Can't be overstated how good having a setting centered on some common activity with low stakes social interaction is for building relationships, romantic as well as platonic.
Hookup culture just isn't for everyone, and the notion that it is has been the cause of a lot of grief and agony.
Most kids have a third place growing up, being an extension of school or another place like the skate park. If you leave school and don't find a new third place, finding new friendships becomes difficult.
Yes, I’ve always loved the camaraderie around climbing gyms and the community that develops naturally when you go to a gym consistently. Romantically it’s quite hard though, if a relationship is built around an activity, there are a number of challenges if someone’s interest shifts or a big skill mismatch etc.
Just like work or school friendships, if you don’t shift those hangouts to other contexts (meals unconnected to the activity, family introductions, travel, etc) then they won’t stick outside of that initial context, however deep they feel at the time
I spent years attending various language courses where I literally sat and talked to people, but I never became friends with any of them. If anything, it usually felt like stepping into a world of individuals hand-picked to have nothing in common with me, except for the fact that they were trying to learn a language too.
I have that feeling at work. I've spent years talking to people daily but never gotten to know them. But for stuff like hobbies I've never had trouble filling the time talking about the hobby. You don't find it interesting to talk about why you're both learning the language, or what books/media in that language you enjoy?
Language courses generally have a clear end date so it's not surprising that many people wouldn't be super invested in making or maintaining new relationships in them.
Easiest way to meet someone is for them to be a friend of a friend. I rarely date someone outside my extended circle even if I was trying to. We inevitably happen to know someone in common.
That said, bars are a great way to expand that circle. Dating is just one aspect of socializing. People who go to bars specifically just to "pick up" are creepy.
It is also extremely powerful for mental health. Having something to look forward and that anticipation has enumerable benefits. Also, every hobby has people who LOVE to help newbies and will talk infinitely about all the minutiae of all the things.
> Hookup culture just isn't for everyone, and the notion that it is has been the cause of a lot of grief and agony
I'm sorry, but how could you possibly think this is the case? Hookup culture is still very fringe, wildly looked down upon.
Humanity has had a purity culture for the past few hundred years. Sex has been a tool to oppress and shame. To this day, this purity culture continues. Women are slut shamed. Gay men are perceived as disgusting by proxy of their sexual inclinations. Kinks must never be spoken out loud.
Sex is still not talked about. We bead around the bush, play innuendos. Speaking directly about what you desire in the bedroom is almost unthinkable. Some married people endure years of subpar sex, when simple communication could fix it.
Where is this hookup culture? Because if I talk to 10 random people about my hookups, in even a very surface-level amount of detail, what responses would I get?
I get disgust, pearl-clutching. I am a whore, a slut, no cleaner than a pig and practically begging to get AIDS. In fact, AIDS might just be a good thing, to rid the world of immoral scum.
Do you see that same level of reaction to proclaims of marriage and romance? Because I don't. Not sure where you live, but if this is your definition of "hookup culture" and you truly believe it's been pushed on everyone... maybe I should move to wherever you are. But I've never seen or heard of such a place.
Umm.. yes it can. Common interests are WAAAY overrated. It's barely even a starting point... asymmetry is there it's at, why "partner" with yourself, when you can partner with your literal compliment, someone who has what you lack.... to make not just a bigger half, but an actual whole?!
It's not about common interests, it's literally just about showing up and being exposed to the same people for a prolonged amount of time. The activity is just an excuse.
fully agree with dagelf here. me andmy wife share nothing in common but the fact we enjoy eachothers presence. imho its really important to have your own thing. if it all revolves around some external commonality, its bound to fail once that thing is gone for either.
Cool. So online activists can become more engaged irl? Sounds great unless the activism is the kind you disagree with. Imagine this brining together a collection of white supremacists or antifa. Or pro-life versus pro-choice.
This is the problem with the tech world. They are so preoccupied with whether they can, they don’t stop to think if they should.
Yeah that's actually largely a good thing. A big problem is the political echo chamber these people live in online. In neutral activities that are not strongly politically coded, they'll meet people from outside that echo chamber, and will inevitably face contradictions to their world view.
"Users near you" functionality is sorely needed in online spaces, considering how much interaction has moved online.
Reddit has worked around their lack of it to some degree with location-based subreddits like r/AtlFilmmakers. But subreddits are high maintenance, and they isolate content. Plus, the naming conventions aren't standard. Maybe there's r/AtlFilmmakers for filmmakers in Atlanta, but another subreddit for musicians uses the state in the name instead of a city.
