Loneliness in the network, or what is the problem of modern social networks

In this article I would like to reflect on how to improve modern social networks, and what trends we can observe on the Internet in the field of communication between people.

Since the appearance of the first social sites, the main principle of their functioning has been the exchange of information between groups of people who have contacts in real life, such as classmates, university friends, business contacts, right through to communication between prisoners. In turn, in real life we ​​make friends during the period of study and then the circle of our acquaintances at least stops expanding, and in most cases decreases every year until we have a couple of close friends and a couple of hundreds of friends on the Internet whom we are in best case happy birthday. And existing sites with the tremendous capabilities of modern technologies do not contribute to solving the issue of lack of communication. The exception - dating sites, but they are not much help out.



Historically, the datings are intended primarily for romantic dating. You will not find here a partner for a party to tennis or a visit to the museum (although there are highly specialized sites, they are not yet very popular). All that is usually offered as a filtering method on the most popular resources is the city, age and a couple of questionable parameters, such as weight and hair color. As a result, to find someone with whom you will be at least minimally comfortable to communicate, you need to review hundreds of questionnaires from hundreds of thousands of users in your city. This is what concerns men. Girls, in turn, is also not easy. Every day, dozens of men, in no way resembling their prince, send letters of dubious content, and often, with even more dubious proposals.
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The situation is similar to the absurd: right now, at this moment a billion people are online online, half of them feel lonely.

Now for the content. What do we see in the news feed of our beloved social network, whatever it is? As a rule, these are reposts. Our friends, in their care for us, selflessly repost everything they can (but mostly cats). The era of content generation by users has passed, and the degree of attitude of an individual post to you personally is usually quite small. The conclusion is: why not create such a tool in which information in the best possible way met the interests of the user and at the same time we could communicate with people who share our hobbies to a greater degree than our usual environment?

In the end, I decided to try to make a website, the principles of which could solve the problems described above. What came of it and how it works: on its page, users create a list of hobbies, including books, movies, music, favorite places in the city, and so on. According to these parameters, the site selects the most suitable candidates for communication and forms the news feed. For example, if you are fond of aikido, modeling from clay, listening to Radiohead and reading Remark, you will find people with the most similar interests here and will receive relevant news.

The site has been working for a couple of years, and during this time several thousand users have come from the search engines in an organic way, though the active ones are much smaller. In the process, we had to constantly work on the structure, implement the wishes, make the changes that were suggested, and finally, the project began to take on the appearance of the original idea; all that is lacking is the users who are ready to test the practicality of the above ideas. Thus, if you have a desire to see what happened in the end or contribute to the development of the project with your participation - welcome: www.lookfun.ru . I will be glad to any feedback and suggestions here or in personal mail on the site. Thanks for attention!