[jstrafy]

I would agree with your categories there. Circles is clearly in the second category & although it's early days our aim with the product is to build a great utility for your social life, rather than yet another media saturated app.

For the desires you've stated above, is there any product that comes close?

[newswasboring]

Nothing comes close. I feel like there is a lot of emphasis on content discovery but none on people discovery. The biggest problem I have right now is its hard to find like minded people. Maybe subreddits come close but they are not as social as I want them to be. Like I don't really know these people. Our bond seldom goes beyond our shared interest in the subreddit topic. But in real life people meet over a shared topic but it expands into a more fulfilling relationship.

After writing all this out I feel like what I want is ok cupid but for finding friends. The problem with that seems to be every time someone tries to do that they have one leg in the dating world (and I understand why, its lucrative). For once can someone actually put people discovery at the center of their product?

[jstrafy]

That's really interesting - do you use anything like Meetup.com or are you on any discord/slack servers?

There is a cool app that I've been using called Lunchclub (https://lunchclub.com/), it links you with another person one time a week. Might be worth trying if you haven't already. Otherwise I'd really been keen to chat on how we could solve that problem!

Completely true about the people discovery apps (probably why most of them end up as dating or a hybrid dating/networking), so in my experience it seems that the only thing that overcomes this is strong interest based products focused on groups.

[newswasboring]

I do use meetup and weeples but they are ... not online native. I would love to chat more about this if you can provide a channel.