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Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Each day, you get paired with a random person, with weights towards your interests but still allowing some variance.

In a previous career stage, I tried several apps that do things like this, and joined networking groups that do it low-tech. The thing this proposal hasn't considered is MLM schemes and similar sales-motivated people. Which people are most motivated to talk to new people everyday? You've got your founding population, or a parasite group that will move in very quickly (see also the death of Clubhouse).

The reputation and rating system is supposed to handle this, because if you try to scam people and 90% of them figure out what you're doing then they rate you horribly and you fall into troll/spam/bot hell and the sales people end up pairing with each other. But I guess there are risks of

A: Naive people who are sympathetic to salespeople and don't rate them horribly might end up getting paired with them more often, which is precisely their target audience. and B: If people just make a new account they get paired with other people who made new accounts and it might end up making the default neutral reputation landscape equivalent to the troll/spam/bot hell, with only high reputation people being able to avoid it.

But it's not like I haven't thought of this. One of the main points of the reputation system is to prevent misbehavior in a similar way to how social networks do that in real life.