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Comment by jasonbarone | Hacker News Reader

Would love to hear from others who run groups/events on Meetup and/or Eventbrite. I used to love Meetup, but the interest has been dwindling and the pricing for Meetup is very odd. You can't run a multi-city Meetup from a single account, which makes it very difficult to expand your Meetup without greatly increasing your costs. Meetup then came out with https://www.meetup.com/pro in order to help you wrangle your cluster of fragmented accounts all over the world. Between Eventbrite, Facebook Events, and Facebook's direct integration to Eventbrite ticketing, I'm not sure I see the point in using Meetup at all anymore.

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> I'm not sure I see the point in using Meetup at all anymore.

Just like any social platform, I think the advantage of using Meetup is that you'll get to a different audience than Facebook. In my case I've found the audience for Meetup to be smaller (i.e. far fewer RSVPs) but much more engaged, perhaps as a byproduct of the sheer volume of things on Facebook making it harder for yours to stand out. The breakdown of where attendees come from is roughly 30/50/20 Meetup/FB/Email, and the incremental time for me to post in all these places is very small.

The pricing is, as you say, odd, and I too have run into the frustration of expanding a single group to a neighboring city without wanting to drastically increase costs.

Some people don't use Facebook. I wouldn't join Facebook to join a group or event, and I know other people who feel the same way.

Meetup for me is 2 things. Professional development (programming groups) and social events (for me board gaming, science talks, and history walks). Its a way of learning things and meeting people you might not normally.

I think interest has been declining a bit, more "flakes" (sign up don't show) . The photo meets-ups I used to go to have shuttered, some of the programming ones are meeting more infrequently. The Social and board game meets-ups seem to be going ok. My partner is an organizer of a social group just pays the yearly fee to keep the group free.

Though in the past 10 years honestly participation ebs and flows. One organizer of "nerd fun boston" ran an event a couple events a week for a couple of years. He got a good group of regulars going to science lectures and history talks/walks around boston (he met his wife though the group). That group still hangs out occasionally, though more "virtually" through a Facebook group now, meet up doesn't do the social network as well I guess...

The site update recently looks nice, but seems not to have made it more functional.

I encourage people to go to meets-ups. Its nice to meet new people and get out of your social bubble. We meet mostly really nice people people going to these events.

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