All: Show HN requires that a thing exists and that people can try it out. A sign up page doesn't count. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Back of envelope total addressable market calculation:
I’m guessing this will appeal greatly to people 3 or 4 standard deviations to the “introverted” side of the introvert/extrovert bell curve. So maybe 0.15% if it’s as high as only 3 sigma.
It’ll be useful to people who’s friendship circles overlap in that 3 standard deviations of introversion.
Let’s assume Dunbars much discredited but widely quoted ideas are right, and that people typically have ~150 social connections.
So there’s about a 1.5:1000 chance that someone would find this useful.
There’s about a 1:50 chance that any of their friends would also find it useful. (That May be higher if introverts tend to have more introverted friends, but is more likely way lower if introverts have fewer friends than extroverts).
In a city of 5 million, there are probably 150 people who’d have one friend for which this is useful, and maybe 3 people who would use it with two of their friends...
My assumptions might be way off. But to a first approximation nobody is ever going to find this actually useful in their real world relationships...
I think more than 0.15% of people feel guilt/anxiety about wanting to cancel plans last minute. I don't have any data to back that up, but it is a fairly common emotion.
999/1000 people feel nothing when they have to renege on a social engagement?
It's that combined with wanting to avoid regular calling/texting/emailing type communication saying you want to cancel, and even then only in situations where the reason for cancelling is trivial enough that the other person actively looking forward to it is good enough grounds to go anyway.
Could easily be significantly less than 1/1000 who feel guilt/anxiety and also don't have the communication skills to deal with it in ways an app like this would help?
No those people just know how to communicate like a normal human and say hey I'm really not up for it tonight let's reschedule. If anyone replies negatively or aggressively to that they then should find new friends. This is ridiculous
I can't imagine being friends with someone who is this incapable of communicating.
The solution to this problem is sending a text that says, "Hey, I'm not feeling like coming out today after all. Rain check?" This app is a worse solution than the obvious solution.
Trying to be empathetic: if you feel the need to use something like this, I'm not qualified to diagnose you as having social anxiety, but I would suggest you talk to someone who is qualified to diagnose you with social anxiety.
That... also sounds worse. This is all just advocating for not actually communicating with your friends. That's not friendship, that's transactional hanging-out.
Someone explained to me once that they had a friend who always cancels on them, or vice versa and they always cancel on them. And it was an open secret between the two of them that they both strongly hate going out, like serious dread feeling. So they would make plans with each other, or even have a standing date... and rather than anyone getting upset when someone inevitably decides to cancel the plans, both of them actually get a huge euphoric rush each time.
It's such a relief whenever they found out they don't really have to go out today!
They were best friends, and they hardly ever saw each other. At least that's exactly how they described it to me... (or, if anyone else has seen this show and remembers, maybe that didn't happen, but I guess it was believable anyway!)
Why are any of these possibilities relevant or desirable? You're complicating something that is simple: spend time with people you want to spend time with, don't spend time with people you don't want to spend time with, and tell the truth about it.
The "possibility" this opens up is not taking responsibility for your own choices, and keeping really inane secrets from people who are supposedly your friends.
To be fair I think this falls into the category of "ugh I'm not really feeling like going out... and I don't want to disappoint my friend.... if only I knew he wasn't too hot to trot tonight as well..."
But I understand your point and agree with you. I prefer direct communication. If you don't want to hang out just say so - I like clarity.
Ok. I think you're right, but I just want to point out that people who are inclined to do things like this experience irrational thoughts. Anxiety is not rational. It fills my mind with irrational thoughts. It makes me afraid of things that rationally do not pose any risk whatsoever. I understand that my social anxiety should be fixed and I should not be inclined to do something like this. Truth is, it's very hard to communicate everything well with people, I have no problem communicating most things to my friends, but some things are very hard. This seems to be always missing in this conversation.
The protocol works, but it does avoid emotional honesty. If this is a chronic thing, then perhaps there are some unsaid things that need to be said between the friends.
For others reading this, I suggest a book called Crucial Conversations. If bailing out is a proxy for deeper issues in the friendship, maybe it is time to have a good chat about it.
> If this is a chronic thing, then perhaps there are some unsaid things that need to be said between the friends.
