'Anti-social' media app a big hit with people wanting to avoid friends

Social media has long been marketed as a way to help us keep connected with other people – but now there is a social media app to help you actively avoid and keep away from your friends.

Hell is Other People is a web app that takes your friends’ check-in data on Foursquare and calculates an “optimally-distanced location”, highlighting various “safe zones” to make sure you don’t bump into them.

Scott Garner, the maker of this app, agreed to an e-mail interview with the Post.

“I actually really hate social media,” says Garner. “I had to sign up for a social media site and talk to people to get them to be my friends on that site so that I could avoid them.”

Hell is Other People is "an experiment in anti-social media". Named after a quote from existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, it’s partially a satire, Garner says, but admits that this new app is also a commentary on his disdain for social media and an “exploration of his own difficulties with social anxiety”.

“I often have difficulty interacting with people, and moving to New York City last autumn was very overwhelming for me," he explains. "The fact that the idea resonates with so many people just shows that I’m not the only one feeling this way."

At present more than one thousand people globally have connected their Foursquare accounts to this app, but most of them come from large American cities, in particular New York City.