I find in-person interaction no more satisfying than online interaction (with a couple of caveats related to physical touch, which is hard to convey across the Internet, and food, similar). I would almost always rather IM someone rather than speak out loud via any medium, even when both are equally convenient.
Maybe I'm just "doing it wrong", but interacting offline is frustrating. People literally do not understand me when I talk: a majority of human beings need me to repeat myself several times, or speak unnaturally slowly (which makes it harder for me to hold onto my train of thought), before they comprehend words I speak, and this includes folks who've known me my whole life, and it gets worse when I'm excited or agitated. People interrupt me and I hate it, and I interrupt them and I can't seem to stop unless I commit to not speaking at all. I can't keep track of what's been said and I sorely miss the ability to go back and read upthread or search through a chat log (and the ability to quote things to others who misremember). The thoughts communicated are shorter, which can sometimes lead to pith but just as often leads to shallowness. I am not good at using tone of voice or body language to communicate, and a lot of people will draw flat-out wrong conclusions about me or what I'm saying by trying to interpret the noise I inadvertently send through those channels. On a pretty regular basis I'll be hung up on some word the other person says, which (through accent or lack of context or an actual misuse) I do not understand, and I have to ask my interlocutor to spell it so I can see it in my mind and figure out what the hell they mean.
Meeting in person requires a compromise on my control of my physical environment. I have to sacrifice my ability to moderate my sensory input - I might have to be out in unkind-to-me weather, or stand around until my feet hurt, or crowd in somewhere where I don't get a bubble of personal space, or suffer kinetosis, during either transit to the meeting or the meeting itself. I can't process competing audio tracks, and any sort of venue background noise can cripple my ability to recognize the stream of verbiage emitting from a companion's mouth, while I have no corresponding difficulty for reading text off my screen in the sensory safety of my own room. The world outside is navigable, but complex - often to the point of seeming hostile - and talking to people is a really complicated task to add to that navigation.
Meeting in person makes it almost impossible to politely multitask or task-switch, and I could count on one hand the number of people who have ever become so engaging that I didn't want to do something else besides talk to them at the same time. (And that handful of people don't manage it consistently!)
And that's when I'm only trying to talk to one person.
I can't process competing audio tracks, and any sort of venue background noise can cripple my ability to recognize the stream of verbiage emitting from a companion's mouth
Is there a name for this? Have people studied this problem? I might have an identical or related problem.
IMHO there is little chance that an online-only community could replicate the successes (many friendships among the members, very high levels of enjoyment, motivation and engagement) of LW NYC.
Why not? Well, at the risk of putting off those readers who dislike explanations from evolutionary psychology, friendship relies on complex functional adaptations that were "tuned" or "designed" by natural selection for an environment in which every friendship has significant costs. By "costs" I mean that either the friends had to pay the social cost (which was significant in the ancestral environment) of being seen to be talking to each other or they had to go to significant trouble to talk without being observed. Even after the rise of the city (where unlike in the ancestral environment, most observers do not care who you talk to) maintaining a friendship had costs, in that the friends have to commit to being at a particular location at a particular time, incur transportation costs, etc.
My theory is that there is important information in whether (and how readily) a friend continues to choose to incur the costs of maintaining an off-line friendship and that when that source information is lost, most people have trouble accurately assessing the value of the relationship and start to make bad decisions on how much time and mental energy to invest in the relationship.
IMHO the same argument from evolutionary psychology holds to a lesser extent for the sense of belonging that people feel for various groups and communities. There was for example probably nothing like a lurker in any community before the online communities enabled by the BBS, the (now defunct) proprietary computer networks and the global internet.
Online-only communities and using the internet to keep up with friends can be extremely useful of course, but a person should watch out for the common failure mode in which online participation lulls one into a false sense of belonging or connectedness which prevents one from deriving the benefits people can get from things like NYC LW and the visiting fellow program in the Bay Area -- benefits that most people here should pursue and that are not available without face-to-face interaction.