I have an idea for that! How about an app where you can write things to your friend, which are held in the system's escrow.
"unsaidthings.io"
Then a machine learning algorithm compares them for similarity/reciprocity. If they are similar, then the escrow is released, otherwise neither person knows whether the other submitted anything at all, or whether they did and it was different.
The prototype can skip the machine learning algorithm and instead let the people select from one of 64 possible messages that are compared according to a static table. Or else be allowed to compose sentences out of fragments guided by a "writing assistant" which guides their structure into possibilities that are easy to analyze.
Agree this is not the solution (though I find it funny and clever), and I say that as someone with lifelong social anxiety.
In fact I think it's counterproductive because you'd bail more often and get less practice with confronting and overcoming anxiety. Avoidance is really tempting, but not the answer.
I disagree, hear me out. The reason this app makes sense is because if you are an empathetic person, and know other empathetic people, there's actually no good way to solve this problem through direct communication.
Lets say you have plans with someone. But then, you decide fundamentally: if the other person would still like to do this, I am happy to. But if not, I'd prefer not to. This is the game theoretic situation this app attempts to solve.
Now lets figure out a way to solve this problem through direct communication. The problem with trying to do so, is often when someone expresses a change to preferences, if you assume that person is empathetic, they will likely be diluting the degree to their change insofar as that change could negatively affect the recipient of the news. Why?
It's because there's a catch-22 in this situation between empathy and honesty. Empathy dictates we try to maximize utility between the parties. When expressing this new preference, if one is empathetic, one expresses it in a way to try to maximize the likelihood that the other party interprets it in a way they can still act selfishly to the maximally acceptable degree. However, the recipient of the information, if empathetic, can anticipate this, and hence may interpret the person's statement as pre-diluted, so in order to maximize utility from their perspective (out of empathy) they in turn may yield due to the imperfect information and assume the preference expressed is stronger than implied by the statement directly. In other words, if I hear this from someone, I put even odds that the person is being completely honest (out of valuing honesty), or, that they actually would really want to skip this plan if it would not cause me emotional pain, and have chosen to continue to express it in a way that leaves the option open (out of valuing empathy.) I know people who would do one or the other, and I don't consider either approach a sign of a moral failure.
In reality, both sides of the communication wrangle with the conflict between empathy + utility maximization in framing their expression, and honesty, which (despite its virtue) runs the risk of being misinterpreted given the other party may assume it is being diluted to maximize utility out of their empathy. Diluting the statement or being direct about it are both rational, depending on how important maximizing utility is due to empathy vs expressing honest preferences.
This app neatly solves this problem. It's not about reducing social awkwardness, it's about preventing the need for mutually-empathetic individuals to have to make trade-offs between the competing desires for objective communication (out of the value of honesty) and trying to maximize utility (out of the value of empathy and selflessness.) If one could be certain another party is being honest, this kind of technique would not be necessary, but since dishonesty in this situation falls out of empathy, its potentially virtuous and comes down to a preference of one's values in how to deal with the situation.
No, you are way overthinking this. There isn't a conflict between empathy and honesty, at least not in my relationships, because an empathetic friend would realize that I don't want to be lied to.
If your friends are mature adults, they can handle being told that someone doesn't want to hang out with them sometimes, without taking it personally. If they can't handle that, that's a problem that needs to be addressed--it's not a kind or empathetic thing to walk around on eggshells and let that problem fester and grow. This isn't a "kind lie" even if such a thing exists. What you're describing isn't empathy for your friends, it's fear/anxiety that your friends won't react well, and if your friends are quality friends at all, it's not a rational fear.
To be clear, moral failure has nothing to do with my argument: I don't even believe in morality in an absolute sense. My argument is that, assuming people want to have cooperative, enjoyable interactions with friends, the best way to achieve that is to tell the truth about what you want and expect the same from your friends.
I’m sorry but this has nothing to do with empathy. As an adult, you should have the grace to understand that sometimes people, for whatever reason, don’t feel up to hanging out.
You are seriously overthinking this. Empathetic people can still communicate.
"It's because there's a catch-22 in this situation between empathy and honesty. "
This is one of the exact things addressed in Crucial Conversations:
(1) The authors recognize that a lot of people feel this way. That they are either brutally honest or they don't talk about it.
