Building friend catchers | Hacker News Reader

Building friend catchers

ferrucc.io

250 pointsamoghs83 comments

Everything described in this history could have happened just as easily if he'd posted everything under the name "Raver Tomato".

Aliases give you the option of more easily disassociating things from your legal identity, as well as making it harder for people to find all the embarassing shit you posted when you were a teenager.

The core message is “The internet is great at organizing information and making you find things you like. If you express your true interests, like minded people will discover you.”

If you prefer using an alias that’s totally cool!

His experience would also likely have been very different had he been a she, in which case "raver tomato" would have been much preferred.

YEP

That’s what I was thinking as well. Using one’s real name adds the possibility of that being used against you as well as feeding spammers and other nefarious actors.

Wondering if this is some state-sponsored post to prevent people entering bogus information online. Everything in this article is true, except the "Lesson learned"

It’s not as if corporations haven’t had their own reasons to push for “real names” to make tracking easier.

Niche activities or are always the best friend catchers. As it automatically filters out anyone not interested.

Anyone who does chat would immediately have a common interest.

Because it's niche, there tends to be original or unique ideas, making connection easier.

That being said, you can't hide your identity and sing it loud and proud to any and everyone. My blog is anonymous so there's no friend catcher effect.

"Finding new interests and joining others in play is certainly one way to stop feeling lonely or misunderstood." From: Movie Wisdom On Making Friends https://moviewise.substack.com/p/movie-wisdom-on-making-frie...

Agreed. A number of years ago I started a small hobby business in a niche. It has been a great friend catcher.

"Another way of doing it is by sharing polarising, unconventional ideas you have. These ideas will repulse those that are close minded towards your ideas and attract more people like you."

This is absolutely true, regardless of the medium - but the internet allows you to do this at scale. If you have an unconventional idea, it makes sense to try to seek out the few like minded people with whom you can discuss. However, in today's world I would be very cautious of encouraging anyone of building their own echo chamber. It's one thing to go against the grain and seek out like mindedness; it's another to live in an echo chamber.

I don't think I've ever met someone online and later met them in person. Except for dating sites.

It seems more difficult to make friends the older I get. I think at least part of it is that everyone is so busy.

Hi, I clicked on your recent comments (they are public, btw) and saw that you worry about low human interaction and also are interested into killing hornets as well.

I couldn't help but pattern-match to this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUlxth701GM

I am not that into killing hornets right now, but I will be moving to the countryside soon. I might hit you up later this month to talk about killing them, if that's alright.

In my earlier days of internet use, I actually made some online friends that I later met in person (and still kinda-sorta-ish keep in contact with ~20 years later).

But I haven’t met anyone online that I have any in person contact with in a long long time. Although I haven’t really made any friends online in ages either, most of my communication with strangers seems to be one off messages like these HN comments that have no real hope of ever developing into anything else. I guess friendships develop in chat rooms rather than comment boards, which is how I became friends with the people I did become friends with.

It’s definitely a lot harder the older I get and it’s quite frustrating. People are busier, I’m busier, makes it hard. Even just going out, the majority of people are a lot younger than me, which is fine for hanging out (I hung out with people my age when I was the same age as the people I see now), but I find it extremely difficult to build a deeper connection or relationship with them, I guess I feel like the creepy older guy sometimes so I stay distant. Double so for dating. It doesn’t help that I have anxiety, I suppose. My core friend group are great and we do hang out, but yeah, they’re busy, most have kids too, which makes it very hard to just casually meet up.

Moving to a new location triggers interesting effect in many people - they shed their social fears and laziness and try to socialize more. Living in a hub that attracts many such folks gives one an endless stream of people that are looking for friendship, consciously or sub-consciously.

The drawback is, long term retention is not high in such a location. Its not nice to see people with whom you connected so well leave. But its endlessly better than some stale rural place where you either have really close people from childhood/school years, or you are pretty lonely.

> The drawback is, long term retention is not high in such a location.

Many would be surprised to find out the friendships they made weren’t really friendships after all but mere acquaintances even if they felt like intimate friendships..

I met a quite a few folks online and then met them later in person.

