The problem with any idea in this direction is that someone ends up having to deal with all of the toxic people, and in this market, there are a lot of them.

In my experience the toxicity you're talking about doesn't usually carry through to in person gatherings. Most people have at least some manners even if they are awkward and being in a group face to face adds social pressure to mind them. It's fairly rare that you see someone who is a complete boor since they are usually excluded from gatherings due to their behaviour. To make something like this work you'd need to leverage all of that cultural machinery that's already in place, networks of trust and reputation, consensus, expectations of politeness, etc. We still have all that social technology that's been built up over millennia, I think we're mostly just lacking the hubs around which we used to organize. Build the hub and people will provide the etiquette.

> In my experience the toxicity you're talking about doesn't usually carry through to in person gatherings. Most people have at least some manners even if they are awkward and being in a group face to face adds social pressure to mind them. It's fairly rare that you see someone who is a complete boor since they are usually excluded from gatherings due to their behaviour.

I think in-person power dynamics are often not immediately obvious, and "inclusive" groups sometimes make it worse.

For example, cases where the inclusion of someone who's socially awkward lead to the self-exclusion of some other people.

Someone's social awkwardness could lead them to constantly stare at people they find attractive; the leaders or organisers of the group might be too nice to exclude said person, since they didn't do anything criminal like harass people, just awkwardly stare at them; and other people might choose to self-exclude themselves because of this.

If the goal of attending gatherings of new people is to expand your social circle then you'll inevitably run into a lot of people that you don't like. A product that enables people to host and attend these events would have to account for such faux pas and gaucherie, maybe having a way to pass anonymous feedback to others at the event (moderated by the hosts first of course) so you could politely inform people that their staring is making people uncomfortable. My thoughts on the initial concept were along the lines of a way of automating not just introductions but also learning how to interact well with others, providing structure to those interactions that people usually fumble through and hopefully avoiding or lessening situations like the one you mentioned.