> they might think you're hitting on them (God forbid; nothing could be more evil than attraction)

You can find legions of people, particularly women, who do not want to be hit on unless they already find the other person attractive. Being hit on by an unattractive person may even quality for them as something akin to danger, already along the spectrum towards stalking or assault. Has nothing to do with being terminally online and has been reported since long before there was ever an internet.

> For many others, they're starving for social interaction

HN is an international forum, and while people are reporting increased loneliness in many countries, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want attention from strangers. Where I live, a total stranger talking to you in public is annoying; it is strongly associated with foreigners who haven’t learned yet how to behave acceptably within the local culture. What people might be starving for are serious, long-term social bonds, of the kind that used to be common through large extended families, the parish church, team sports, and school friends who stay put and don’t move away. A mere friendly stranger in public could lead to such real bonds only rarely, so rarely that it’s not even worth considering.

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cubefox an hour ago | parent [-]

> Being hit on by an unattractive person may even quality for them as something akin to danger, already along the spectrum towards stalking or assault.

Just trying to initiate a conversation with someone simply is not stalking nor assault, even if it is perceived that way. Their "perception" is mistaken in this case.

> HN is an international forum, and while people are reporting increased loneliness in many countries, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want attention from strangers. Where I live, a total stranger talking to you in public is annoying; it is strongly associated with foreigners who haven’t learned yet how to behave acceptably within the local culture.

I don't know what country you are from, but it is highly probable that even in your culture, public conversations significantly decreased in the past 30 years. Which means that the amount of interactions was higher than it is now, even within the same culture.

> A mere friendly stranger in public could lead to such real bonds only rarely, so rarely that it’s not even worth considering.

The gym example of this article points in the opposite direction, or do you think that gyms in your culture work differently?

	▲	TFNA an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Their "perception" is mistaken in this case. It’s their right to decide how they perceive being approached by a stranger. And most of society is going to empathize with them and their feeling of unsafety, not with the stranger approaching them. > even in your culture, public conversations significantly decreased in the past 30 years The culture in my country never really had many “public conversations” from one stranger to another. This is something that has been noted by foreign travelers for generations now, at least back to the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries. What has changed are that the substantial family and institutional bonds I mentioned earlier have declined. > do you think that gyms in your culture work differently? They definitely do. This has already been mentioned by various people from different countries in this thread.