Ask Lemmy

a government dating app that has no algorythm, no payment, punishes mass scrollers, and has a ton of admins who actually ban the idiots out. we have the technology, but its all enshitificated.

Just force everybody to interact. Obligatory meetings for the whole village/city district/city block (depending on size of population) every saturday morning with local news, coffee and cake and maybe games or time for chatting.

As any other problems, it's an issue with political will

• Have minimum delivery fee to force people to visit physical store over "online shopping" and promote farmer marker and city-centre (village-centre) shopping so people interact with each other

• End-up US style suburbanization, these nice house in a quiet area are great to sleep-in but means you're away from every social activity, and when you're too young/too old to drive it turns into house arrest

• Increase subsidises for non profit-club, especially for the one having under 25 and above 65 members If you go playing scrabble, theatre or practice Karate you stop being lonely

• Carpooling parking and lanes to push worker to interact with people living nearby

Live with friends.

• Sport and art
• low cost and free places to do sport and art
• linked together by public transit and clean, safe places to walk, run or cycle (or scoot or skate or whatever)
• a shorter working week, so people have time to do the above
• a higher minimum wage, so people can afford the (ideally low, if necessary) costs involved

So, e.g., lots of parks with publicly accessible five-a-side football pitches, ping-pong tables, basketball courts, skateparks whatever - that's your sport. The parks also have bandstands or outdoor theatres, where there's space for that.

Public libraries with rooms people can hire (or use for free) for book clubs, sewing circles, art classes - that's your art.

Good thing about the above is that all these ideas already exist in lots of forms, you just pick whatever works best for your current situation.

Easy, stop considering any kind of digital communication as social interaction, it might seem like it but it is not.

We call it social media, social networks, communities, groups but rarely think about the individuals within them, it's I saw on Facebook or according to Reddit. We tend to think about the entire platform as a single entity, we barely notice the names of the users.

Messaging apps. How often do we ask to someone how's going? And to how many people? We might spend the whole day in the group chat of our actual friends and still not know if they are fine or not.

Less pants

Need to bring back Internet cafes.

Go to the bar, drink, tip well. At least the bartenders will want to socialize when they can, even if only for their own self interests (tips). Also, other patrons might be in the same boat, and you can commiserate over drinks!

Get a personality. It worked for me!

Hamsters? I didn't know y'all enough to trust you with cats or dogs outright.

For me, working in human services does the trick. Over the summer I take a vacation to heal body/mind, and swap to spending more time on MMOs, a Mud, and making sure I go “out” somewhere at least once a day. Even just to the library.

Turn off internet access, or throttle it to the minimal usable speed.

Plenty of good real solutions in the comments here. My creative solution is to add a feature to everyone's phone that automatically will FaceTime them with someone also on their phone in the area. You can't turn it off, you can only add people to your default list. No guarantee they're who you connect to though.

Is the epidemic one of loneliness or one of improper socialization, a background fear of people and purposelessness? Sadly, idk how to make people change their minds and hearts besides just talking to them and hoping something sticks.

Mandatory copulation every 14 hours.

Try and find where my invisible friend went then hang out with them again.

I don't think there is a solution. I think this is the path and these are the results.

Abolish digital slavery and publicly code and fund the public commons with no scraping or exploitation whatsoever. Restore the rights of autonomy and self determinism required for a citizen in a democracy and people will return to the culture that existed before google won its privateer piracy charter to digitally enslave everyone in exchange for free email and search results because the US was too backwards to fund the fundamental public commons required for real democracy and was itching for slavery again at the first opportunity of going unnoticed.

Chatbots

Capitalism is a root cause. Let's get rid of that, or if that's too extreme that severely regulate it.

Jail all of Facebook's decision makers. Seize it (investors get nothing), and either shut it down or revert it to a simple message board. Require moderators. Ban the trash (eg: sovereign citizens groups). Remember that time they tried to see if they could make people sad by changing the algorithm? Find those people and ruin them.

Pay labor more. Work them less. I'd just do basic income, personally.

Make more walkable spaces. Fuck car culture. You don't meet anyone when you drive. Everywhere could have local spots where you see regulars.

More free public events. Brooklyn does "movies under the stars". There's also like yoga classes, bird watching, concerts. More of that.

Offer free education for anyone who applies in good faith. Offer classes on a range of subjects, but honestly I think a lot of people would benefit from lessons and practice on "how to talk to people" and public speaking.

Kind of a ramble. But I think if you leave capitalism in place, you're going to have problems. "Everything has to make the owners as much money as possible, immediately" isn't a formula for a good life.