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Third spaces are, I think, an important part of society. It provides an avenue for hearing other opinions and getting outside the echo chamber.
Is the bar or a church the best place to hear or share a dissenting opinion?
No, but no two people agree on entirely everything so a bit of discussion helps people see that it’s ok not to sycophantically repeat what their influencer hero says.
I fully agree with you. There's a reason why people that are terminally online often have pretty extreme ideas.
It really feels like it's getting more and more difficult to have a good discussion where you can disagree on something but still talk to each other about it. People are in their echo chambers and the dissonance of that to the opinion of someone else is so large that they can't do anything but call it fake or wrong.
This graph ending in 2020 is such a poor data set, you’re literally ending in an outlier
Yeah but narrative control
If you end the graph at 2018 the trend is still extreme.
Can you explain what you mean? What makes you say 2020 is an outlier, or that it would be cleaner to omit data?
The time resolution / degree of smoothing in the chart is not really clear, but given the trend back to 2000, the 2020 data doesn't seem implausible.
Not OP, but I'd guess because most people were working from home, unable to go to bars and taking classes online out of a well founded fear of the spicy cough
Ah, yeah thats a fair point.
I interpreted them as saying that the data point from 2020 was literally an outlier from the rest of the dataset.
So 2020 is literally an outlier because as another commenter pointed out it was illegal for people to meet in person in much of the world during 2020 and onwards through the pandemic. But that only lasted a few years, ending it there is almost dishonest (not attacking OP just whoever made the graph). It wouldn’t rebound all the way back up but this is showing something entirely unrelated to the core premise
I mean, there was sort of a massive world-halting pandemic in 2020, which forced many people into seclusion. In many areas, it wasn’t even legal to go to a social bar. So yeah, I’d call it a bit of an outlier.
Yeah fair. I took you literally to mean the reported data from that year was a statistical outlier.
for some reason seeing the plummet of "through friends" makes me really sad
Nearly everyone I dated or hooked up with, including my wife, were through friends. It was a great way to hang out and get to know each other before just doing one on one stuff.
I knew it was going to go down, but holy hell that is a massive drop and I don't know if that means through friends wasn't as good as I remember compared to online or if people just aren't bothering with introducing people anymore.
I'll bet that it's due to the trend we've seen in the last couple of decades: fewer close friends, if any at all.
Or just more online friends, which (depending on how the researchers broke up the data) would shift things away from “through friends” and towards “online” instead.
I don't think there's a "right" way, people adapt to how our society functions. Proud to be part of the few at the beginning of the red line, met on Q-Link and we're still together, so it can work. I would say "online" should be broken into separate lines, as there's different ways to meet online, and some of them let you interact and "know" a person better than others, like dating apps (which also existed before the internet!)
Q-Link
Now, that's a blast from the past!
I agree that "online" is too much of a generalization. There definitely needs to be a differentiation between people meeting each other in an online meeting space not specifically set up for dating vs. a dating app or website which is specially looking to match people up.
If you meet on a forum or other type of social environment that is not specifically for dating, is it really much different than meeting at a bar or a bowling alley?
Who has friends? lol
isn't it on netflix?
I met my partner at the dog park. I had just moved back to the city and she had just started taking her puppy to the park. My dog is 8 years older than her dog.
We didn't know until months later but she started going at the same time so she would see me and I was going at the same time so I would see her. We've been together for nearly 9 years.
Some third spaces are very specialized for certain activities but that is a bonus because something like a dog park means you already have common interest.
In 2010 did people meet through their online friends?
Kind of. Dating apps didnt exist yet (or didnt have large userbases). Met my spouse online in ~2008, through online friends (gaming).
i met my wife in 2007, so its a little before 2010 (i fall into the work category above; temp hairnet/nametag shit job, but still was work). online dating was still bourgeoning, and there was still a large sentiment of it being weird/creepy to meet strangers from dating apps. i was a big nerd and knew some people who started dating online gaming friends, but that was looked at being worse than dating apps. im glad that stigma is gone...
we have been dating/married for so long now, though, that if we get divorced or one of dies, its going to be really hard to get into the online dating scene because it was so creepy before and now normalized. i figure if this happens to me then i'll still look in the (what my brain still considers) "regular" places (the ones nobody uses anymore in favor of online dating) first before going online.
Online dating is easy, just offer your genital photos and if the other person wants to use them, they come over and then leave.
How does the graph look after 2020? Because around that time Tinder died.
People stopped meeting and instead are glued to TikTok now.
I was about to disagree as the last couple of women I've gone home with I've met at the bar.
Then I remembered that "oh yeah, those were one night stands, not coupling. Last couple of relationships definitely started on the apps."
BUT, I will say that at least three couples (one has recently graduated to marriage!) on my various soccer teams met on the team or through team friends. So there's still sort of hope!
Eh well I met my hubby sixteen years ago from a crummy online app, so...
Guess it works sometimes. Let's see the graph showing how many actually stay together though.
Right when I'm finally comfortable talking to women I just met and am interested in. Great.
Oh fuck
Of all the women IV dated I only met two outside of work.
Meet = tinder date. Which means you have to look good or not get the chance to meet a woman at all.