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As someone who used to go clubbing a lot there was more social interconnections than you might expect. Excluding tourists most of the people you met ended up being people who knew people you knew. Men/women with behavioural issues would often get a reputation. And there was a culture (especially among women, understandably) of warning someone if it looked like they were about to hook up with someone known to have some sort of form.

When adoption of social media started to ramp up (on MySpace initially) it quickly became apparent that most of the seemingly random people you met were all on each others friends lists.

Even "meeting at a bar" would usually have been among friend groups, not atomic individuals meeting in isolation.

Kind of but things were more local back then so degrees of separation were smaller.