It's a bit like folders vs. tags. It would be nicer to have a single filmmaking subreddit with the option to filter on users' locations -- and default filtering out of location-specific posts in other places.
That wouldn't just make for better dating, though it probably would compared to something like Tinder. It could also lead to stronger local communities and better health outcomes.
> "Users near you" functionality is sorely needed in online spaces, considering how much interaction has moved online.
Funny this got mentioned as France just successfully got that very feature removed from Telegram by arresting the founder and citing that feature as the one being used most for abuse.
That might have been cited as the reason, but I think we all know the real reason is that France is fighting against Russian troops in their former African colonies, and Russian troops mainly use Telegram for their communications.
Strava has a feature called Flyby that allows you to find out other Strava users who you ran past (flew by) on your activity. With a single click you could get the other user's entire route, likely including their home (start/finish).
After some backlash about safety/privacy, it was disabled on everyone's account and required people to manually opt-in:
Strava has features to make this safer, e.g. allowing you to hide the first n meters of an activity, though a dedicated individual could eventually determine your route.
Honestly, though, there are easier ways to determine where you live and your routine, e.g. address books + parking a car outside of your house & observing.
Wasn't it also Strava or a similar app that revealed military bases by the staff on patrol having the app on?
I mean given sattelite imagery is a thing I doubt army bases are secret, but that was still a bit of a whoopsie, on both the personnel's part and the app's.
Unfortunately “Users near you” has the same problems AirTags has to deal with.
If you’re looking for someone, these features often make finding the names of their new accounts trivial. It also tells you that person is within the app’s range.
Airtags are very near you. Knowing someone is within 50 feet/a couple of meters is much different than knowing someone is within 30 mins drive of you, in a dense urban environment.
TikTok is the only app I’ve encountered that gets this right. I’ve made connections with people from my town and places just outside where I live. I’d love to see more apps do what TikTok does.
Sharing a common interest is the best way to meet lots of new people. It creates low stakes interaction opportunities and removes the creep factor (if you are at a meetup for fans of model trains along with like a dozen other people, it’s not weird that you are talking to some of them).
Better than any app, go get a hobby in person and get out there to meet people who are into it. Chances are you present yourself way better in the real world vs online. Online dating, especially the Tinder variety, really skews to work for some demographics and not others (I am not talking about gender here so much as age, location, etc.).
This is the common advice, but it's also resulted in many of these hobby based events being overrun by people who are primarily there looking to find a date. It can be a weird dynamic.
My suggestion is get a hobby that you explicitly are interested in, but don't go in with an expectation that you'll find someone, or make that your primary goal.
> Chances are you present yourself way better in the real world vs online
> My suggestion is get a hobby that you explicitly are interested in, but don't go in with an expectation that you'll find someone, or make that your primary goal.
The issue here is that you need to have hobbies that are explicitly good for finding partners. For instance, I love riding motorcycles. I am happy to do group oriented aspects of the hobby like track days or group rides, etc. The amount of women in that activity is near zero. The same is true for cars. It's almost entirely men. Even if you say there's 10% women showing up - that's still a horrific 9:1 ratio.
I find it super annoying because my hobbies are so masculine and male dominated. I have to actually go out and do things that I'm not really that passionate about or interested in as a way to meet women - and then I have to be really good at said hobbies.
Fortunately, I am someone who is able and willing to suffer through things that I don't enjoy for a goal but it is going to contradict all the most popular advice out there of "do what you love and love will follow". It's just simply not true. All the women I've met were through activities or hobbies that I had no real interest in doing. I was simply doing them to improve my odds in regards to dating women.
Who cares if you're interested. Just do the fucking work.
And even for those with better intentions, the low stakes interaction will become high stakes as attraction and expectations increase. When rejection almost inevitably happens at some point, bringing feelings of innability and jealousy, it will be tougher to deal, specially for the less experienced following this path.
In this sense hookup culture can relieve such pressure and allows for decoupling the sexual needs, and romantic ones even - personal note: I think it's weird how people online talk as if it's mandatory to mistreat/abandon the people you hook up with. I build a small but nice network of "friends with benefits" which for me are simply friends who enjoy a specific activity. Like, exactly the inverse of what everyone is recomending and it worked for me.
For me a hobby group is for doing that hobby. I want to focus on that and not on building potential romantic relationships. If it is something I am really passionate about I am basically in asexual mode and don't even "see them that way".
