The Sipping Point still does what it did back in the day: people suggest events, send out invites, and if enough say yes, the event trips. We had some success with that—happy hours, trivia nights. Since bringing it back, I’ve been trying to expand on it by using LLMs to suggest events instead of having people create them manually. I’ve been at that for several months with mixed, mostly bad, success. The events that get suggested are not well received.
I think one big problem is that those events aren’t things my friends and I usually do. As much as I like a chili cookoff, or wine tastings, or pasta-making classes, they’re unusual for our group. We’re much more likely to do something like trivia night, or meet up for bowling, or have dinner. Those kinds of things don’t show up on community calendars, so the LLM leans on what it can find—and that’s not us.
So I added Rituals. Rituals are just the regular things we do together. In Sipping Point they work like event templates: a place, a description, and time suggestions, but no actual dates or times. When the weekly suggested events go out, we combine events from public calendars with rituals on a specific cadence—e.g. twice a month, every four months, once a year. The hope is that these suggestions feel more natural and are easier for people to commit to, because they’re already “our” things.
A few rituals in the app—each with description, location, and a cadence. The system tracks when it was last suggested so we don’t overdo it.
We’ll see if mixing these in with the calendar-driven suggestions makes the weekly digest something people actually want to say yes to.