[kelseyfrog]

If having friends and community is truly valuable to people then there is a huge business opportunity to provide that value. What I'm hearing instead is that folks are complaining that something doesn't exist and then not being willing to pay for it. If you're not willing to pay for something then it's not really that valuable at the end of the day.

[SQueeeeeL]

Community doesn't commodify well because it doesn't scale. You can't hire 100 more workers to produce 1000 more communities every day, so there really is no ability to sell it. It's basically the only thing you legitimately can't pay for, you have to "earn" community by being actively involved with many people over the span of multiple years, nothing else will produce the right neurochemical response of safety in people's minds.

[barbazoo]

Funny to think that this could be solved by the free market.

[kelseyfrog]

I'm sorry you don't believe the free market has the power to solve this problem, but some one somewhere will eventually innovate and we'll all change out minds from impossible to inevitable. The first one to do it will be seen as a rule breaker but then as a luminary and finally a thought leader. We all know how the story goes.

[manuelmoreale]

I’m so baffled by both your comments on this subject. And I have a hard time figuring out if you’re serious or if you’re joking.

It’s so weird. Some things are not business opportunities. If people are feeling lonely because society is a mess, that’s not a business opportunity. That’s a social issue that should be solved.

[kelseyfrog]

Sometimes people try out arguments to experiment with ideas. This might be one of those cases involving the limits of reflecting human relations as economic relations. One example we already have is the reification of real world social relations into social networks which are monetized. There shouldn't be a reason why this is a one-way process - economic relations which are the proximal cause of distal social relations - namely the instantiation of friendships. Maybe in another world.

[hotpockets]

it's an elegant system. capitalism creates problems, which are just opportunities for you to monetize.