I don't think this will ever be resolved.

It's a twofold problem, I believe. People are lonely because of fear of rejection and also actively avoid new people out of caution and high standards.

So two people who are otherwise lonely will make no effort to connect.

I think social networks have done a tremendous amount of damage to our collective psyche. Because on the web, you can single-click permanently block someone and never see them again. If you are admin of a group this person is in, you can also ban this person and prevent them from interacting with members of the group (in the group, that is, you cannot control private messages, but by banning someone from a community you are effectively isolating them), and I think we haven't considered how much power we are giving to random Reddit mods due to this.

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LorenPechtel 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I do believe high standards are behind a lot of the dating issues. Dating pools are so large that people hold out for the right combination of the things they find desirable--except they're never going to find that because they don't have exactly the right combination to attract that "perfect" match.

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CrimsonCape 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I can't help but think that in 1910, both the concept of "fear of rejection" and "high standards" would have made no sense to people at the time. Yet I would agree that they are valid concepts today. We have to explore why these two concepts exist and why they did not exist in 1910. It seems valid to call them side effects of something bigger, what the bigger is I don't know. I don't see how society can address these two issues without addressing the other issues that lead to the existence of these.

	▲	OkayPhysicist an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not sure why you believe that "high standards" and "fear of rejection" didn't exist a hundred years ago. Think Gatsby, from the Great Gatsby (published 1925): dude longed for human connection (hence throwing massive parties), but was terrified of being outed as not belonging to the social strata he found himself in. That's fear of rejection. People being to good for others is basis of the class system, and that predates written history.

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StevePerkins 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is that REALLY a lot of power, though? Reddit is quasi-anonymous, how "isolated" are you when you can create a different account in seconds?

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kevin061 2 hours ago | parent [-]

When I said "Reddit mods" I didn't mean literally Reddit, but the overzealous nature of full-time Internet moderators with too much free time.

Regardless ban evasion is always forbidden so if you slip up or get caught because of the way you type or whatever, you will be banned again.

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blibble 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Regardless ban evasion is always forbidden so if you slip up pr get caught because of the way you type or whatever, you will be banned again.

so you create another account?

they don't even do IP bans, (er, so I hear)

	▲	SchemaLoad 30 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Reddit doesn't do hard IP bans, but they do a lot of fingerprinting to link alt accounts together and will ban them all. You can get around it but you have to be pretty careful, wiping cookies on all your devices, signing up from a new IP, never logging in to the old accounts again, etc.
	▲	yesitcan an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And if they do, there’s VPN