I am sure many people's brain are wired differently and things "just happen" for them but I need to be more explicit to make anything happen. It also feels boundary crossing, especially with activities where there is physical contact. And even if you take a rejection well, I imagine it doesn't feel great for the other side to get unwanted romantic attraction. It has so much potential to create unnecessary drama.
I wish there were places you could just got to find romantic partners. Not like speed dating but where you can casually hang out. Sure bars and clubs do work for a certain crowd but are not that great if you are not into the "party scene" and lots of people there don't really want to meet other people but just party with friends.
Probably depends on the details of the online communication.
A video call, a synchronous one on one text chat, an asynchronous one on one text chat, and a public broadcast like HN or Twitter all create very different experiences.
HN’s format makes it easy to show aloof, professional detachment and conceals my age and looks. For dating, though? That ain’t an advantage.
This is why clubs exist and have for centuries. Country clubs, rotary club, computer club, Masonic, etc. There’s a ton of them but you don’t see younger people joining them as much today.
> There’s a ton of them but you don’t see younger people joining them as much today.
That's because they're primarily filled with old people, with "old" interests. Short of a coordinated visit, you'll always be in the minority. Heck, I'm in the minority, and I'm in my 40's the few times I accept an invitation to go to one of these places.
There's also the occasional left-over haughtiness about the value of being let into the club. Left over from when they were exceptionally popular. This can push people away too.
> “The thing about Letterboxd is there isn’t a ‘central town square’ like there is on X; it’s a very single-channel conversation,” says Gracewood. Comments happen in-line – similar to those on the Guardian and Observer websites – meaning that it’s less possible to performatively repost content into a main feed in order to encourage a pile-on. Similar situations exist on platforms such as Goodreads and Strava, where it’s possible to communicate with and message others, but not to publicly shame them easily.
> Because hobby apps are nicer places to exist, people spend more time on them – and they can eventually turn into services that are more than advertised. That includes finding like-minded people with whom you’d want to spend your time romantically.
> One reason that people may be starting to find love on apps not explicitly designed for that purpose is because the expectations are lower – and as such, the atmosphere is less sexually charged.
I feel an 'Ask HN' coming on: "have you found love on HN?"
I’m not seeing what’s so bad about the popular reviews. I guess my one complaint would be that no one is writing reviews and so they should stop calling it reviews when they’re really tweets about movies, but I think if Letterboxd were actually 100% in-depth reviews I’d log off immediately. Usually people writing a short quip about a weird/funny thing they noticed is way more enlightening than trying to go through some intellectual exercise after every movie you watch.
We try to search for meaningful relationships, which socials stole from us apparently, by switching to different socials, pretending they're going to do better than the previous ones.
Wouldn't ditching socials altogether get us in a better place on this matter? It is utopia at this point I guess. Some socials could actually be useful to make new friends/relationships but it seems to me that the very people that constantly complain about the "anti-social" aspect that our lives have taken are the ones that go on and try 1000 different dating apps, give up on friends after a couple of months to try and find new "better" ones.
I do use Strava a lot to record my rides and stuff, and even more since I could afford a Wahoo - but I really hate the 'social' side of Strava. It tries to make you 'competitive' so hard.
Granted, as a professional loser I'd like to find someone that likes cycling too, though cycling alone is great too - still, I'd rather find that person in one of those rides than in some weird thing like Strava fly-by's or something.
I've found that it's really what you make of it. My city has a bunch of cycling subcultures - social slow rolls, fast road riding, sightseeing and exploration, commuting and errand-running - and different people like to see and talk about different types of rides and sometimes dabble in different subcultures, but generally people care way more about seeing the rides, and whatever fun banter or background context you add when you post it, than analyzing your speed and elevation.
I really love the social aspect of Strava because I'm friends with all the other people I follow on it. In some way I think it is more intimate than traditional social media. You could get a better picture of my life and how I spend my time from seeing my physical displacements during the day than by seeing the super filtered Instagram stuff that I only choose to share when I'm having a good time and doing something interesting.
This so much... most of the time I use those online services to track my own progress (reading books, rides taken, etc) and it always results in WTF when someone leaves a like on my activity… Would love for a global setting "disable all social aspects"...
Yeah, I used to use Strava to track rides when I was cycling a lot and at some point realised it just made feel bad about my own performance. I run a lot more than I ride now and only take my keys with me. I check the time before I leave and know roughly how far and log it in my calendar. Running without any tech or music/podcasts/audiobooks has also helped me focus on technique and breathing and gives me a proper break from everything.
