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Friday Fun Thread for March 10, 2023

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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Is there a tinder equivalent for finding friends? I've heard that people are using bumble for this purpose but I don't think it's explicitly meant for it.

Bumble has a mode called "BFF" which is explicitly intended to be used for meeting new friends. FYI you can't use the default "date" mode and the "BFF" mode concurrently, you have to pick one or the other.

That's unusual. I suppose you can 'back out' and enter the other stream at any time? Will take a look.

If you are a guy "just do things". Men make friends shoulder to shoulders, not face-to-face. I've made friends through projects and competitions before post college. Maybe sign up for a competition in something and recruit team members through a forum or something. And then work yourself to the bone together late into the nights over a while, it's hard to not become friends after that.

Will have to think about this. I've lost the competitive spark I had when I was younger so something like this hadn't even occurred to me. Thanks for the suggestion!

I will second MeetUp. Met some really cool people through various hobby meetups.

Bumble has an alternate mode for finding friends, but it is infamously rife with people who are either gay and cruising for sex with some veneer of plausible deniability (on the male side) or incredibly flaky (on the female side). It only matches you with potential friends of the same sex because, in practice, opposite sex pairing only happened between people who were into each other's physical looks anyway, and the man would typically end the "friendship" date by trying to convert it into a date-date where he could get laid sometime soon. As a result, male-female friendship was officially declared unrealistic and removed from the app.

The real Tinder equivalent for finding friends is probably Meetup; look for some hobby or activity group that meets in your area, go there every single team the meetup occurs, and make small talk while participating. Regular attendance will eventually net you friends in the same way regular gym attendance will make you jacked: i.e., not the first time, nor as fast as you might hope, but after 2-3 years everyone will see the difference.

You make bumble sound worse than I had initially thought to be honest. Is that universal or just in particular areas?

The meetup suggestion sounds like solid advice. I guess it makes some amount of sense that friendships aren't usually created one on one but rather in a group context. I'll take a look at it and see what's around my local area.

You make bumble sound worse than I had initially thought to be honest. Is that universal or just in particular areas?

You should have known that this is the obvious failure mode. Effective Altruism events can't even get people to stop using the Swapcard app to get dates. Bumble had no chance.

You're right in that I shouldn't be surprised. I guess I am just a little disappointed. Thankfully some of the other advice is already working well for me, so I won't necessarily miss that this doesn't work!