I'm tired of trying to meet new people. So I've built another social network | Hacker News Reader

I'm tired of trying to meet new people. So I've built another social network

blog.interestin.co

36 pointstalhof866 comments

Everyone, please stop. Seriously, stop. How many more of these things do we need?

"Find people nearby with similar interests", sounded like a semi-decent premise 3 or 4 years ago, but no one did it well enough to reach a critical mass, and nor did the 100 or so clones that followed. I cringe every time I hear about a startup like this now.

People (maybe just me) don't generally make friends in this way. How many times have you honestly been walking down the street and thought, "I must find someone who shares my love of handball as well as Star Wars!" You don't. You go join a handball club, or you find some nerds that are into sci-fi, and maybe there might be an overlap. And if not, who gives a shit - there's much more to liking a person than what their interests are. They might be really unkind or talk about you behind your back. I'd rather not be friends with them in that case, even if they love handball and Star Wars more than they love breathing.

Offering control over your users privacy can not be claimed as a selling point, as I see so often in social media startups. It is a minimum user requirement and in some territories, a legal requirement.

I hate to tell anyone that you can't do something, but I think there are so many more valuable unsolved problems out there.

I agree. Of my friends, I made friends with approx. 33% of them in school/uni, 15% from work-related things and tech meetups, 15% from couchserfing.com (but through physical meeting the people), 33% through mutual friends and the rest from online sources.

You see, the goal here isn't to connect you with people who love both x and y, and so they fit you as potential best friend. The goal here is replace those tons of friends on your social networks, whom half you (not specifically you ofcourse) barely know, with people who really interest you and love x, or y, or even both. Thanks for your comment

And this isn't location based. I've seen too many of those on my iPhone, claiming to find you some new "BFF's". It isn't the goal

Out of curiosity, what's the difference between this and forums which have many ultraspecific subsections for people to discuss their personal interests? Is it that this searches for people who have as many overlapping interests with you as possible?

So it's Reddit?

Not really. Reddit is a news site, Interestin tends to be more like Facebook.

@unalone as I said in the post, this meant to provide an alternative to multiple accounts on these various "ultraspecific subsections" sites. It doesn't matches you up with people. It provides you tools to find them, and not by using any weird "matching" algorithm.

You know, at first I was thinking this is a cheesy idea, especially with it not really giving anything new. But then I think, what would I pay to find a friend that truly has overlapping interests? I'd probably pay decent money for that, because I can't seem to find a "best friend". The people who share my sports interests don't understand how I can watch a chick flick. The people who are into programming can't understand my religious views. And those people don't take kindly to my love for science. And those people don't appreciate my musical abilities. So on, so forth. Only my wife understands all that, which is great, but I need a friend outside that. My existing friends are good for diversity, but nobody understands me enough to really be my best friend. So, in short, I'd pay for something that let me find someone who can actually understand me. Call it "friend dating".

Absolutely agree. I mean we already "pay" by going out whether it's a coffee shop or a restaurant, etc.

Are you saying you're religious, yet love science? I'd like to have a discussion with you.

maybe you're just being nice, but this comes across as "how can you be a religious scientist?". and if that's how it was intended, well, many people are both religious and scientific. religion is a social thing - a community with common moral ideas. it can be very useful / rewarding and it certianly doesn't have to mean anti-scientific beliefs.

> it certianly doesn't have to mean anti-scientific beliefs.

Disagree. Name one religion that doesn't have anti-scientific beliefs. The whole concept of religions is based on believing without asking any questions, which is totally opposite from what science is.

This is too broad an assessment. People who claim to be "Christian" for example have varying degrees of interpretation. There's young earth creationist fundamentalists->people quite a bit less crazy.

Sure, faith is central to religion as a whole. But the author of the parent post says it's possible for a religious person to also not hold anti-scientific beliefs. Like Christians who believe in evolution and who are generally pro-scientific.

That is the stupidest goddamn description of religion I've ever heard. "[B]elieving without asking any questions" is literally the exact opposite of the concept of faith, which in every religion I know of requires believers to confront their own beliefs with frequent doubt. Faith is meant to put you in a frequent state of crisis in which you reexamine what you think you believe, in order to find something truer and more real.

Some of the brightest scientists I know are Christian, and absolutely they use the same methodology to investigate their faith as they do to investigate their work. It took me a little while to realize that, as an atheist, every criticism of their religion I'd come up with to bother them was a criticism they'd been grappling with for about twice as long. There are fanatics and idiots, sure, but assuming those idiots are at the center of every major religion is giving far too much credits to loudmouthed assholes and their blather.

you're taking religion to be this very clearly defined thing. for most religious people it's not like that. they don't sign up to an exact set of rules; they live within a society that shares certain ideas and they make their own personal choices and compromises.

so it's impossible to name "a religion" because every person's religion is slightly different. but if you are looking for examples of religions where people are particularly non-prescriptive then the quakers and the unitarians are pretty cool. see, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism - a "free and responsible search for truth and meaning" sounds pretty compatible with science to me....