(2) That people often feels this way because they don't know how to talk about difficult things. It does not have to be this way.
The authors lay out the steps for being able to communicate difficult conversations with anyone. Is it still going to be unpleasant? Yes. But it does not involve an either-or choice of being "brutally honest" and being "empathetic".
These are especially important in conversations these authors call "crucial conversations": important conversations that people have a lot of stake in its outcome, when opinions differ, and emotions run high. These are literally the underpinning of every relationship I know, be them romantic partnerships, to relationship with friends, with bosses, with people who work for you.
The key thing to getting out of that seeming either-or trap, is to understand that you can talk to anyone about anything if they trust you. They trust you because you sincerely want something that includes them. That you are not out to get them or trap them into things. That perhaps, you both want the same things though you might not see it. That you both are sharing in some shared meaning together.
It is a very practical book. It lays things out in ways that are catchy and easy to remember.
It's the book I gave to a friend of mine for a wedding present after I have been married for three years, something I wished I had known about when I got married.
But the correct play for empaths in this app is for both to pick bail in case the other person decides to pick bail. But now they've bailed on something they both want to do, but were okay with not doing. Not even sure if this app had a "pick 1 to 10 how much you want to bail" it'd be able to address this
It would be valuable information to say, used car salesmen.
They could look up a prospective customer wandering around the lot. If the customer asks for a test drive, check the "flake metric" and deny it for high flakers, who are probably just noncommittal tire-kickers.
This reminds me of those apps that will call your phone so that you have an excuse to get out of a social interaction by pretending to have an emergency. Rather than, you know, being a grown-up and just telling the other person you have to cut things short for whatever reason.
A) the number of degrees of discomfort between, "I can talk about this any time with no effort", and "I literally can't talk about this".
B) how normal it is for certain types of people to struggle with this kind of interaction in general.
On the first point, I am perfectly capable of being frank with friends. I am perfectly capable of telling them how I feel. And when I need to have confrontational conversations with friends, I do. But that's not the same thing as feeling no aversion or worry at all about disappointing someone. And if a crutch exists that mitigates part of that problem, I just don't see the harm in that crutch.
There are dozens of tiny, inessential affordances everyone gives themselves every day to help manage non-crippling problems. That's normal. It shouldn't be weird to anyone that people with even mild anxiety around friendships might want similar affordances. Sometimes it's not about necessity, people just want a tool that makes their life easier.
On the second note, I'm not going to go in depth here, but people who don't struggle with social anxiety usually don't understand how many other people do, or what their experiences are actually like. There's a pretty wide range of different annoyances or aversions that people can have about this stuff, and I really don't want to pretend to speak for other people. Some introverts don't struggle with this at all, some struggle in completely different areas.
I am speaking in very broad generalities. But I consider these to be very common situations for someone like me:
- going to an event I'd rather not just because I don't want to disappoint a friend or make them think I don't enjoy their company.
- actively not inviting a friend to an event because I'm worried they'd only come out of obligation and would resent that I asked.
- feeling like if I just express interest in changing plans a friend will accommodate me even though they had their heart set on something.
I'm not going to say people like me are a majority: we're definitely not. But we're not that rare. If you've never had even a casual acquaintance like me, you're not looking very hard.
> I can't imagine being friends with someone who is this incapable of communicating.
I realize this is somewhat blunt and a little uncharitable, and I don't mean it as an attack or as a character flaw -- but in the general spirit of being confrontational and open: when I hear this, my immediate thought is, "this person probably doesn't have many introverted friends, and they probably don't have many deep, honest relationships with the few introverted friends they do have."
Your perspective definitely isn't uncommon, and it shouldn't surprise me when I hear it, but I'm always surprised anyway. :) It's like seeing someone who lives in a completely different world, to the point where when they see the world I'm familiar with it's not just unexpected to them, but so unexpected that they think, "there must be something wrong with that."
Not the parent you're replying to, but I agree with their perspective for the most part.
I think absolutes are silly to use as arguments, and sure, there are certainly some people for whom it's really difficult to proactively cancel plans. Sometimes I'm that person. But I choose to suck it up and act like a human instead of (if I were to use this app) hiding behind a computer to let it do my dirty work for me. I certainly grant that there are some people who just can't do that sometimes, or even more often than sometimes.
