For me it was always obvious that if you want to find someone you should reach them directly. Completely regardless of image editing, privacy, mass scams and many other things I never saw an internet friend as same as a real one.

Let’s say we assume that the definition of a friend is someone who’s going to help us anytime we need. Let’s say that we are not really worried about timezone difference. How someone like that is going to help you in the hardest moments? We assume that everything we have we would have indefinitely and that’s the core problem.

If our friend is close it’s rather obvious that we would help each other even if one of us does not have same problem. The difference is that we do not expect that someone from the 2nd end of the world to come and save us from a dangerous situation. When we stop assume everything and start asking questions we start to see the reality.

I guess we can say the same about dating apps. We have some “contacts” that we would never meet and all we can is to share information. A generic purpose tool that for example let’s you learn local language and culture from your home is indeed helpful, but if we would use our tools the wrong way we should really not expect any positive results.