I am tied to several communities where there is a whole lot of overlap between people online and in-person activities. For instance, I am involved with a long-running folk festival in Texas that has a large community, and many of those people are on social media. It's a fairly regular thing that I meet people at that festival who I'd previously only met in online spaces.

Similarly, I play music and I rock climb. I'm also involved in several forums for those activities. I've met up with quite a few folks over the years who I only knew from those forums, mostly because both those activities often require other people to participate.

Your point that "everyone is busy" is correct, I think. The big factor is what people are busy doing and finding the folks who are already busy doing things you would like to do.

Back when Usenet was popular I met a group of people from rec.autos.sport.f1 a couple of times, once for a karting day and once attending the Montreal GP.

I was also part of an online trivia group for a long time and met a lot of people from that many times (and married and divorced one of them).

I assume similar things still happen these days in Reddit and Facebook groups but I seem to have drifted away from that kind of online activity.

> More difficult to make friends…

For me, it’s intolerance. I have a low threshold for bullshit, the (intentionally?) inarticulate, and stubbornness in conversation.

I’ve kept some friends. We’ve physically separated, but we stay in touch and meet in person. Making new ones is indeed challenging.

What interest me the most is whether old friends would actually pass today's low thresholds (which seem to get lower over time in my case)

I met someone on tribe.net back in the early/mid 00's who I met in person a couple of years later. We dated but it didn't work out (PDX - SFO). Though we are still very good friends about 20 years later.

I don't know, I think your dad's advide is pretty spot on? Just that it isn't mutually exclusive with the fact that IF you want to be recognized by the content you put up, you'll have to associate your name with it.

I started surfing the web in the early 00's when I was like 3 or 4 yo so it sticked to me the whole nickname thing way before asking for First Name and Last Name, cell phone, ID number, street address was the norm (depending on the service ofc)

Yeah righto mate, you started browsing the web when you were 3?

My aunt owned a cyber about that time. Instead of spending my free time playing in the (dangerous) streets of Brazil, I spent it playing Warcraft III, CS and surfing the web. Yes, I don't remember exactly when but I think I was, at most, 5 years old?

Why is that weird? I recall starting videogames around that time, and if the internet had been easier to access I probably would have been on there as well.

Most 3 year olds can't read.

The statement was "<year>, when I was 3 or 4 years old". I took that to mean it was closer to four, which is not that weird of an age to be able to read. Or at least I thought so, until I looked it up. I guess it is pretty unusual.

Children who can’t read browse the Internet using visual cues (bookmark buttons, suggested sites, sometimes recent site autocomplete, etc.) All mouse or trackpad based. It’s obviously limited and from my observation, they have no idea they’re missing so much.

When I was 4 years old I was playing mac games on Mac OS 7 I think..

Must have been 3 or 4 when I downloaded bonzi buddy on our family computer.

I started my son on computer games (minecraft, Starcraft, borderlands) when he was 2.9

How fast did he learn how to read? I have a 4 year old that can recognize letters and numbers and slowly starting to connect the dots and read but I haven’t introduced him to computers yet. Im sure reading would improve faster but I feel there’s plenty of things to learn outside of computers at this age.

Great read. Friends is the best way to achieve just about anything.

One day I hope to be able to meet a friend from Moscow. Even if Russia shares a border with my home country Norway, it is impossible for us to meet in person at the moment. The russian fellow took over my open source project when I had lost interest in it.

More on friendcatchers here: https://www.swyx.io/friendcatchers

haha thanks for the shoutout. i definitely owe @patio11 some inspiration on this and despite people's cynicism on this page it has changed my life. just met a 5-year long mentor of mine who I've never met 1:1 before, and he knew about the friendcatchers I left out there because of the impact/word of mouth they have had.

I've been in multiple communities under a fake name. Every birthdate I entered online is always 01-01-1970. I don't think you were being rebellious, you were the complete opposite!

I've met people IRL from Finland, Lebanon, South Africa, basically all over the world, who I met online. Sometimes I would introduce my real name only when we met IRL.

Not using my real name has not held me back from meeting new people, online or IRL.

Funny one. I've met IRL a guy who I've been playing Minecraft with on a private server for years recently.