It's hard to believe that there are enough people like that for an app. My feeling is that most people who use this would actually otherwise actively cancel plans, but will use the app instead just to be socially lazy or to avoid even a hint of confrontation, and the effect will be to lower the quality of social interaction between people overall.
> A) the number of degrees of discomfort between, "I can talk about this any time with no effort", and "I literally can't talk about this".
I don't think I'm underestimating it, I just don't see any of these degrees of discomfort as justification for my friends not telling me their preferences when they're relevant to me.
> B) how normal it is for certain types of people to struggle with this kind of interaction in general.
I think you're making some pretty big assumptions about my experience in an attempt to explain our differences in worldview.
Social anxiety is normal/common. But being "normal" is not a goal I have, nor is it a goal I think other people should have. The fact that it's normal/common has turned it from a personal problem some people have, to a social problem that most people have to deal with even if they don't have social anxiety themselves.
The fact that it's normal/common doesn't mean we should just accept it as inevitable. This is a fixable problem.
To be clear, I myself have struggled with social anxiety a lot. I'm not saying people are bad people because they have social anxiety--I'm saying they should address their social anxiety. This isn't some moral/ethical "should", it's something they should do because it would benefit them and everyone they come in contact with.
For what it's worth, I wish I had addressed my social anxiety sooner. Working on my social anxiety has been some of the most beneficial work I've ever done on myself, and I've seen similar trends with my friends who have worked through their social anxiety.
> I realize this is somewhat blunt and a little uncharitable, and I don't mean it as an attack or as a character flaw -- but in the general spirit of being confrontational and open: when I hear this, my immediate thought is, "this person probably doesn't have many introverted friends, and they probably don't have many deep, honest relationships with the few introverted friends they do have."
On the contrary:
1. I'm an extrovert, but I tend to make friends with introverts, and I tend to have <10 deep friendships and almost no acquaintances.
2. I think you're equating introversion with social anxiety, and they are not equivalent. There are introverts without social anxiety, and and extroverts with social anxiety (I am in the latter camp, though my social anxiety is probably 90% fixed at this point). Extroversion/introversion is just a statement about how much social interaction you prefer, it doesn't inherently mean you'll have any anxiety about stating those preferences.
Some folks I knew who rented an apartment in East Village to do their own startup had this exact same idea with this exact same name back in '14. I don't think they lasted very long with it and all ended up getting jobs, but this did at least make me check if this was the same folks.
Edit: That said, I would pay to use this if it were done well and if I could get all my friends to use it.
There was a similar app for Facebook too where the app remained quiet unless you were both interested in having sex with each other and then it would send notifications to the two people.
This is a little bit sad and a little bit scary. Have we reached the point where we now prefer to avoid actual communications with our "friends" that this exists? It's up there with people who won't answer phone calls and only want to text.
Telling a friend you want to cancel is hard, and depressing, and so you oftentimes go just to not bail on them. And hate it.
But what if your friend is feeling the same way? What if you both want to cancel, but neither of you wants to hurt the other person.
Well, with something like this, you can bail without letting them down; they only know you wanted to bail -if they also want to bail-. That's the key bit.
Or you could be adults and talk to each other. Telling a friend you want to cancel is usually hard because you haven't practiced setting boundaries.
This app doesn't help. It just postpones the problem until you meet somebody who doesn't need the app, except now you're even further behind in practicing that skill.
I get the desire to automate interactions. I really do. I have days where I really would rather not see people at all. But it doesn't work. In the very best case, if it works as designed, it deprives you further of human interactions, making it even harder outside of the app context to interact.
Maybe its a cultural thing. Around here we grow up and learn to state our preferences honestly and understanding its not hurtful to be truthful but rather the opposite. Weaseling about is something you correct small children on.
There's an argument to be made that learning to have hard conversations with friends/family is a useful skill, and also builds closeness and trust over time.
> Telling a friend you want to cancel is hard, and depressing, and so you oftentimes go just to not bail on them. And hate it.
Holy cow, just how disempowered are people that they can't be honest with their friends?
