Need a norm for blind (outsiders don’t know whether it’s a deliberate rejection or something circumstantial) polite rejections.
I thought about a mobile application for all participants. You could “block” a person; the other person would get that information, but no one else. You could send an “invitation to talk” to a person who is not blocking you, and the person would respond by “yes, now”, “try later”, or “block”. An invitation followed by “yes, now” would allow you to start a conversation.
This could work in a setting when there are many people walking in a room, making one-to-one conversations. Which would probably be too limiting, but not completely impossible. With a larger group of people, I can imagine upleasant situations difficult to solve algorithmically.
Imagine this: You have three friends F1, F2, F3 and one enemy E. (Suppose the enemy wants to talk with you; only you don’t want to talk with them.) Now all F1, F2, F3, E are sitting at one table, discussing some interesting topic, you walk around, and your friend F1 uses whatever protocol to invite you to the discussion. You would like to join, but only if E is not there. But the social norm is that you shouldn’t make this information publicly known (to F1, F2, F3). (EDIT: Also, E actively abuses this norm by staying with your friends F1, F2, F3 the whole evening, hoping that your preference for interacting with them will be greater than your preference for not interacting with him.) What should happen now?
I thought about a mobile application for all participants. You could “block” a person; the other person would get that information, but no one else. You could send an “invitation to talk” to a person who is not blocking you, and the person would respond by “yes, now”, “try later”, or “block”. An invitation followed by “yes, now” would allow you to start a conversation.
This could work in a setting when there are many people walking in a room, making one-to-one conversations. Which would probably be too limiting, but not completely impossible. With a larger group of people, I can imagine upleasant situations difficult to solve algorithmically.
Imagine this: You have three friends F1, F2, F3 and one enemy E. (Suppose the enemy wants to talk with you; only you don’t want to talk with them.) Now all F1, F2, F3, E are sitting at one table, discussing some interesting topic, you walk around, and your friend F1 uses whatever protocol to invite you to the discussion. You would like to join, but only if E is not there. But the social norm is that you shouldn’t make this information publicly known (to F1, F2, F3). (EDIT: Also, E actively abuses this norm by staying with your friends F1, F2, F3 the whole evening, hoping that your preference for interacting with them will be greater than your preference for not interacting with him.) What should happen now?