I was driving near his area so I took a detour, visited him home and we chatted for like an hour.

We totally forgot to exchange real names :)

Author here, happy to see this got picked up!

I was enjoying it, until we got to Peter Thiel, a particularly horrible person.

Loved this, your opener reminded me of a personal shift I decided recently. Because I have had family in politics, it had always floated around as an option, so for some time I was subconsciously like "let me muzzle myself on social media as if I may run" and today I've decided something like the opposite, "let me actively insure that I'm always able to say what I want by doing that now and if it cuts me out of something, then I probably never needed to be there."

Ciao Ferruccio

Ciao Simone, it feels meta to have you reply here! I think I've seen your name many times on HN, and a bunch of times on posts I shared :)

That was the intention! Maybe we'll meet IRL in a decade or so :)

And from the other side, I've had good success reaching out to people in response to something posted on the web. An email only takes 5 minutes, and it can lead to a life-changing new friend, project and business.

I really want to believe in this, but from personal experience it hasn't worked out. I used to spend a lot of time posting frequently on LinkedIn, nothing came out of it. Maybe I didn't try hard enough, maybe there's survivor bias in the success stories, who knows.

> I used to spend a lot of time posting frequently on LinkedIn

Maybe it's just the people I have added on LinkedIn but it always strikes me as a very superficial place and not the one for deeper connections or discussions about projects. Twitter on the other side seems to be more promising (at least in my case).

I'll throw in Reddit into the mix. For deeper discussions about projects, it has a way better interface than Twitter, and also as a "newcomer" you have way better chances if you pick out the right communities. One other factor is probably also frequency of posting.

While my posting cadence of "something interesting" every few months works well for Reddit, that's not something that gets people to follow and engage with you on Twitter.

I got a few really good exchanges on Reddit. But I always feel weird reaching out to people directly afterwards, I feel the platform isn't made for that.

I would not consider LI to be a place to make "new" friends. I consider it a place to help tell people, who already know who I am, from elsewhere, more about myself.

In my case, doing nonprofit/volunteer work has been a great place to make new friends (and the occasional enemy).

I agree, it's more for reminding existing connections that you exist.

Sadly not interested in nonprofit volunteering at the moment, too worried just making ends meet. London’s very expensive these days and wages aren't great.

I find Twitter conversations are just as shallow unfortunately. I do follow a couple of people there - Benedict Evans and patio11, but comments on their tweets aren't any better.

I think your chances of having a good conversation is higher on small accounts in the niche you are interested in.

How do you find those smaller accounts though? When you look by topic you tend to get tweets from popular influencers. And I may sound lazy but I don't like the idea of doomscrolling through Twitter just to find the right person.

Depends on what kind of community you are looking for, for me it's mostly IndieHackers and HN so I often click through profiles on HN comments or if there's a blog post shared on a personal blog I look for their Twitter account there.

After you built up a few interesting accounts finding more accounts via Twitter is easier and less noisy.

Oh, never thought of doing it like that. I'll give it a go, thanks!

LinkedIn probably isn't a great choice. Randomly, have you looked for local groups that share an interest on Slack or Discord? There's an Irish Tech Community slack, for instance, where I've made many friends (real life ones too!)

I tried Slack and Discord groups, but they had too much noise.

I've had the same experience on linkedin, and I think it's because a lot of the content is not specific enough, it increasingly feels like facebook.

I think there may be other places with a higher density of very specific purpose, like angel.co

edit: this point is made in the article - "The beginners guides to everything have already been written. What’s missing is more advanced content."

Yes, when I realised it's just like Facebook I decided to stop posting altogether. I never heard of angel.co as a social platform, only know of it for startup jobs. I'll have another look, thanks!

Right, angel.co is not exactly a social platform by design, but people on there are in the startup space, likely very motivated, working on something very specific and open to discussion/proposition.

I guess the specificity of the discussion is the main thing interesting there, provided startups are your thing.

For other things, hobbies etc., there may be more specific places where you get a concentration of focused discussion on a topic.