OMG, I don't want to eat at McDonald's today, but what if Marco gets super disappointed that I won't meet him at McDonald's and eat fries with him! He'll be so depressed. I'm so depressed! .... I really hope he bails before I do.
As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I don't think that products like this help anyone. It might seem harmless, and maybe it will be, but only if few end up using it. Otherwise, it's not going to help people expand their social abilities, their sense of self value, etc.
A friendship based on withheld communication is dysfunctional.
But what's up with getting mad when people don't want to talk on the phone? I don't want to assume but it sounds like you feel entitled to a certain method of communication .
No I didn’t say I was mad. More and more my friends don’t want to chat on the phone at all, which ironically we’ve talked about on discord or on the phone. It’s not the subject matter (just chatting about their day or what’s new in their life) but the ratchet of the ability to have complete control of our time responding to texts when it is most convenient for us but forgoing some human connection of hearing a voice. And I think it’s that way across society and I think it’s a little bit sad and a little bit scary.
I’m not on Facebook so maybe the portal screens are getting traction and things will tip back toward a human element with video.
Clearly this is to combat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance on the two-person level[0] which is utterly reasonable considering the phenomenon is widespread no matter how much people like to talk about their ability to be socially able to handle interactions.
My objection is that it may make it too easy to get what I want momentarily, i.e. I want to place high activation energy constraints on exiting because in the period leading up to the event, there will be many moments where I dip below my threshold of excitement for the event. However, since activation energy to set up the event is high because of natural constraints (I have to make sure everyone is available, that the event is available, that the venue is available), this means that if I lower the threshold to exit, I will bias strongly towards exiting.
Given that, I consciously hard commit myself to events. Post making this choice I have a far more active social life. This is why I won't use your app. It's because it actually does make a thing easy, but I don't want it to be easy.
Love that you used Netlify to knock it out, though. How did you enjoy the experience of developing it?
Readit News
All: Show HN requires that a thing exists and that people can try it out. A sign up page doesn't count. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
I’m guessing this will appeal greatly to people 3 or 4 standard deviations to the “introverted” side of the introvert/extrovert bell curve. So maybe 0.15% if it’s as high as only 3 sigma.
It’ll be useful to people who’s friendship circles overlap in that 3 standard deviations of introversion.
Let’s assume Dunbars much discredited but widely quoted ideas are right, and that people typically have ~150 social connections.
So there’s about a 1.5:1000 chance that someone would find this useful.
There’s about a 1:50 chance that any of their friends would also find it useful. (That May be higher if introverts tend to have more introverted friends, but is more likely way lower if introverts have fewer friends than extroverts).
In a city of 5 million, there are probably 150 people who’d have one friend for which this is useful, and maybe 3 people who would use it with two of their friends...
My assumptions might be way off. But to a first approximation nobody is ever going to find this actually useful in their real world relationships...
999/1000 people feel nothing when they have to renege on a social engagement?
It's that combined with wanting to avoid regular calling/texting/emailing type communication saying you want to cancel, and even then only in situations where the reason for cancelling is trivial enough that the other person actively looking forward to it is good enough grounds to go anyway.
Could easily be significantly less than 1/1000 who feel guilt/anxiety and also don't have the communication skills to deal with it in ways an app like this would help?
The solution to this problem is sending a text that says, "Hey, I'm not feeling like coming out today after all. Rain check?" This app is a worse solution than the obvious solution.
Trying to be empathetic: if you feel the need to use something like this, I'm not qualified to diagnose you as having social anxiety, but I would suggest you talk to someone who is qualified to diagnose you with social anxiety.
If the other person doesn't bail, you can stick with the commitment.
That opens possibilities, like getting a better opinion about time spent with that person.
It's such a relief whenever they found out they don't really have to go out today!
They were best friends, and they hardly ever saw each other. At least that's exactly how they described it to me... (or, if anyone else has seen this show and remembers, maybe that didn't happen, but I guess it was believable anyway!)
The "possibility" this opens up is not taking responsibility for your own choices, and keeping really inane secrets from people who are supposedly your friends.
But I understand your point and agree with you. I prefer direct communication. If you don't want to hang out just say so - I like clarity.
The protocol works, but it does avoid emotional honesty. If this is a chronic thing, then perhaps there are some unsaid things that need to be said between the friends.
