There are no startups in this except for meetups.
Why dont some non-profit organize meetings to find loneliness?
Why there is no volunteering opportunities that focus on making friends first and only second helping the cause?
There are a lot of organisations and volunteering options that deal with loneliness though, at least where I'm from, but they aren't really working. I mean, they are better than the alternative, which is often no social contact, but they aren't curing loneliness because the people involved in the programs are often painfully aware of the fact that they are being helped.
I think what is needed is more environment for adults to hang out. The basic recipe for friendship is basically spending time together outside of work. Spend enough time together and you grow on each other.
That's easy when you're young, but once you finish your education, it stops completely, and if you don't have a friend circle or some hobby activity where you'll get stuck with the same people on a regular basis, then you'll probably end up being lonely.
Can tech fix that? I doubt it. But board game cafes are doing an excellent job all over Europe.
I'd also agree Tech has enabled things that expose how broken society has always* (probably?) been; and enables it to be even worse (probably...) today.
Yet Tech is a tool; it might enable a solution that helps us be better.
The other possibility is to make dues-free fraternal organizations. Churches are payment-optional so why not payment-optional frats? Say dues payment halves bar prices (and no-dues prices are somewhat uncomfortably high).
It's non-religious rather than atheistic.
We are kinda-sorta meetup based, to the extent that we want people to get out of their houses and be active in their local communities, be it hiking, going to local venues, or hanging out at local parks.
I'm writing this comment in-between writing the code to help this very problem.
Anyone in the Seattle area who is interested in helping (early stage startup, boot strapped, app and back-end nearing completion) shoot me a message.
... Where you meet the same boring people each week, for years.
What do you think friends are? My uncle has been having dinner Friday nights with the same guys for the last 60 years. Every time he's about to go, he sighs and says, "I hate these guys."
For many people with a casino in town, its the only affordable place that adults/elderly can hang out for hours with other adults. Relatively cheap at first if they play penny slots. Mind you, its a trap, since many of these people will get addicted fairly quickly. But pretty much everything costs money now. Going outside in Winter for an elderly person is not really suitable. The weather might be too harsh for many days in a row. But even in the summer, a trip to a national park could be $100+ with fuel and camping. So pretty pricey, for someone on a pension.
And hanging out in a bar is not a great alternative either. Its not cheap, and carries serious downsides like drinking and driving charges, alcohol addiction and so on.
I love capitalism. But pretty much everything that could cost money, does.
My town, recently bulldozed rider made, mountain biking paths in two parks. Only to announce its own trail project half a year later. I have strong suspicion that it will cost money at some point in the future to ride these trails.
That's a really wonderful and underrated idea, actually. It may very well be the solution to a whole array of problems.
This always warms my heart, and I know they made at least individual lives better, even if they didn't (yet) manage to change the situation single-handedly:
> "We are a social online movement that connects people over the middle east"
You are sort of answering your own question, why are you not doing anything about this? Everyone seems to wait for 'someone' to do something about this.
I remember back in 2008 I used to play Crysis and a side-effect of the game’s insane hardware requirements (for the time) meant it weeded out a lot of bad actors. On any server you’d join the chat was always polite with real conversations instead of swearing & complaining which is all that I seem to notice now on modern games.