Garmin Connect is actually fairly decent. Tracks activities (also sleep, which I find pretty useful), fairly detailed stats, little to none social features and a little gamification with challenges and achievements.
Also the watch reminds you to move from time to time.
Komoot is great for planning of "trips" and "stealing" other people's routes. I've done couple of them and you kind of never know what you're gonna see there (hopefully not agressive dogs), all of them were pretty enjoyable. It has a bit of a social aspect, but barely anyone uses it where I live, so IDK how it is.
One thing I miss from Strava are segments (or whatever they're called) - short parts of your route with it's own leader-board. Has "speedrun, but IRL" vibes, which is pretty cool IMO.
I use RideWithGPS for this reason. It also has social features (if you want them), but making everything private is three dropdowns on a single settings page.
Yeah, I'm happier since I switched my Strava to private. My friends can see where I have been riding, but I'm not competing with the broader community.
I wish there were more offerings for socialising around hobbies.
Strava looks great for some sport activities, but I’d like to meet other nerds into 80s computing, hobby electronics, comics, sci-fi, home automation, kayaking, city exploration, etc
You invariably end up with lical Facebook groups, which are just a flow of posts, and require a FB account, or some non local reddit group, or small scale website you have no idea exists.
Something is missing. It sure would require mass appeal to be useful, but a ‘Tinder for your hobbies’ might be nice.
Get matches from people near you who enjoy a cross-section of the same stuff.
Add some social aspects for those who like to show off or share (don’t force it though), make discovery easy, let people organise events…
It sounds to me like what is missing is community.
Around here, if you go outside you're soon going to learn who the like-minded nerds are. Even if you don't chance-encounter them directly, the people you do encounter are apt to know them and let you know about them. From there, you can reach out. Connection made.
In fact, I was just having a conversation with an old friend who recently moved to my area and he noted how everyone is out there talking to each other and finding out about each other, which felt foreign to him. He says where he moved from he was effectively anonymous. I suspect your living arrangement is more like his previously was.
Perhaps the solution isn't tech-based, but simply for us to be more neighbourly the old fashioned way?
Meetup.com in large cities has become a money-grab, spawning a bunch of semi-professional “event planners” who charge much more than the cost of putting on the event. Feeling like you’re paying for the privilege of talking to other people is demoralizing. People want a place to meet other people that doesn’t feel like they’re paying to be “set up”.
Strava is the only social network I’m on anymore, and I pair it with a number of weekly, in person group rides. It’s a great way to maintain connections, and a wonderful source of encouragement.
Typical social network dopamine hits probably aren’t great for your health, but when it’s paired with 100 miles of exercise, I think it has a net positive. I’ll definitely admit to pushing myself further than I typically would for those Strava kudos.
That said, I don’t think something like Strava is particularly useful without the in person aspect to go along with it. Heck I don’t even know how you’d gain followers without doing group rides.
I find Strava is also helpful for solo activities that aren't in-person. Knowing that an IRL friend/follower will see my activity pushes me to work harder.
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Hookup culture just isn't for everyone, and the notion that it is has been the cause of a lot of grief and agony.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
Most kids have a third place growing up, being an extension of school or another place like the skate park. If you leave school and don't find a new third place, finding new friendships becomes difficult.
I agree, and that's why I find it important to study and understand the social dynamics of hookup culture through research [1].
[1] What is Hooking Up? Examining Definitions of Hooking Up in Relation to Behavior and Normative Perceptions: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3546226/
That said, bars are a great way to expand that circle. Dating is just one aspect of socializing. People who go to bars specifically just to "pick up" are creepy.
I'm sorry, but how could you possibly think this is the case? Hookup culture is still very fringe, wildly looked down upon.
Humanity has had a purity culture for the past few hundred years. Sex has been a tool to oppress and shame. To this day, this purity culture continues. Women are slut shamed. Gay men are perceived as disgusting by proxy of their sexual inclinations. Kinks must never be spoken out loud.
Sex is still not talked about. We bead around the bush, play innuendos. Speaking directly about what you desire in the bedroom is almost unthinkable. Some married people endure years of subpar sex, when simple communication could fix it.
Where is this hookup culture? Because if I talk to 10 random people about my hookups, in even a very surface-level amount of detail, what responses would I get?
I get disgust, pearl-clutching. I am a whore, a slut, no cleaner than a pig and practically begging to get AIDS. In fact, AIDS might just be a good thing, to rid the world of immoral scum.