For others reading this, I suggest a book called Crucial Conversations. If bailing out is a proxy for deeper issues in the friendship, maybe it is time to have a good chat about it.
I have an idea for that! How about an app where you can write things to your friend, which are held in the system's escrow.
"unsaidthings.io"
Then a machine learning algorithm compares them for similarity/reciprocity. If they are similar, then the escrow is released, otherwise neither person knows whether the other submitted anything at all, or whether they did and it was different.
The prototype can skip the machine learning algorithm and instead let the people select from one of 64 possible messages that are compared according to a static table. Or else be allowed to compose sentences out of fragments guided by a "writing assistant" which guides their structure into possibilities that are easy to analyze.
In fact I think it's counterproductive because you'd bail more often and get less practice with confronting and overcoming anxiety. Avoidance is really tempting, but not the answer.
Deleted Comment
Lets say you have plans with someone. But then, you decide fundamentally: if the other person would still like to do this, I am happy to. But if not, I'd prefer not to. This is the game theoretic situation this app attempts to solve.
Now lets figure out a way to solve this problem through direct communication. The problem with trying to do so, is often when someone expresses a change to preferences, if you assume that person is empathetic, they will likely be diluting the degree to their change insofar as that change could negatively affect the recipient of the news. Why?
It's because there's a catch-22 in this situation between empathy and honesty. Empathy dictates we try to maximize utility between the parties. When expressing this new preference, if one is empathetic, one expresses it in a way to try to maximize the likelihood that the other party interprets it in a way they can still act selfishly to the maximally acceptable degree. However, the recipient of the information, if empathetic, can anticipate this, and hence may interpret the person's statement as pre-diluted, so in order to maximize utility from their perspective (out of empathy) they in turn may yield due to the imperfect information and assume the preference expressed is stronger than implied by the statement directly. In other words, if I hear this from someone, I put even odds that the person is being completely honest (out of valuing honesty), or, that they actually would really want to skip this plan if it would not cause me emotional pain, and have chosen to continue to express it in a way that leaves the option open (out of valuing empathy.) I know people who would do one or the other, and I don't consider either approach a sign of a moral failure.
In reality, both sides of the communication wrangle with the conflict between empathy + utility maximization in framing their expression, and honesty, which (despite its virtue) runs the risk of being misinterpreted given the other party may assume it is being diluted to maximize utility out of their empathy. Diluting the statement or being direct about it are both rational, depending on how important maximizing utility is due to empathy vs expressing honest preferences.
This app neatly solves this problem. It's not about reducing social awkwardness, it's about preventing the need for mutually-empathetic individuals to have to make trade-offs between the competing desires for objective communication (out of the value of honesty) and trying to maximize utility (out of the value of empathy and selflessness.) If one could be certain another party is being honest, this kind of technique would not be necessary, but since dishonesty in this situation falls out of empathy, its potentially virtuous and comes down to a preference of one's values in how to deal with the situation.
If your friends are mature adults, they can handle being told that someone doesn't want to hang out with them sometimes, without taking it personally. If they can't handle that, that's a problem that needs to be addressed--it's not a kind or empathetic thing to walk around on eggshells and let that problem fester and grow. This isn't a "kind lie" even if such a thing exists. What you're describing isn't empathy for your friends, it's fear/anxiety that your friends won't react well, and if your friends are quality friends at all, it's not a rational fear.
To be clear, moral failure has nothing to do with my argument: I don't even believe in morality in an absolute sense. My argument is that, assuming people want to have cooperative, enjoyable interactions with friends, the best way to achieve that is to tell the truth about what you want and expect the same from your friends.
You are seriously overthinking this. Empathetic people can still communicate.
This is one of the exact things addressed in Crucial Conversations:
(1) The authors recognize that a lot of people feel this way. That they are either brutally honest or they don't talk about it.
(2) That people often feels this way because they don't know how to talk about difficult things. It does not have to be this way.
The authors lay out the steps for being able to communicate difficult conversations with anyone. Is it still going to be unpleasant? Yes. But it does not involve an either-or choice of being "brutally honest" and being "empathetic".
These are especially important in conversations these authors call "crucial conversations": important conversations that people have a lot of stake in its outcome, when opinions differ, and emotions run high. These are literally the underpinning of every relationship I know, be them romantic partnerships, to relationship with friends, with bosses, with people who work for you.
