Is the Online/IRL Divide Collapsing?
I recently listened to Rhai Ghoburdhun’s insightful interview of Sacha Lazimi. For those who don’t know Sacha, he is a co-founder of Yubo and a great guy. At some point in the interview, Sacha reflects on his fundraising journey and says this:
“Investors never understood what we were building. For older generations, you don’t make friends online. You make friends offline. … [Investors would say:] ‘your vision of making friends online is not true’”
There are a lot of things to say about this quote but I’ll focus here on the more substantive point: the long-prevailing perception that online socialization (i.e., building and nurturing human relationships) is fundamentally different and inferior to IRL socialization.
It’s something that I probably believed for a long time. But I’m now of the view that we are at a key juncture in our collective understanding of the role of the online world in meeting new people and keeping relationships alive and well. Could it be that online socialization is not only on an equal footing with IRL socialization but that the distinction doesn’t even make sense anymore?
The Walls of Constantinople: IRL vs. Online 🧱
For most of the last three decades, the prevailing view was that online and IRL experiences were axiomatically distinct and that the latter were inherently superior to the former.
From the early days of the internet many of us joined forums, messaging apps, or the first dating sites. Overcoming the frictions of the physical world was a key appeal of the internet and facilitating socialization was one of the first use cases.
But in many ways the practice was still frowned upon or at least considered to be no more than a proxy for something that should happen IRL. Remember the look of despair when you told your mother that you had made a friend on WoW?
In so doing, we erected mental fortifications between online and offline — just like the Byzantines did to protect the city of Constantinople. Inside the fortress of IRL was what we knew and what felt safe; outside thick walls was a new mode of socialization that felt inferior and dangerous.
Specifically:
- We thought that only IRL interactions could be “real” and “genuine”; that face-to-face interactions were a necessary condition of revealing one’s true self and seeing others for who they really were. We felt that it wasn’t possible with an online interaction.
- We emphasized the dangers of online experiences. If you were brought up in the 90s, you’ll remember the constant words of caution about the threats lurking in the darkness of the internet, from fraudsters to pedophiles with everything in-between. The online world was something to be protected from and definitely not the place for meeting new people and nurturing these relationships.
Walls, however, rarely stand the test of time.
Gen-Z 🧨: a Breach in the Walls
For those born with a pervasive mobile internet, omnipresent social applications and ever-better communication tech (e.g., airpods), it’s arguable that the divide between IRL and online already makes little sense.
My colleague Heloise says that younger generations are “bionic”, meaning that their virtual and physical experiences are now so intertwined that they have become impossible to break apart.
I think that she’s right and spending some time with a 10–15YO will likely convince you that, for that generation, IRL and online are simply different but equally valuable layers of the same reality.
For example, check out Swtorista’s story: passionate about Star Wars: The Old Republic, she describes how she built an online community through guilds, which led to in-person events but also meeting her husband.
In many ways, it makes sense because Gen Z has built the foundational pieces of socialization (building one’s own identity and first social graph) online on the back of increasingly powerful tools of communication — permanent, instantaneous, and across multiple formats like video, audio and text.
It may also be that online relationships are in some ways easier to build, in part because the online environment is often more controlled (e.g., when the medium is asynchronous or anonymous) and therefore allows us to portray who we want to be rather than who we might appear to be IRL. Importantly, the persona that we portray online may define the parameters of the relationship.
In that context, relationships built on Yubo, Fornite, Discord or any other platform are no less real and worthy of nurturing than relationships built at school or otherwise in person. It doesn’t mean that IRL interactions don’t happen when they make sense; they do (sometimes thanks to great products like Zenly or Snap Map), but not everything is necessarily driven towards an IRL meeting.
Sacha and his Yubo co-founders understood that phenomenon well before many others, specifically addressing the problem of discovering new friends online and building their product accordingly. Importantly, they are taking into account the specific risks associated with meeting new people for a younger demographic and are very good at solving for them.
Other products also aim to become meaningful sources of online socialization. Just to name a few:
- Games like Fortnite, Roblox or Animal Crossing are trying to build their own versions of a Metaverse where, among other things, users can make new friends and have a wide variety of social interactions (including building political consciousness).
- Communications apps are evolving to not only provide tools of messaging/video-conference (Whatsapp/Houseparty), but also of shared experiences (Houseparty’s new co-watching feature but also apps like Squad, Bunch and Discord).
Quarantine = Mehmet II’s Canons? 💥
With the Covid-19 pandemic underway, many of us have been (or were 😷) stuck at home for weeks. I ask myself if, for those outside Gen-Z, this event is to the online/IRL divide what Mehmet II’s new canons were to Constantinople’s walls — a final push towards irrelevance.
While we are clearly living through a unique moment, it has made us experience first-hand that:
- Communication apps are probably good enough to nurture existing relationships without the need for a face-to-face interaction. That’s not to say that these apps shouldn’t improve or that we won’t be happy to have a nice meal with our loved ones as soon as possible, but video-calls are now reasonably good, and combined with messaging and some audio apps, can provide a well-rounded human experience.
- Making new meaningful connections online is not only possible but in fact can be more effective and efficient than doing so in person (surprise, the internet removes a lot of friction; an important exception is probably the serendipitous connections that happen at large events). On my end, I’ve used a product like LunchClub (the Yubo of VCs, I guess 😉) far more frequently than ever before— not constrained by the requirement to meet in person, I’m able to meet at least 1 new person every week, when in the past I could only meet in-person with 1 person every month.
With that in mind, I’m excited about a number of opportunities to improve socialization online:
- Friend discovery is still vastly under-explored and deserves more attention. I’m a huge fan of Yubo but there is potentially space for a suite of other products that either cater to different demographics, use other formats as their core primitives, or verticalize the process of discovery.
- The vast majority of dating apps today are built on the premise that users want to move IRL as soon as possible. I believe that UIs and UXs can be re-thought (e.g., Feels) to allow users to know each other and determine fit a lot better than by a simple “swipe”.
- Some content formats still feel seriously under-explored to nurture relationships online, including audio (live or asynchronous).
- So many of our experiences (entertainment, shopping, education, finance, even sports) are moving online, but they are so much more powerful when social. Apps like Squad and Discord are doing a good job, but there are a lot of opportunities in facilitating socialization over many of these experiences.
Wrap-Up
Many of us have approached online socialization as something inherently distinct and inferior to our real life social experiences. While Gen-Z has unquestionably embraced online socialization differently and in fascinating forms, I now ask myself if these trends have extended so far beyond that generation that the online/IRL socialization divide is fully collapsing.
If this is really happening, it will be an exciting source of opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors alike. Hit me up if you’re working on any of these or have thoughts on this topic. I’d love to chat.
— As always, feedback welcome! 🙏
