Layla Rivera was at work when her boyfriend texted: someone on Reddit was looking for her.

In the comments of a post on the subreddit r/warpedtour, attendees of the punk rock and emo music festival searched for their missed connections – ephemeral friends or hookups they met onsite and would like to see again. Rivera could tell that one message, addressed “to Leila/Layla (the short girl with the red top)”, was almost certainly written by a man she encountered while watching the band Sweet Pill at Warped Tour’s Washington DC stop in June.

“You tapped my shoulder and asked me to help you crowd surf,” the man wrote. “I picked you up, but no one around me wanted to help you crowd surf so I awkwardly had to put you back down. First, I’m sorry I couldn’t help more and second, I thought you were cute and even after I saw you later I was nervous to ask for your number or socials.”

The post’s writer shared his Instagram handle. Rivera, who is 29 and works in real estate, reached out. She told him that while she had a boyfriend, she found his message sweet, and she appreciated his help with her crowd surfing mission. The pair became friends over DM. They have plans to attend the same DC stint of Warped Tour together next year.

“I would love to meet up and maybe try for him to catapult me up into the sky again,” Rivera said. “I do have a boyfriend, but I’m glad we can be friends.”

Rivera, who straddles the gen Z-millennial cusp, did not grow up reading Craigslist’s missed connections. In those posts, people tried to reach strangers they shared fleeting moments with on the train or in line at the grocery store. Anyone who wouldn’t dare write their own came for the voyeuristic entertainment value, or maybe the secret hope that they were memorable enough to spark interest from a stranger.

The posts were popular, little oddities reminding readers of the charmingly random nature of city living. In 2010, Craigslist estimated that there were nearly 8,000 new ads posted to New York City’s missed connections page a week.

Craigslist’s missed connection posts live on. (Recently posted on New York’s page: “We met at a barbecue in Rockaway,” “We locked eyes for the longest time on 86th.”) But the rise of social media and dating apps certainly dulled its cultural influence. A decade later, young people eager to shoot their shot have revived the tradition on Reddit and TikTok.

On Reddit, pages like r/warpedtour host missed connection “megathreads”, where commenters write about their own encounters and optimistically leave their contact information. Subreddits for cities including Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Minneapolis and Richmond, Virginia, have joined in. Ditto for the music festivals Bonnaroo, Coachella and Electric Forest, as well as the Berlin techno club Berghain (where phones are all but verboten on the dancefloor, making for many missed connections).

“I’m looking for the beautiful woman with amazing eyes [at] Popeyes,” wrote one Redditor in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Someone in Arlington, Virginia, is searching for the woman he met at a bar – while he was on a date with someone else. In St Louis, someone visiting their father in a hospital chemo ward saw a stranger crying in the hallway and stopped to pray with them; the stranger was still in their thoughts.

Young people say that in romantic contexts the practice is an antidote to dating fatigue, promising to fulfill that ultimate urban fantasy: locking eyes on a crowded subway platform and being so unforgettable that it compels a stranger to fall in love with you. It’s an analogue alternative to dating apps, romanticized in older comedies such as Desperately Seeking Susan and Sleepless in Seattle.

“You move to a big city and are so filled with this hope for chance encounters and magical moments at every turn,” said Maggie Hertz, a DJ at the New Jersey free-form radio station WFMU and host of Cat Bomb!, an all-cassette show that also plays missed connections from listeners who phone in. “There’s nothing more vulnerable than writing a missed connection.”

Hertz said that none of the missed connections on her show have led to real-life meet-ups – at least that she knows about. That doesn’t take away from the fun.

“My favorite came in at three in the morning,” Hertz said. “She sounded so excited and nervous and probably still drunk. She was at a diner in Brooklyn and there was a waiter there who she said looked like Jake Gyllenhaal. She was all gushy about him.”

Last month, Karly Laliberte was exiting a Trader Joe’s in Boston’s Seaport neighborhood when she spotted a cute guy walking with his friends. “He was tall, which is a rarity in Boston,” said Laliberte, who is 30 and in sports marketing. “It’s a stereotype that’s sort of true: we call it ‘Short King City’.” In the movie version of their almost-encounter, she would cast Jacob Elordi. They walked in the same direction for a few blocks, and Laliberte could “feel his eyes” staring at her. She almost said hello, but stopped herself. She didn’t want to interrupt his conversation.

Laliberte got home and filmed a TikTok, pleading with viewers to help her identify this man, with only his height and a description of his outfit to go on. “Within hours, it had 50,000 views,” she said. “On TikTok, you can tag your city, so any video you post can be seen widely, locally. That made it seem like a logical place to post a missed connections. It felt a little vulnerable to put myself out there, but people did want to help.”

Though she never found the man, Laliberte received messages from people offering Instagram handles of men they thought it could be. And they got pretty close – one was a man she already dated.

Laliberte has spent years on dating apps, always orbiting the same group of people. She’s tired of swiping and wants an old-fashioned meet cute. “There’s this desire to connect in-person,” she said. “I’m craving a connection that’s organic and less forced.” Why not try to find the person who made eyes at you outside of a Trader Joe’s?

While younger adults may be discovering missed connections, the practice predates even its Craigslist origins. Francesca Beauman – British historian and author of Shapely Ankle Preferr’d, a book about the history of lonely-hearts ads from 1695-2010 – has traced the first of its kind back to 1709.

Published in the Tatler (now called Tatler), the ad said: “A gentleman who, on the 20th incident, had the honor to conduct a lady out of a boat at Whitehall Stairs, desires to know where he may wait for her.” The woman was instructed to contact a Mr Samuel Reeves. Beauman found a marriage record a year later under that same name. There’s no way to know if the union came out of that missed connection, but she hopes that’s the case.

Three hundred years later, and there’s still little evidence the strategy works for finding true love. But people keep trying. Sometimes, there’s a glimmer of hope. The actor Colman Domingo recently revealed that he met his husband via a 2005 missed connections post. (They made serious eye contact at a Walgreens in Berkeley, California.) And while Laliberte didn’t find her tall guy, she said she would “100%” post another missed connection.

“We’re all incurable romantics and enormously deluded,” Beauman said. “It’s fun to read them, just as much fun as it is to place or respond.”