[disclaimer: i'm an atheist (and have a PhD in SCIENCE). but i can see the advantages of community and even, at one particularly hard point in my life, talked to a bunch (what's the collective noun? vibrational mode?) of quakers to see if they would accept me. and frankly they would accept anyone (you gotta love em ;o), but it just didn't feel right...]

Most religious people believe that stories from thousands of years ago are basically reliable accounts of what happened. Atheists believe they are not.

Both sides have evidence for their beliefs, it depends on which evidence you find most compelling.

Science shouldn't be thought of as a noun that you believe in, but as a verb that you do. You don't need to hold a certain belief to be able practice "science" you only need to be able to conduct a repeatable experiment.

A person could believe with all his heart that he is 10,000 year old alien, and still be able to form a testable hypothesis and design and conduct a repeatable experiment. You don't have to be a strict empiricist to realize that empiricism is directly useful in day to day life.

A theist can use the scientific process even if it means working with models he doesn't believe are wholly correct. Just like you can use Newtonian physics even if you realize it isn't a correct explanation of how things really work--because it is a useful model.

The vast majority of C19 science was created by Christians. Much of what they achieved had already been achieved by Muslim scientists a century earlier. Science does not preclude religion. Religion does not preclude science. Although there have been times and places where questioning the religious hegemony has been a bad idea, that's got nothing to do with religion per se.

Not sure if this leads to trolling, but yes, extremely, on both accounts. I'm both a Christian (even something of a creationist) and manage to love science. I admit it's not a common combination (hence my post), but it does exist. :)

I'm curious. What does "something of a creationist" entail? Is this a Deist sort of creationism, or are you closer to biblical literalism?

It means I believe at the very least, a creator was responsible for initial life. I also believe that evolution is either a guided process or that the existing evidence can also point to creation. Do not believe in young earth. Do not believe the creator started it and has not intervened since.

Curious! I can't say I agree with that – at least, not the way you just phrased it; could just be linguistic ambiguity – but it's interesting nonetheless. I have to say, that's a mindset I don't usually expect on Hacker News; now I'm wondering just how diverse the beliefset of this community is.

My personal belief is that the earth was created as if it were much older than it actually is, although their really wouldn't be much of a difference to us.

For example, if God created the first tree, just snapped his fingers and poof, there it is full sized. Would that tree have tree rings? I think it would.

What would be the point of creating something and then faking its age? Is it a test, for us to ignore empirical evidence and determine that God made it anyway? Or are you suggesting that, perhaps, the world began with us humans, and that the universe pre-humanity was manufactured to seem like it gave rise to is (but it couldn't have, because it started with us)?

I'm interested in where such a belief comes from.

I don't think that is was manufactured to trick us, but that for whatever reason the simulation needed a past. Imagine the world is a recursive algorithm and it start running at n = 1, you need to define n = 0 for it to make any sense.

Tree rings are needed to support the tree and would occur once the simulation started running anyway, so God could either create two classes of tree, or use the more elegant solution (to my mind) of having that tree appear the same as if it had grown.

My reason for believing this is that I think it's a more elegant solution (that is just based on my personal perception of elegance) and that God decided the world should be in a certain state before humans arrived, so either he could run the simulation for billions of years, or he could just fast forward as if it had ran for billions of years. Either one works, but since there were no people around to experience time why bother with actually running it (or the opposite argument, why not actually run it).

Another reason why I think the simulation was needed in the first place, because it moves the limits of our knowledge further away, and gives us more room to explore.

Imagine if God decided humans needed an energy source, so he put a magic black liquid under the ground with no explanation. We'd find it, and that would pretty much be the end of it--we could go no further. However, if he instead ran set up a simulation and ran it(or skipped ahead) to create oil, we can try to figure out where oil came from.

Basically we have a whole rich and complex simulated past to explore before we hit the brick wall of--God did it.

I'm Catholic and I think this is much more common than you think.

I asked because I'm fascinated about this subject. I'm an atheist, but I try to keep an open mind about everything, so I'm always looking to hear alternative viewpoints from other intelligent people.

First, I do not intend to charge for this, at least at the moment. Same thing about ads. I'll have to come up with more sophisticated business plan, but this it doesn't really matter for me now, cause this isn't the goal. Regarding the problems you pointed out: I see your point, and I think this will be a challenge to connect people with truly best friends.

And thanks for you feedback!

There's definitely a need for this. I've been working on something very similar due to the situation I talk about here http://socialocale.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/why-we-built-the...

Let me know if you want to collaborate. I'd really like to make this kind of thing happen.

