Not sure how I feel about this. You are either helping or taking advantage of people who are already down.
Why should be excited about or support a mental health startup, who stands to make money when people have poor mental health?
Does anonymized voice interaction help more than it hurts? Do you have any idea what you're doing or are you just doing it? What personally motivates you and your team?
I am doing my best to help people who feel lonely in today's day and age because I have personally been through it during my time in grad school.
I was going through a long-distance relationship at that time, and the workload was tough during my PhD. I did have friends that I hung out and even went to cafes to study together, but once they got girlfriends and boyfriends, they left me... I was not their priority anymore.
It felt incredibly lonely and I could not get the kind of support from my girlfriend since she was on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I needed someone that I could talk to and do things with, outside of the romantic boundary. I tried looking, but what I found online were all these dating apps that capitalized on precisely the romantically lonely men and women.
I really did not like how the tools that claim to help people find partners and meaningful connections boil people down to simple profiles consisting of several pictures and bullet points of what they are looking for. I think it honestly creates increasing number of people reporting feeling lonely because all these tools overemphasize on vanity and shallow qualities of a person instead of who they are.
I think the web can be a better place for people to find others who they resonate with, and the current offerings just do not cut it. Having personally experienced loneliness and finding no solutions for my problem back then, I vowed to create an app myself that I think can help people find meaningful connections. So, here I am. I quit my job at Apple last year to dive into this full time as I thought about the meaning in life and what I wanted to leave in this world, and I thought solving the problem of loneliness is the most personal and meaningful problem that I want to take on.
I appreciate the non-vanity aspect of it, and the aspiration to not turn people into bullet points. There's an intellectual honesty in that which, I think, shows that you're different from most people, in that you may be one of the few who just enjoys conversation with everyone without wanting something from them. There is not a great niche on the web for that, anymore. That trait, by the way, probably makes you easy to talk to and less likely to be lonely (in the long run).
Yeah, many people approach loneliness with different motives, and the one we are trying to promote on this platform is genuine connection. Sure, it could develop into a friendship or a romantic relationship, but we think it should start from authenticity. Too many apps focus on superficial qualities, and the world does not need another one!
We did our job of putting this out there. We hope people from different pockets in the world who feel the same come and join us. If it does not turn out well, I think the journey was well worth it.
Not to marginalize your idea, but an app is also just a surface level solution. A quick fix, not useless, but not longterm.
Isn't the traditional solution not just to pick up some hobby's, go out, some cultural events?
It's not easy at times, but especially at events with shared interests it's normally easiest to connect to like minded people, and those connection have a chance of lasting.
Not everyone can do these things. Some people can't afford to start a hobby or go out. Some don't have the time or space. Or mental energy required to go out and be perceived by others. Others may have disabilities that the public doesn't bother accommodating for.
Apps like these offer ways to cope for the time being. There are millions of people treading water and the old coping mechanisms aren't working anymore.
Very well said! That has been a lot of what I heard from talking to the users on the platform. Many people struggle going to venues to meet people because of their anxiety, geographical location, disabilities, and time, to list a few.
Many people suffer in the dark. I hope Bubblic can be some sturdy straws for them to grab on to re-shore themselves.
There are meetups on all kinds of topics all over the world that are free to attend.
If you crave social connections, but dont know how to make them, you havent learned a coreskill for being a human and there are much deeper issues, such as depression, at play. Would be time to look at therapy or other more structural solutions.
An app won't solve your social & community issues.
The map feature can help bridge the gap between online connection and real-life connection, in my opinion. If you see that person you are talking to is near you and you hit it off very well, you can decide to meet in real life and form the real-life relationship, whether friendship or romantic relationship. That is the ultimate goal!
I want Bubblic to be the stepping stone for meaningful connections, a means to a real-life connection :)
> Why should be excited about or support a mental health startup, who stands to make money when people have poor mental health
I used to think this way about therapy. After all, they stop getting paid from you when you stop seeing them. But then I realized I love programming. It's my favorite thing to do, and I love getting paid for it too.
There are people that love what they do, and they should get paid for it just like anyone else. That being said, getting paid as a therapist is different than targeting infinite growth and profit. So hopefully this app is made by someone who likes the idea and wants to be paid, not someone just looking for a profit.
Someone has to pay for the servers and put food on the table... right? :P
I won't let profit take precedence over the mission that we started out with: to help people suffering from loneliness. It is personal to me since I have been through it, and I will keep iterating to make this platform the most useful to the people it serves.
I'm kinda with you that the mental health(ish) framing is a bit disconcerting. But it's hard to guess what the audience really is, if there is one. ChatRoulette was a neat idea that disintegrated into a bunch of guys showing their johnsons, so maybe that without video would get rid of the riff-raff and let people go in and have actual conversations. Or not. The truth is, though, there has not been a lot of experimentation in one-on-one, non-group, non-hierarchical stuff in awhile. Apart from its clothing, I don't see why this is any different from a dating site or something.
Personally I don't like talking to disembodied voices (why I don't play multiplayer games with random people) - and I live 5 minutes from a dozen bars if I feel like meeting strangers. But I can't see how it really hurts, if it doesn't become polluted with griefers and perverts.
Why should be excited about or support a mental health startup, who stands to make money when people have poor mental health?
Does anonymized voice interaction help more than it hurts? Do you have any idea what you're doing or are you just doing it? What personally motivates you and your team?