The key thing to getting out of that seeming either-or trap, is to understand that you can talk to anyone about anything if they trust you. They trust you because you sincerely want something that includes them. That you are not out to get them or trap them into things. That perhaps, you both want the same things though you might not see it. That you both are sharing in some shared meaning together.
It is a very practical book. It lays things out in ways that are catchy and easy to remember.
It's the book I gave to a friend of mine for a wedding present after I have been married for three years, something I wished I had known about when I got married.
It would be valuable information to say, used car salesmen.
They could look up a prospective customer wandering around the lot. If the customer asks for a test drive, check the "flake metric" and deny it for high flakers, who are probably just noncommittal tire-kickers.
:)
Like most data collection, this is far too sparse a dataset to ever be useful.
A) the number of degrees of discomfort between, "I can talk about this any time with no effort", and "I literally can't talk about this".
B) how normal it is for certain types of people to struggle with this kind of interaction in general.
On the first point, I am perfectly capable of being frank with friends. I am perfectly capable of telling them how I feel. And when I need to have confrontational conversations with friends, I do. But that's not the same thing as feeling no aversion or worry at all about disappointing someone. And if a crutch exists that mitigates part of that problem, I just don't see the harm in that crutch.
There are dozens of tiny, inessential affordances everyone gives themselves every day to help manage non-crippling problems. That's normal. It shouldn't be weird to anyone that people with even mild anxiety around friendships might want similar affordances. Sometimes it's not about necessity, people just want a tool that makes their life easier.
On the second note, I'm not going to go in depth here, but people who don't struggle with social anxiety usually don't understand how many other people do, or what their experiences are actually like. There's a pretty wide range of different annoyances or aversions that people can have about this stuff, and I really don't want to pretend to speak for other people. Some introverts don't struggle with this at all, some struggle in completely different areas.
I am speaking in very broad generalities. But I consider these to be very common situations for someone like me:
- going to an event I'd rather not just because I don't want to disappoint a friend or make them think I don't enjoy their company.
- actively not inviting a friend to an event because I'm worried they'd only come out of obligation and would resent that I asked.
- feeling like if I just express interest in changing plans a friend will accommodate me even though they had their heart set on something.
I'm not going to say people like me are a majority: we're definitely not. But we're not that rare. If you've never had even a casual acquaintance like me, you're not looking very hard.
> I can't imagine being friends with someone who is this incapable of communicating.
I realize this is somewhat blunt and a little uncharitable, and I don't mean it as an attack or as a character flaw -- but in the general spirit of being confrontational and open: when I hear this, my immediate thought is, "this person probably doesn't have many introverted friends, and they probably don't have many deep, honest relationships with the few introverted friends they do have."
Your perspective definitely isn't uncommon, and it shouldn't surprise me when I hear it, but I'm always surprised anyway. :) It's like seeing someone who lives in a completely different world, to the point where when they see the world I'm familiar with it's not just unexpected to them, but so unexpected that they think, "there must be something wrong with that."
I think absolutes are silly to use as arguments, and sure, there are certainly some people for whom it's really difficult to proactively cancel plans. Sometimes I'm that person. But I choose to suck it up and act like a human instead of (if I were to use this app) hiding behind a computer to let it do my dirty work for me. I certainly grant that there are some people who just can't do that sometimes, or even more often than sometimes.
It's hard to believe that there are enough people like that for an app. My feeling is that most people who use this would actually otherwise actively cancel plans, but will use the app instead just to be socially lazy or to avoid even a hint of confrontation, and the effect will be to lower the quality of social interaction between people overall.
I don't think I'm underestimating it, I just don't see any of these degrees of discomfort as justification for my friends not telling me their preferences when they're relevant to me.
> B) how normal it is for certain types of people to struggle with this kind of interaction in general.
I think you're making some pretty big assumptions about my experience in an attempt to explain our differences in worldview.
Social anxiety is normal/common. But being "normal" is not a goal I have, nor is it a goal I think other people should have. The fact that it's normal/common has turned it from a personal problem some people have, to a social problem that most people have to deal with even if they don't have social anxiety themselves.
