tend to see is people politely ignoring people like that.

I also have random people come up and talk to me fairly regularly, i've had some great conversations with random people i've met.

My dad gave me a piece of advice he got from a friend of his when he was young about interacting with people in public. It helps to remember most people are just as nervous and afraid of you as you are of them, but at the same time, most people are looking for someone to talk to.

Paying attention to people's body language and reactions helps. If you pay attention you can usually tell the difference between someone who's nervous and someone who just doesn't want to talk.

People really aren't so bad. You gotta remember humans are social animals interacting with eachother is something we naturally do. Today's society may make it difficult, but those drives for human companionship are there.