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Comment by deepinsand | Hacker News Reader

I've never used WUT, but was intrigued by the anecdote at the end: "Sun’s out; in Washington square park. Who’s around?”

I've seen tons of apps that try to solve the "I want to hang out" problem. They all fail because cool people don't use those apps. Psuedo-anonymity can potentially solve this.

Some tried to do anonymous matching, but those had cold-start-network-effect problems. Psuedo-anonymous social networks might be able to back into a solution by attracting early adopters with their "gossip network" use case.

This reminds me of how Facebook backed into essentially being a status, photos, and events platform when it started life as a networked address book.

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I think some of it may simply be that hanging out is with strangers is not a way most people want to meet people. Meeting at events or places where simply by being there you have a mutual interest is more attractive for many.

Sorry, I should have said "pseudo-anonymous". At least in Secret, I can see how many degrees of separation I am to someone via our phone address book. I've since edited the original post.

It's anonymous enough that you don't feel the consequences of making a FB status update that no one comments on, but with enough identity to not be creepy.

> you don't feel the consequences of making a FB status update that no one comments on

Wait, what? What's the consequence of that? You expect people to comment on every one of your status updates?

Kids these days...

> I think some of it may simply be that hanging out is with strangers is not a way most people want to meet people. Meeting at events or places where simply by being there you have a mutual interest is more attractive for many.

Yeah, I don't really see strangers hanging out. That would be kind of weird. For a bunch of people to gather in one place, with no overall goal than to talk, hang out, perhaps have some background music but not much else. Maybe some smoking breaks. And then maybe for all of them to go to another place, maybe more towards the city, where you have to pay to do the same thing, that is, hanging out with people with whom you have no obvious common interests except for doing this hanging out thing, and in a much more crowded place.

Wait... what if you added alcohol to the above? Then I can totally imagine it. :)

You are totally correct on the cold start problem. ;)

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