Do you see that same level of reaction to proclaims of marriage and romance? Because I don't. Not sure where you live, but if this is your definition of "hookup culture" and you truly believe it's been pushed on everyone... maybe I should move to wherever you are. But I've never seen or heard of such a place.
A lot of interests need a common space.
This is the problem with the tech world. They are so preoccupied with whether they can, they don’t stop to think if they should.
Yes, that's from Jurassic Park.
I'm sorry, but I think you may be spending too much time online.
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Reddit has worked around their lack of it to some degree with location-based subreddits like r/AtlFilmmakers. But subreddits are high maintenance, and they isolate content. Plus, the naming conventions aren't standard. Maybe there's r/AtlFilmmakers for filmmakers in Atlanta, but another subreddit for musicians uses the state in the name instead of a city.
It's a bit like folders vs. tags. It would be nicer to have a single filmmaking subreddit with the option to filter on users' locations -- and default filtering out of location-specific posts in other places.
That wouldn't just make for better dating, though it probably would compared to something like Tinder. It could also lead to stronger local communities and better health outcomes.
Funny this got mentioned as France just successfully got that very feature removed from Telegram by arresting the founder and citing that feature as the one being used most for abuse.
Bunch of sources about that here: https://ground.news/article/telegram-to-start-moderating-pri...
After some backlash about safety/privacy, it was disabled on everyone's account and required people to manually opt-in:
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/10/strava-flyby-feature.htm...
Very few people opted back in so the feature became useless.
Most people still have the setting that matches them with people who have run with them on a group run (same exact route at the same time).
Honestly, though, there are easier ways to determine where you live and your routine, e.g. address books + parking a car outside of your house & observing.
I mean given sattelite imagery is a thing I doubt army bases are secret, but that was still a bit of a whoopsie, on both the personnel's part and the app's.
If you’re looking for someone, these features often make finding the names of their new accounts trivial. It also tells you that person is within the app’s range.
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Better than any app, go get a hobby in person and get out there to meet people who are into it. Chances are you present yourself way better in the real world vs online. Online dating, especially the Tinder variety, really skews to work for some demographics and not others (I am not talking about gender here so much as age, location, etc.).
My suggestion is get a hobby that you explicitly are interested in, but don't go in with an expectation that you'll find someone, or make that your primary goal.
> Chances are you present yourself way better in the real world vs online
For many of us I don't think this is true
The issue here is that you need to have hobbies that are explicitly good for finding partners. For instance, I love riding motorcycles. I am happy to do group oriented aspects of the hobby like track days or group rides, etc. The amount of women in that activity is near zero. The same is true for cars. It's almost entirely men. Even if you say there's 10% women showing up - that's still a horrific 9:1 ratio.
I find it super annoying because my hobbies are so masculine and male dominated. I have to actually go out and do things that I'm not really that passionate about or interested in as a way to meet women - and then I have to be really good at said hobbies.
Fortunately, I am someone who is able and willing to suffer through things that I don't enjoy for a goal but it is going to contradict all the most popular advice out there of "do what you love and love will follow". It's just simply not true. All the women I've met were through activities or hobbies that I had no real interest in doing. I was simply doing them to improve my odds in regards to dating women.
Who cares if you're interested. Just do the fucking work.
In this sense hookup culture can relieve such pressure and allows for decoupling the sexual needs, and romantic ones even - personal note: I think it's weird how people online talk as if it's mandatory to mistreat/abandon the people you hook up with. I build a small but nice network of "friends with benefits" which for me are simply friends who enjoy a specific activity. Like, exactly the inverse of what everyone is recomending and it worked for me.
I am sure many people's brain are wired differently and things "just happen" for them but I need to be more explicit to make anything happen. It also feels boundary crossing, especially with activities where there is physical contact. And even if you take a rejection well, I imagine it doesn't feel great for the other side to get unwanted romantic attraction. It has so much potential to create unnecessary drama.
I wish there were places you could just got to find romantic partners. Not like speed dating but where you can casually hang out. Sure bars and clubs do work for a certain crowd but are not that great if you are not into the "party scene" and lots of people there don't really want to meet other people but just party with friends.
Probably depends on the details of the online communication.
A video call, a synchronous one on one text chat, an asynchronous one on one text chat, and a public broadcast like HN or Twitter all create very different experiences.
HN’s format makes it easy to show aloof, professional detachment and conceals my age and looks. For dating, though? That ain’t an advantage.
That's because they're primarily filled with old people, with "old" interests. Short of a coordinated visit, you'll always be in the minority. Heck, I'm in the minority, and I'm in my 40's the few times I accept an invitation to go to one of these places.
