Meeting new people, when what you want from them is practice
Two people can type the same phrase into a search box and want opposite things from it. This page is about the second meaning, which nobody writes for.
The learner's version of the phrase
When somebody studying a language says they want to meet people, they are usually not asking for friendship. They are asking for repetition — for more instances of a stranger speaking at natural speed with no obligation to slow down. Friendship would actually get in the way, because a friend adjusts to you within a week and the adjustment is the thing you came to have removed.
- You want many people, briefly, rather than a few people, at length.
- You want them unprepared, because prepared speech is the register you already understand.
- You want them slightly impatient, because patience produces the lesson you are trying to escape.
- You do not want to be findable afterwards, because the next one is the point.
Which is why the format fits this and not the other thing
Everything that makes a random video chat useless for making friends is what makes it work for repetition. No handle means no accumulated politeness. No history means nobody has learned to speak to you in particular. Two seconds to the next person means the supply is effectively infinite.
Read from the other direction it is a bleak little list. Read from this one it is a description of a drill, and drills are supposed to be like that.
What to stop chasing
The good conversation. A learner who holds out for the twenty-minute call that goes somewhere will have three of them a fortnight and count the rest as waste, when the rest was the exercise.
Four minutes of struggling with somebody who is in a hurry does more than twenty comfortable minutes with somebody being kind to you. Counter-intuitive, faintly unpleasant, and of everything written here the most useful line.