Your site isn't up. What's the best way to reach you? Interested in chatting about the idea

matt@ the site's address. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Isn't it weired idea to assume that friends are necessarily like mined in every aspects? I don't think any of my friends is liked minded like this. Most of them know things that I don't, or behave differently, that why I enjoy spending time with them.

I don't have to have a friend that is the same as me. Indeed, that would be boring. I just want a friend to at least be able to understand those facets of me, and not judge me for them. Likewise I wouldn't mind befriending an atheist skateboarder that enjoys yoga and reading russian existentialist literature. I wouldn't even judge his love for kimchi, as long as he doesn't make fun of my watching Clueless.

Basically, a friend finder for "out of the box" people in general. For those who aren't defined by any one thing, and like being around other people who refuse to be categorized.

I had this idea when I was employed at Facebook. I was even considering doing something similar to it on the Hackathon. I believe in your idea and if Facebook won't do, in my opinion it it will be big (I didn't see anyone there interested in picking up this idea, so I don't think they will).

Graph search solves part of this problem - on example you can search "Friends of my friends, who like tennis, programming and Game of thrones". The problem here is that it's awkward to contact these people - you won't message person "hey, I found out that we have similar interests, we may be friends". The whole problem is "breaking ice". The fact that you know who could be a good friend doesn't solve this problem, because you don't have a good way of meeting these people.

I had a few ideas how to solve it, any wasn't perfect. Core thought behind is that you usually meet new people not through internet, but either on parties or by introduction through common friend. Maybe you will have any use from them:

1. Facebook or your site could algorithmically organize events for people. But honestly I don't know if people would be interested in attending such parties. You would sign up for a party and Facebook would find ideal group of strangers, that according to some machine learning would be your ideal friends. Having enough data is is possible to make awesome selection, but I don't know if people would be interested in attending such parties. Some slight modification is organizing "lunches". Imagine you are working in big office or at big school campus. Then your site could find ideal people to eat lunch with.

2. This is slight modification of point 2. There are tons of public events and venues. You could suggest what are good public parties and venues where I could find the most likely minded people. This is probably the least awkward option, but it is also the least accurate in finding likely minded people.

3. Introductions. Likely minded people will probably be close to you in your social graph. There's a chance that you have common friend. He could get a suggestion from Facebook or your site - "Hey X, we found out that your friends Y and Z should know each other. Do you want to introduce them to each other?". But here I am again sceptical if people would do it.

4. Having option of posting a status to result of graph search query. Then you could on example post a status "Hey, who wants to play tennis?". Problem here is that to initiate a conversation another person needs to write a message to you. Messaging a stranger is always awkward and in my opinion won't work, unless there will be big mental shift among people.

I believe this is a big problem for a lot of people nowadays, especially introverted people not good at making new connections. I believe in you, good luck :).

Thank you very much for your details feedback! Much appreciated!!! I'd love to talk further, if you'd like to as well, you can find me at contact AT interestin.co

I think meetup.com fills this role fairly well at the moment. There's definitely room for improvement but if you're looking for a group of people that want to play some tennis, go climbing etc. then it's a pretty good bet.

Meetup.com is pretty good but there's plenty of room for competition.

While there's room for competition, it does have the chicken-and-egg problem. People who create meetup groups need to know there are people to join the group and people who want to go to meetups need to go to a place with a wide variety of groups. That's why it's hard to do a Craigslist or eBay competitor.

This is very true. If there are only a handful of people in a small town who have your interest, you're kinda out of luck with meetup.

While meetup.com is primarly focused on getting you to meet face to face, Interestin is primarly focused on getting you to know people, online. Thanks!

I have been thinking about something similar to this for a while. The problem is the negative stigma of hunting for friends. That makes it difficult to get people to want to signup. The best potential candidates would already have lots of friends and wouldn't need your service.

However, this would be immensely helpful in finding new friends, especially if you just moved to a new area. Even moving within a city, it is difficult to maintain close connections to your friends if you don't live near them.

Best of luck

> The problem is the negative stigma of hunting for friends. That makes it difficult to get people to want to signup.

I think it'd be interesting to research why that is and trying to come up with some solutions. (This problem is also present in dating sites).

I think meetup.com's approach avoids this problem because you're not explicitly "fishing" for friends.

I think the "stigma" in both cases comes from having an agenda for someone you have not yet even met. I think it is a case of "the key is the safe"/"you can't get there from here." But I am not the target audience/market for something like this. I don't join stuff like dating sites.

Agreed. I strongly feel the stigma against dating sites, and still refuse to use them, but Meetup is a great resource I don't even think twice about using.

I just can't get over the thought of "well, I can't do it in real life, so let's take the easy way and throw it up on the internet and see what sticks."

