A Rant

I need to type and this odd little corner seems like a good enough place.

I'm a work from home software engineer which means I don't talk to my coworkers anymore. Thanks to some moving around, leaving groups and a hint of pandemic I don't have a lot of people around at all. So I thought, maybe I should find some local musicians to see if we can get something going. 

First stop, I'd like to be a better fiddle player, so maybe I'll look up lessons to help get me back up to speed. Search: 'fiddle lessons near me', 'violin teachers near me', etc. Results: about a dozen bespoke 'lesson sites' selling me online lessons, allowing teachers to list themselves if they want people booking through these sites, plenty of other SEO abusing sites that buried the real ones. Kind of a bust.

Tried some searches on Facebook. Not only did I mostly get ads, the real posts I saw were just different types of ads- 'Need a dummer for your band? Affordable and available now!' types of things. Or people trying to pad their personal brand. No connections available. I also can no longer sort search results by date, or even filter them any useful way. Seems designed to discourage searching (which it probably is, since that's more expensive and less lucrative for Facebook). 

Craigslist: empty other than some more very low quality ads.

Not a normal choice, but maybe someone on Nextdoor has said something about this. I'll ignore the people complaining at each other over pretend outrage that the platform promotes to the top and just search for a violin teacher again. First result:

'I don't want to harp on this...'. Harp is highlighted. Nextdoor has decided that by 'violin' I must have meant 'any instrument', and 'harp' is close enough so it's just going to show me everything using the word 'harp'. Also no date filter, no chronological options, can't even look only at my local posts despite that being the whole point of the site. Again, it's clear that they would prefer I just look at the recommended posts and not worry about finding the thing I wanted.

Maybe there's a musician specific platform that can help? I'll cut to the conclusion: no. None of them help.

So I wasted some time and connected with no one. Just like every time I try to use what should be an amazing tool and technology to help people connect.

This project we're on now and groups like this are at least an indicator that I'm not alone. I don't know what the solution is. But I sure hope that it becomes apparent. Maybe someday I can use my code to make the internet a little closer to what it could have been instead of writing endless A/B tests for upsells.