What did you post though? A lot of LinkedIn writing is very generic. Think the point of this article is that being honest and maybe a little provocative can be used as a filter, not things that come to mind with LinkedIn posts.

Those were the kind of posts I was writing, and they didn't work. A lot more effective to do a low quality outrage-economy style post. My most successful one by 100x was a generic complaint about tech recruiters.

Post one in a reply to this. What are you looking for?

Sure, here are a few things on my mind now: - Practical use cases for crypto/blockchain. I don't believe in the speculative financial assets that came out of it, but I am intrigued by the idea of a central bank digital currency for example. - How to make some side income while having a full-time dev role in London. - General startup ideas chat with people who aren't too attached to one particular view.

LinkedIn might not be the best place for that... even Hacker News is a better platform for that I think.

If you want to find friends (not just potential business associates), I suggest trying to find some other personal interest of yours that isn't money-related. Perhaps sharing on a different platform as well.

I was actually posting about data science / ML during that time.

It's these kind of topics that I enjoy talking to people about though. I get very quickly bored if we talk about other stuff. Sad I know.

Some people here seem to be talking about them as in making actual friends, but it's more in the sense of a friendly party (e.g. followers who have gratitude due to something you've provided for free) rather than the kind of traditional friendship experience we actually have one on one conversations with.

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apatio11%20friend-catcher...

just worth noting.

Author here, I think a lot of the examples I made are friends for life!

The projects I started working on with strangers are mostly dead, but I still meet up and spend a lot of time with a handful of them. Even the example I made of Francesco and Fabrizio are of people that met online serendipitously and now have been business partners and friends for almost 10 years

Met my previous co-founder and now one of my best friends through the Machine Learning reddit talking about Using Embeddings for medical Diagnosis codes ~2017. So I can attest to "putting yourself out there".

The new friend catchers are all on Discord.

Really. I'm finding Discord has a really high surface tension. By that I mean that I bounce off servers because so often nothing interesting is happening and I can't see anything to drag me back

Similar to any other medium, Discord Servers for nieche interests where there is an incentive to go back (semi regular events / activities) are better than anything else mentioned above.

What makes discord better medium

- Ability to have single / threaded chats

- Multiple channels (#general #help #more-nieche)

- Instant transition between voice and text channels

- Able to screencast (watch content together, explain understand better)

- Stimulating being together, not necessarily talking (music channels, work together channels)

Pretty hard to find friends on discord, join a server that's too popular and it's like a twitch stream. Join one too small and no one talks or quickly runs out of topics.

The best ones might be activity centred discord channels, like translating mangas. But, at that point, discord isn't the friend catcher anyway.

I know what you mean, many discords fall into either category. But there are discords that are in the sweet middle ground. Also requires time investment on your part though because you won't make friends by just lurking and never interacting.

How do you find this subset of discords? I mean most of the ones I hear about are from creators promoting their servers and by definition they’re too busy and chaotic. Any pointers?

Most sub-reddits also have a discord of their own, also do many of your favourite products and services and sometimes these are nice places beyond the marketing shills.

One of my favourite servers which I later joined as mod is Tools for thought [0] (15k+ members) which is a space for discussing new tools, productivity, workflow, help with tools and similar stuff.

https://forthought.tools/

Yeah those aren't great. There are discords that are specific to topics, like your favourite hobby. Then you need to find one that doesn't have too many, but also not too few people. They will be filtered by hobby I guess.

I've met my best friend on Last.fm 16 years ago. I still cherish that initial PM from him that said: "want to exchange music?".

I've been online forever as MikeWarot or KA9DGX, depending on username requirements. It has served me well for finding stuff I found interesting in the past. Now that I've met another Mike Warot, who live(d?) in London, via the web, that might not be quite as useful as it was in the past.

Can can attest to this, a small random alt hip-hop forum in the early 2000's changed my life because of the people I met on there.

Met some people from the forum, started making music, going out to clubs etc. 20 years later not only has my life been shaped by those encounters so have many other people who know me!

'The beginners guides to everything have already been written' -- strong disagree... there's always space to write for somebody who is getting into something for the first time. Any beginner's guide is someone's advanced topic, and vice-versa.

I'm with dad on this.

This reads like satire.

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