The funny thing is, relying on chance to put you in the same room with the right person, let alone identify and connect with them, is really inefficient. Current dating sites notwithstanding, the internet has a huge potential to optimize this process. And yet, it just feels so wrong. You are trying to start an intimate relationship through such a clinical and impersonal interface, and the vision of someone sitting there browsing through hundreds of candidates "asynchronously" at your leisure is unsettling to me.

Thank you very much! The site's goal isn't to provide you with a "friend hunting" platform. More like Facebook, but here you can actually find people that interest you and connect with them. If you become close friends it's even better.

I'm really surprised that this post was able to reach the front page with "I'm building another social network". That being said.. here's a startup that's trying to deal with this problem: http://www.joinbunch.com/group/28/startups/1/

Still, I find it unclear if the goal is to meet people online or offline..? Or why I would like to meet someone sharing the same religion/book/movies/job/etc... My startup buddies don't share all the same religions, and my starcraft buddies don't share my startup enthusiast.. but so what?

If the goal is to meet new people sharing your passion, just join the next meetup or events related to that passion..

If the goal is to meet new people online sharing your passion then.. I guess that's an interesting problem to tackle. There are lots of verticals going after this (I.e. finding a fitness buddy). The only difference with yours would be "having all these in the same feed". Is that enough of a value proposition?

A friend of mine created something that could clearly hit that market idea.. still unclear if he wants to go in that direction.

The goal is to replace those big numbers of "friends" in your social networks, with your true friends and people that interest you, if you become their friend - it's even better.

This would be great, if you could pull it off. I'm stuck in a bad situation like this - most sites connecting you to a single person are dating oriented, and that is HELL as a female user, and otherwise I have made a little bit of use of meetup.com and couchsurfing.org, but I do find it lacking. The issues with meetup.com is that you have to tolerate sometimes awful group meetups, and one person will come every time and be really awkward or something...I'm much better person to person. When I've used OkCupid to meet people, guys assume they're on a date and start doing a ton of inappropriate crap even though we're just meeting for coffee. Would love to see the niche filled, and please see if you can do what you can for gender balancing/creepers, which is a huge problem for female users of such sites.

Thanks!

I've been working on http://www.socialocale.com . It's interest and location based. Judges at Startup Weekend hated it. What do you guys think? Is it worth pursuing? Here's a screenshot of what it looks like on the inside http://imgur.com/ciPp9pA

I would avoid calling it a social network, simply because of the increasing "social network fatigue." Even when fatigue isn't tangible (and I don't think it yet is for social networks) it can mean the difference between a potential user visiting your site and possibly signing up, or never even clicking the link.

I think this sounds really cool. It would be really interesting to get REALLY specific into your interests and see if anyone matched up with you.

It's great that it's not designed to be a dating site, I take it there'll be no pictures or 'how would you describe your body type?' data fields, then?

Thanks! LOL no "body type" things. I'm still in looking to come up with more features, but I'm not sure weather you'll be able to press a button saying "find me a friend" like dating sites do, that matches you up. I'd love to discuss over your ideas/everything you'd like to see in the site via email as well - contact AT interestin.co

We think we are on track with http://www.LetsLunch.com to cater to people meeting during lunch hour. It is a least friction way for you to meet new people. Tell us what you think about it? so far 12,000 lunches setup and going up!

I remember PG interviewing Zuck for Startup School 2012, and Zuck mentioning that while Facebook solved the "How to connect with existing friends" problem, it wasn't really focused on solving the "How to meet new friends" problem. So, nice work!

Thanks :)

Interesting concept, I'm looking forward to the first release.

> it's not a dating site

The skeptic in me says that if it works to some scale, it will quickly become one :)

Thanks for your feedback! It's one of my biggest concerns actually. I really don't want it to become another dating site. Using your (the users) help and feedback, I'll try to get pass this.

Actually it would be nice if it becomes "implicitly" a dating site, but not explicitly.

Just like how in real life you can hang out with a mixed group of people where implicitly/secretly everyone knows a part of it is fishing for a relationship.

But explicitly and on the surface it's only about finding friends and like minded people.

The problem is that offline, there is an implicit vetting system.

I.e. if in your group of friends, one of the guy is always trying to hook up with a different girl everytime, quickly people will stop inviting him to events.

However, some social networks that have become "implicit dating websites" (meetup.com comes to my mind to some extent), there is no such self-regulatory system.

If you want to meet new people is the solution really to spend EVEN MORE time on the computer?

I see your point and tend to agree. The right title is "I'm trying to meet new people online" except it's too long. I'd like to try and make social networking more efficient so people will spend even less time online. We'll out it'll work.

I'm interested

Thanks! For any question please don't hesitate to contact me via contact AT interestin.co or even via Quora (see the link posted on the blog)

Sounds like Reddit++ to me

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