The fact that it's normal/common doesn't mean we should just accept it as inevitable. This is a fixable problem.
To be clear, I myself have struggled with social anxiety a lot. I'm not saying people are bad people because they have social anxiety--I'm saying they should address their social anxiety. This isn't some moral/ethical "should", it's something they should do because it would benefit them and everyone they come in contact with.
For what it's worth, I wish I had addressed my social anxiety sooner. Working on my social anxiety has been some of the most beneficial work I've ever done on myself, and I've seen similar trends with my friends who have worked through their social anxiety.
> I realize this is somewhat blunt and a little uncharitable, and I don't mean it as an attack or as a character flaw -- but in the general spirit of being confrontational and open: when I hear this, my immediate thought is, "this person probably doesn't have many introverted friends, and they probably don't have many deep, honest relationships with the few introverted friends they do have."
On the contrary:
1. I'm an extrovert, but I tend to make friends with introverts, and I tend to have <10 deep friendships and almost no acquaintances.
2. I think you're equating introversion with social anxiety, and they are not equivalent. There are introverts without social anxiety, and and extroverts with social anxiety (I am in the latter camp, though my social anxiety is probably 90% fixed at this point). Extroversion/introversion is just a statement about how much social interaction you prefer, it doesn't inherently mean you'll have any anxiety about stating those preferences.
Edit: That said, I would pay to use this if it were done well and if I could get all my friends to use it.
Deleted Comment
Telling a friend you want to cancel is hard, and depressing, and so you oftentimes go just to not bail on them. And hate it.
But what if your friend is feeling the same way? What if you both want to cancel, but neither of you wants to hurt the other person.
Well, with something like this, you can bail without letting them down; they only know you wanted to bail -if they also want to bail-. That's the key bit.
This app doesn't help. It just postpones the problem until you meet somebody who doesn't need the app, except now you're even further behind in practicing that skill.
I get the desire to automate interactions. I really do. I have days where I really would rather not see people at all. But it doesn't work. In the very best case, if it works as designed, it deprives you further of human interactions, making it even harder outside of the app context to interact.
Holy cow, just how disempowered are people that they can't be honest with their friends?
OMG, I don't want to eat at McDonald's today, but what if Marco gets super disappointed that I won't meet him at McDonald's and eat fries with him! He'll be so depressed. I'm so depressed! .... I really hope he bails before I do.
As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I don't think that products like this help anyone. It might seem harmless, and maybe it will be, but only if few end up using it. Otherwise, it's not going to help people expand their social abilities, their sense of self value, etc.
A friendship based on withheld communication is dysfunctional.
But what's up with getting mad when people don't want to talk on the phone? I don't want to assume but it sounds like you feel entitled to a certain method of communication .
I’m not on Facebook so maybe the portal screens are getting traction and things will tip back toward a human element with video.
Robocaller: "Hello is this $FIRST_NAME $LAST_NAME?"
Happy customer acting surprised: "Why yes it is. May I ask who is calling at such an hour? I'm hanging out with my friends."
Robocaller: "Yes this is $AUTHORITY. We need you to do $MANDATORY_TASK immediately.
Happy customer acting surprised: "Oh my! Okay, I'll be there soon."
Happy customer to friends: "Guys, this is so crazy, but I've got to run!"
Then you leave the party or whatever. Side-effects: you can't sleep at night because you're thinking about how weird you are.
Clearly this is to combat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance on the two-person level[0] which is utterly reasonable considering the phenomenon is widespread no matter how much people like to talk about their ability to be socially able to handle interactions.
My objection is that it may make it too easy to get what I want momentarily, i.e. I want to place high activation energy constraints on exiting because in the period leading up to the event, there will be many moments where I dip below my threshold of excitement for the event. However, since activation energy to set up the event is high because of natural constraints (I have to make sure everyone is available, that the event is available, that the venue is available), this means that if I lower the threshold to exit, I will bias strongly towards exiting.
Given that, I consciously hard commit myself to events. Post making this choice I have a far more active social life. This is why I won't use your app. It's because it actually does make a thing easy, but I don't want it to be easy.
Love that you used Netlify to knock it out, though. How did you enjoy the experience of developing it?
0: Really, this is exactly the Abilene Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox