[cybervegan]

As an autistic person (and I'm not suggesting OP is also an aspie), I can say that all the advice that amounts to "just put yourself out there" is worse than useless; you only see things the way you do because those interactions come naturally to you, and you instinctively know how to process and act on them. People who are socially awkward are often unable to do this. It's like saying to someone who is not good a maths, "Having trouble with arithmetic? Just calculate harder!"

[whatshisface]

"Just calculate harder" is reasonable advice for a lot of people. If you think of your skill level as a multiplier on your effort, more effort will help for anyone with a skill level above zero. If you're worse than normal at math a lot of people would tell you that you needed to spend even more time studying.

Spending more time in a learning environment is a very reasonable thing to advise a slow learner do, math or otherwise.

[doktorhladnjak]

Agreed. It is tiresome.

Starving? Just eat some food

Insomniac? Just go to sleep

Socially anxious? Just be more social

No friends? Just put yourself out there

All the same useless advice

[vanviegen]

Do you notice how your last example (the one that was actually suggested by GP) doesn't fit the pattern? That would be:

No friends? Just get more friends.

The advice as given by GP is at least somewhat actionable.

[drooby]

Being more social was a legit solution for me for social anxiety. It’s called exposure therapy and has quite a bit of research to back up its efficacy if done properly.

This seems like the classic confusion caused by conflating “simple” and “easy”. Simple advice may be useful.

[tomcooks]

It works most times, case in point: don't get angry

[burnished]

What sort of advice has helped you?

[Smaug123]

Caveat: by sheer dumb luck, I've never actually had this problem, but I am painfully aware that history would only have to be a tiiiiny bit different and I would have the problem. (It's possible I have a secret talent for binding together friend groups, but it totally doesn't feel that way.) I'm forming this advice by looking over my life and identifying why I'm in such a fortunate position.

The standard advice is: friendship is formed from proximity; repeated unplanned interactions; and a setting which encourages people to let their guard down. This seems extremely true. Sometimes luck puts you in a position where you can't avoid these interactions with people who are near you a lot, but if you're finding that it's not happening naturally, look at which of those is lacking in your current activities and see whether you can increase them.

Case study: choir or orchestra (remember that "unplanned interactions" can take place in a planned setting). There's a shared goal among people in close proximity; there are very often periods of unplanned downtime and hence casual interaction while the conductor focuses on some other subgroup of the choir to yours; smallish (~30 person) choirs naturally form into nicely conversation-sized groups among the parts anyway; the nature of the activity is already skewed towards publicly making a fool of yourself (everyone around you can hear your wrong notes!) so everyone's sensitivity to social convention is slightly suppressed.

Debugging example: perhaps you attend a club so are regularly in proximity to people and there's the chance for unplanned interactions, but you're finding that conversations just don't naturally happen (this is me all the time!). That suggests there's some combination of you and the setting which is not encouraging people to let their guard down. The easy-mode hack is to decamp to the pub afterwards (even if you hate pubs, I can't stand them but they do the job extremely well) and let the group's collective guard go down with alcohol. It'll be easiest if they already have some friendships among the group, so that some people are already being open with each other. Remember that you might be part of the problem here, so consider erring on the side of being uncomfortably open yourself.

And in college, remember that however painful it is, there are so many people around; if you mess up somewhere, you can literally just never see those people ever again if necessary.