Interesting to read, but this is where movies are more "real" than true life - people can't verbalize their true feelings and need to experience or work through them in some way non-verbally.

If you've seen any Kar-wai Wong movies, that's basically his whole filmography (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, etc.).

It's so odd to read a take like this. I agree with the problem but I do think there are ways to fix it, it's just going against the tide.

For music I intentionally listen to local independent radio and also somafm, where I'm not "picking" the exact music.

I read the NYTimes and the Economist and both of them do movie reviews and the Economist has good book reviews.

Hey I think this is a great idea! In fact I am working on putting together something similar! The apps in the meetup space are so bad there is a lot of potential here for new platforms.

It is interesting that both you and the comments are focused on event discovery. I am looking at it from a different angle. I am looking for a platform that can keep a calendar of events and rsvps for already-established small nonprofits and community groups - like book clubs, board meetings, local political groups, etc. In my opinion there are lot of social networks that are doing a decent job of event discovery out there (as much as you can in our very fragmented world). The problem is organizing who is going to what without using Outlook, Google Calendar, etc. - also with better options for recurring events and notifications/reminders, and something non-tech-savvy people can use.

Consider something like Mobilizon[0] - it's ActivityPub based, like Mastodon, but apart from the federation capability, might have the feature set you're looking for?

[0] https://joinmobilizon.org/en/

Cam here to talk about mobilizon. The project is quite easy to work on and it is made in Elixir. :)

I have used d3 for a few years now and with ChatGPT I find it at least 50% easier to set it up and troubleshoot issues.