jaybhum

I've been wanting for a while to share my experience of loneliness and how I overcame it 7 years ago during my PhD in the hopes that people who find themselves stuck in a similar situation find solace and encouragement.

In summary, the following 3 factors helped me overcome loneliness:

1. Support from my family. 2. Commitment from my romantic partner. 3. Becoming unstuck from my career obstacles.

Having friends around was fun in the moment and arguably gave me some of the most amazing memories in my lifetime. However, in the moments of despair, friends without commitment weren’t able to provide me with the refuge and support that I needed to trudge through the trenches and make it to the finish line.

They say “no man is an island.” We form mini continents with people we are committed to. Non-committal relationships, on the other hand, are like cruise ships—docking at the island briefly, then sailing away whenever they please. But, man, aren’t those ships fun to have around—they can turn a mere island into a paradise.

I think that is fair if the expectation is such that you contribute interesting ideas, like in a forum. However, when it is one on one communication, many times people are looking for emotional connection rather than simple exchange of ideas. I think that is when ghosting really stings.

Our reliance on online interactions is responsible for the increase in the tendency to ghost.

That is a big problem because that means more proportion of people's attempts to connect with others as a whole end up in straight up neglect which can be detrimental to not only one's ego, but also one's social development.

I think this contributes significantly to the loneliness epidemic, and ultimately people need more in-person interactions to overcome this.

Wouldn’t mind that’s for sure

Definitely should be a balance between individualism and collectivism. Covid drove us all the way to one extreme, and now some people seem to crave the opposite. But it is also interesting to see that there seems to be a wide spectrum in office cultures post Covid. Some jobs still feel like they are in the thick of it, while others are back to 5 days (or even more if you work for one of Elon's companies)

"If I told you, 'I went into my backyard, I made this pill. It's amazing. It's free. If you take it, it'll actually improve your health, make you feel better, improve your performance at work, improve your grades, boost your immunity,' you'd be like, 'Sign me up. I'll take that tomorrow.'" It turns out that's what social connection is. Just a little connection can go a long way in keeping us healthy.

please refer to above comment. They are real voices (sometimes with filter) with real people behind them :)

Thank you very much!

Thank you for your suggestion! Is it this? : https://www.metafilter.com/ I have never been there before.

These are real voices from real places. It does have 2 AI voice filter options available for people who want to stay anonymous, but the audio sources are real people. You can tell by the diverse voices you can listen to.

What was also incredible was that there were not only people experiencing loneliness here, but also people who did not feel lonely but were on the app to support others going through loneliness. They would share stories and studies related to loneliness in their posts, and also try to talk to some lonely folks on the app who seemed very hardened by their experience of loneliness which made them cynical and pessimistic. The concept of compassionate listening by Thich Nhat Hanh and Polyvagal theory that explains 3 levels of our nervous system are a few things they mentioned that come to my mind. Unfortunately, these efforts by supporters were often, so to speak, ineffective in solving people’s loneliness.

What I learned:

And that was part of what made it so hard to have a sustainable ecosystem on my app: many people who have been lonely for a long period of time had their personalities and social skills hardened to the point that they either:

* did not know how to engage with others by understanding social cues and sharing stories about themselves that allow themselves to be vulnerable to others, which allows for deeper social connections

* felt they are never good enough, they are stuck in their situation, and there is nothing that can help them get better. Any help or suggestions offered by others would only work on others and did not apply to them.

My hope for the app was to help people who experience loneliness find and support each other. By providing the platform for them to voice out their stories, have them be heard by others, and find others who resonate and reply, I thought they would finally find friends whom they can relate to, share their lives with, and would no longer have to feel lonely again.

However, the reality was that many were hardened by loneliness and it was hard for such connections to materialize. Plus, one of the main ways for an app like this to grow is by word of mouth. Unfortunately, most people experiencing loneliness did not have anyone to share the app with, which stunted the app’s growth and mostly depended on me manually bringing users onto the platform.

With fewer chances of having good interactions, even the people who really resonated with the app and shared stories slowly stopped coming back. Some just suddenly ghosted, which made the experience on the app painful for other engaged people on the app.

My hope for the future:

I still believe that there are more people out there experiencing loneliness who have the deep desire to share their stories and find the long-term friends across the globe who understand each other and can share slices of their lives with.

So, if you are someone that can benefit from sharing stories and solve your loneliness this way, feel free to check out my app at https://bubblic.app Also, if you know of any way I can improve the app to better help people experiencing loneliness, please leave a comment.

Lastly, word of mouth would really help. If you like the app, or if you know someone who would benefit from the app, please share it with others!

TLDR:

I created an app focused on voice communication to help lonely people connect, inspired by my own experiences. Despite an encouraging start and meaningful interactions, many users struggled to form lasting connections due to the deep impact of their loneliness. Growth has been slow, mainly reliant on my efforts. If you know someone who might benefit, please share my app: https://bubblic.app. Feedback is also welcome!

Tech stack used: Backend: AWS Websocket, DynamoDB, Cognito, S3, Lambda; AI: WhisperX model running on laptop locally; Frontend: Flutter

That is a very good point.

On the actual app, you are able to carry a conversation with a stranger, going way beyond just sharing your short audio status messages.

We will try to capture that in the demo as well, either as an video or texts. Thank you for your feedback!

