In all seriousness, I can't believe that we still haven't solved this. Crazy advanced social media but no workaround for the "networking problem". No, not gonna suggest we need a "productivity social network" or another meetups.com but could our existing social medias at lest be somewhat biased towards promoting content that connect people over common interest in the real world? Why can't they? (The answer is obvious).
100 people on the internet want to ask me questions about X? No, I don't have time for that. (Yes, a few experts do. Emphasis on few.)
1000 people on the internet want to ask me about W and Y, which are kind of close to X, and about V and Z, which are farther afield, and want to rant to me about Brazilian jiu jitsu, and Yemeni politics, and time cubes, and how everything is Henry Kissinger's fault? I'm out. I'm changing my email and only giving the new one to people I trust.
At that point, if you want to ask me about X, you need to be one of the people that I've built up trust with over the years, to the point that I'll trust you not to abuse my email address.
So the problem becomes: How do we put (at least some) honest, interested seekers in connection with a few bandwidth-limited experts, without opening the floodgates?
As it is, I've had a lot of the same questions for 5 or 10 years, and just not known how to get answers. There are books/papers in those fields where I understand everything, and books/papers where I understand nothing, and not much in between.
[0] https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-f...
Aren't they already? I've made a few very good friends through social media and it was mostly through common interests at first.