There's also the occasional left-over haughtiness about the value of being let into the club. Left over from when they were exceptionally popular. This can push people away too.
This depends a lot on the person.
> Because hobby apps are nicer places to exist, people spend more time on them – and they can eventually turn into services that are more than advertised. That includes finding like-minded people with whom you’d want to spend your time romantically.
> One reason that people may be starting to find love on apps not explicitly designed for that purpose is because the expectations are lower – and as such, the atmosphere is less sexually charged.
I feel an 'Ask HN' coming on: "have you found love on HN?"
The problem with Letterboxd that it's gamified and there is an incredible amount of noise and it's getting worse.
Top reviews are all just copy paste like baits.
"Me when watching a Ghibli film :cryingemoji:" 20k likes
"Yes I'd let Ethan Hawke visit me every single night" 10k likes
etc
It's a good site but also must users are writing dogshit
Just look at the popular reviews page https://letterboxd.com/reviews/popular/this/week/
“Yeah I’d let Jim Keller design my CPU” 200 karma
We try to search for meaningful relationships, which socials stole from us apparently, by switching to different socials, pretending they're going to do better than the previous ones.
Wouldn't ditching socials altogether get us in a better place on this matter? It is utopia at this point I guess. Some socials could actually be useful to make new friends/relationships but it seems to me that the very people that constantly complain about the "anti-social" aspect that our lives have taken are the ones that go on and try 1000 different dating apps, give up on friends after a couple of months to try and find new "better" ones.
Granted, as a professional loser I'd like to find someone that likes cycling too, though cycling alone is great too - still, I'd rather find that person in one of those rides than in some weird thing like Strava fly-by's or something.
On Zwift your followers can be automatically notified when you start a ride, and you have zero control over them receiving that notification.
It's creepy how much they push the social aspect.
I've found that it's really what you make of it. My city has a bunch of cycling subcultures - social slow rolls, fast road riding, sightseeing and exploration, commuting and errand-running - and different people like to see and talk about different types of rides and sometimes dabble in different subcultures, but generally people care way more about seeing the rides, and whatever fun banter or background context you add when you post it, than analyzing your speed and elevation.
I really love the social aspect of Strava because I'm friends with all the other people I follow on it. In some way I think it is more intimate than traditional social media. You could get a better picture of my life and how I spend my time from seeing my physical displacements during the day than by seeing the super filtered Instagram stuff that I only choose to share when I'm having a good time and doing something interesting.
Also the watch reminds you to move from time to time.
Komoot is great for planning of "trips" and "stealing" other people's routes. I've done couple of them and you kind of never know what you're gonna see there (hopefully not agressive dogs), all of them were pretty enjoyable. It has a bit of a social aspect, but barely anyone uses it where I live, so IDK how it is.
One thing I miss from Strava are segments (or whatever they're called) - short parts of your route with it's own leader-board. Has "speedrun, but IRL" vibes, which is pretty cool IMO.
It also has a great route builder.
Strava looks great for some sport activities, but I’d like to meet other nerds into 80s computing, hobby electronics, comics, sci-fi, home automation, kayaking, city exploration, etc
You invariably end up with lical Facebook groups, which are just a flow of posts, and require a FB account, or some non local reddit group, or small scale website you have no idea exists.
Something is missing. It sure would require mass appeal to be useful, but a ‘Tinder for your hobbies’ might be nice. Get matches from people near you who enjoy a cross-section of the same stuff.
Add some social aspects for those who like to show off or share (don’t force it though), make discovery easy, let people organise events…
It sounds to me like what is missing is community.
Around here, if you go outside you're soon going to learn who the like-minded nerds are. Even if you don't chance-encounter them directly, the people you do encounter are apt to know them and let you know about them. From there, you can reach out. Connection made.
In fact, I was just having a conversation with an old friend who recently moved to my area and he noted how everyone is out there talking to each other and finding out about each other, which felt foreign to him. He says where he moved from he was effectively anonymous. I suspect your living arrangement is more like his previously was.
Perhaps the solution isn't tech-based, but simply for us to be more neighbourly the old fashioned way?
Typical social network dopamine hits probably aren’t great for your health, but when it’s paired with 100 miles of exercise, I think it has a net positive. I’ll definitely admit to pushing myself further than I typically would for those Strava kudos.
That said, I don’t think something like Strava is particularly useful without the in person aspect to go along with it. Heck I don’t even know how you’d gain followers without doing group rides.