That is a fair point. We did want to promote it on Hacker News because it is such a great forum to get the word out. We apologize if it came off as a bit off-putting.

But we do hope that our app delivered on the value that we promise.

Thank you very much for your feedback!

I agree with you that we should be more incisive on our messaging instead of being too promotional like a mass-market ad.

But rest assured, we were able to deliver real value to our users for the past 2 months since we have launched. The voice as a conversation medium has allowed people to connect with complete strangers at an authentic level not possible with texts, not to mention photos and videos.

To answer the basic questions:

  - what is this? : Bubblic is a social audio app where you connect with others exclusively with your voice.

  - why should I care? : The authentic human connection is getting harder to come by as the communication channels people are inundated with are low-dimension (texts) or highly focused on vanity (photos and videos) which ultimately leads to surface-level connections. We believe this is the cause for rising loneliness and mental struggles among people, especially youths, in US and around the world, and the digital and social environment is such that it is very easy to fall into the abyss of loneliness. Many don't know how to get out of it and eventually go out into the world to find friends. We want Bubblic to be the bridge that can help people get out of, or prevent getting into, the abyss of loneliness by helping them connect with others using their voice. Voice, being the most primal method of communication, has the power to help feel connected and understand others that other media do not come close to, in our opinion.

Thank you very much, again!

Thank you for your comment. The crux of the platform is that you can connect with other people going through similar things as you from half-way across the world using the power of your voice. I think we can improve on the messaging on our landing page, but from what we have seen so far on our app, people have been able to connect with complete strangers in authentic manner thanks to using your voice.

That is great to hear!

Sometimes it is hit-or-miss. I think it might have to do something with the AWS backend that sometimes fail to connect instantly. We plan to improve on this for next iterations.

Thank you very much.

Voice connections without the element of vanity (photos, videos) can allow for authentic connections between strangers that texts cannot convey. It is what we believe in and first-hand experienced on our app.

We first want to achieve the network effect so that the platform has value to users, then we do have some premium features in mind that we can serve to enrich the experience of power users.

Thank you for your thoughtful remark!

It is the web-demo of the app that we have. On our iOS and Android app, we have onboarding pages that guide you what our mission is, and how to use the app. Sorry if the web-demo interface felt abrupt!

The goal is to facilitate people forming authentic connections using their voice in today's day and age where we are flooded with vanity-focused photos and videos and easy-to-misinterpret texts.

So far, the response from the actual users have been really great. I suggest you give it a try to connect with someone online1

Great point. We are working to optimize the load time as we have built this quickly to get it out into the world

I agree that any social media has the potential be manipulated for sexual solicitation. I think we have an innate defense mechanism for that right now which is people need to leave an open voice message with their voice, share their location, and there isn't an ability to share links for people to easily click on. Plus, we do have a reporting function so that we can collect the 'yellow cards' and address the reported users appropriately.

Going forward, we are considering adding several features to mitigate it. - NSFW label to protect the experience of users who do not want it - AI to distinguish content like this.

If you have a good suggestion, I am all ears!

I hope that is a joke haha

We actually built the ios and android versions first, then decided to also build for web so that people can easily demo the app!

awesome! Yeah it is awesome to be able to develop on multi-platforms with a single codebase.

Hi, husband here :)

To share with you a bit of the journey:

- from Sept to Dec 2022: built an MVP of a slightly different app using Javascript + Phaser3 as I learned how to do full-stack development. Wondered how to launch this before we latched onto the idea of creating something simpler to reach a wider audience

- Jan to Feb 2023: built a simple website for people to check in their location and how they feel by filling out a survey. You can check out the website here: https://lonelyworld.info . We got >1000 people log their location, and captured about 100 email this way by lauching on Hacker News! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34584462 And on this MVP was where I met a friend from South Africa to work on the app together!

- Feb to June 2023: built the mobile app with Flutter.

- June to now: We have continuously added features to create more values to the users, including doing our own podcasts in the app! We are hunkering down on user acquisition and refactoring the app to make it more performant.

To share briefly our journey, we started by launching this simple website: https://lonelyworld.info as a mini MVP. Then we got a tremendous response from various forums including Hacker News and Reddit, that we decided to pursue this idea further and develop into an app. Our team is me, my wife, and a friend from South Africa that I met on the LonelyWorld website! I realize that had I never launched that mini MVP, I wouldn't have met my friend to work on my mission together! The mantra is right: one should always build in public :)

I have personally experienced a period of extreme loneliness during my grad school in 2017, and had wished that there was a better way to platonically connect with like-minded people than what was offered at the time which primarily focused on dating (Tinder, Bumble, etc.).

I quit my job last year to finally work on this idea full-time because I thought this was the most meaningful work that I could do before other life responsibilities caught up on me. I am working with my wife and a friend from South Africa whom I met by talking to him on my platform!

We currently generate no revenue, as we believe we need to first build up the network effect to generate value for the users in order to earn the right to offer additional premium features for power users. We take privacy seriously, and do not plan to sell or share user data with anyone or use them to train an AI model.

The link I shared is for the web-version of Bubblic, where you can listen to all the messages left by our users. Please download the mobile app at https://bubblic.co to leave your voice messages!

sorry to hear that. We will patch it up asap!

Unfortunately, not for now. We will have some web offerings in the near future. Please stay in the loop! You can follow us on Twitter: @BubblicCo

:)

Hey there, the app is closed-source for now. Thank you for using the app!