Comment by seannaM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seannaM | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think social anxiety is a bad focus at all. I personally suffered from a lot of social anxiety 10 years ago.

My personal focus right now are more like social finesse, being slightly more fun at parties, handling difficult social situations (Calling in debts, interpersonal arguements, close relationships with difficult people, etc)

If you keep up with the social anxiety focus, I'd really like to see some kind of roadmap for success - Examples of what people using the service or similar approaches have accomplished. My understanding of social anxiety is that there's varying degrees of accomplishment for the same effort that people put in - some people are always going to feel awkward.

I haven't heard of those last two movements personally. Have you thought about how your site relates to the PUA movement? I've noticed some similarities. I don't mean that in the I'm currently raising pitchforks way. I think there was some concern within that community about how to help men with social anxiety that got drowned out with all of the fuzzy tophatted snake oil salesman and face-tattooed guys that want you to murder your step kids.

Thanks for the feedback!

Ah ok, in that case yes we do hope to expand into those areas you mentioned. Our overall goal with Metamorfus is to become a really good resource on getting better at socializing, regardless of your background or goals. We definitely recognize a website can only do so much and people will respond differently.

We are still building the core of the site and bootstrapping. But we hope to eventually team up with therapists and relationship/communication experts to help provide content and guidance for people. So if you decide to take on a "go to a party" challenge, we hope to also provide tips, advice, and steps you can take to help make going to a party more successful, and cater that advice to your needs and skill level. One member of the team is a therapist who specializes in anxiety, and so we already have a good start on that.

I think the PUA gets a bad rap. Yes it has its problems, but at its core it always felt like a positive thing to me. I don't mind getting compared to it. We will definitely strive to keep metamorfus gender neutral and not make anyone feel uncomfortable though.

Honey badger is the "don't give a f movement" (http://www.reddit.com/r/howtonotgiveafuck/), their overall goal is to flat out not care about anything at all. Which has its pros and cons, of course. But so far metamorfus has responded well with that community, many of metamorfus's current members joined from htngaf communities. And No More Mr Nice Guy is this book -- http://www.amazon.com/No-More-Mr-Nice-Guy/dp/0762415339 -- there are in person communities around the country that follow the book, and the book itself contains many challenges and exercises, so a Metamorfus-type site could potentially become an online NMMNG community.

and btw, if you come back to the site you should find it much faster now. It was embarrassing how slow it was, we found and fixed the bottleneck :)

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