But I do wonder if Discord for community and event planning + self-hosted website for member growth / publicity is the way to go in 2022?
I ran the DCPHP group for years on our own site. We grew from ~10 to 400 over a span of 5 years. It was great. When I moved, the new leadership moved it to Meetup and grew from 400 to 1000 in a year. Meetup is the discovery platform for just about everyone out there.
In covid times, most groups stopped meeting in person (some stopped meeting at all) but Meetup is still THE place for discovery.
If you're deep and well connected into your local community (based on geo, not tech), you personally can probably skip it but you're also probably an outlier. Anyone less connected or new to your city or the field itself won't know how to get started without it.
Side note.. for 5 years, I ran ATXTechEvents - https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents - and 50+ other cities broadcasting out via Twitter what was going on and that helped double meeting attendance but I realized pretty quickly, it was existing members. It drove some discovery but was more of a reminder system.
I'll add that as a user who wants to go to meetups, I don't want to be hassled by emails, chats, logging into a discord (that I use just to participate in this one community), and so forth. I want to look at a single app, see if any talks are of interest, click yes and add to my calendar. And because that app is already meetup, I don't want to add a second app. Its like adding a second or third chatting application.
p.s. most (not all) of the other criticism seems to be aimed at the issue of getting people to consistently meet up at all. An alternative app or messaging system would not solve this issue, and may make it worse.
In that first five years, it was entirely word of mouth. The only people who found us did because they met someone in the core group or knew someone who met someone in the core group. It required us to talk about it regularly everywhere in addition to organizing the actual meetings, etc.
In the next year on Meetup, they only had to organize meetings.
Fundamentally, it's not all that different than any early stage startup except that we were driven by passion, not pay.
Although I haven't updated my perspective about meetup since COVID started, so while I thought it was very useful before, and believe it still is, I'm not sure it's traction survived (or resources if it faded)
Now that restrictions are lifted in Ontario we will be going back to in-person meetups and probably by the end of the month we will be posting them on Meetup. I am optimistic that we will be able to bring people back.
It sounds like your success can be attributed to, at least in significant part, having a strong/sticky "base" BEFORE the pandemic started.
Would you agree/disagree that? More applicably to guiding the OP here, would you say that if you guys DIDN'T have that sticky base of attendees that you'd be as well-off or even around at all post-pandemic?
In other words, was it just popularity that got ya'll through (obviously you and yours did all the work, not saying otherwise!), or can you point to something else that the OP can replicate?
Again, not at all to "throw shade" at you here, just trying to see if your outcome is a reasonable expectation, and how applicable/likely it is for the OP, especially given the wide disparity in outcomes mentioned by others. Either way I'm happy to hear your meetup is doing well!
We do have a fairly regular group of core users that are usually there. Of course this core group will change with time given life commitments and other things that come up. Not uncommon for regulars to disappear for a while and show up later when life permits.
Something we have discussed about our longevity is early on we decided against using webcam meetups. All our meetups are voice only. I had a lot of feedback from people early on they preferred the voice only meetup. Now almost 2 years later, we question if this decision allowed us to avoid the webcam fatigue that most other groups seemed to suffer. It probably doesn't hurt we are in Canada's biggest and hottest tech hub.
I have contacted them to ask for help, and I follow up every month to remind them that it still needs to be fixed. But no luck so far.
Any suggestions a) how to get this specific issue resolved and b) general advice for getting menial (but "important to me") things like this fixed?
Meetup.com is now rubbish (mostly singles events, walking tours, scam investment talks etc) and Discord is too geographically distributed to be the right answer.
I've seen a handful of apps that claim to work but none have achieved network.
Been thinking about launching a no code app that basically sets up whatsapp distribution lists plus a low touch website. That's all that's really needed.
In addition, instead of one summary email that could come once per week/month by default they bombard you with hundreds of worthless emails from evety small meetup. So you mass unsubscribe from everything.
Their rework that happened some time ago is basically digg 4.0 level of failure.
I still try to use the site when I remember about it. Yet it is so damn bad; poor search, poor communication, you cant even find how many meetups you attended (possibility of verified badges or w/e).
But this is the best we got. Maybe one day they get some sane designers, current design basically sabotages their core product.
This is still the best place for discovery of events.
I think I went to around 80-90 meetups and it is a pity that they also introduced this terrible monetization (people from silicon valley dont want to pay 2 dollars per attendee, imagine how it looks for the rest of the world - lots of groups dont use meetup anymore).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21257661 lists other alternatives
I just haven't met many interesting people on meetup. The good independent events just use word-of-mouth and get more than enough people. It's best for sports, the park I live next to is really just a huge playing field, through meetup I can play football, touch rugby, or do some circuits there.
I still think it's the main place to advertise/host technical meetups though. I can't think of anywhere else. You have to put yourself in the shoes of someone who might come to your event - how will they find you? Are they going to be actively looking for your event, or will you need to reach out?
I'm no huge fan of discord for IRL communities because I like to separate my 'gamer tag' from my real identity, as do most people. I've had this problem lately, I love the discord app but I wish we could make IRL servers with real (or abbreviated, like 'John S.') names. It would be so much easier to manage and mod sports clubs if we could keep comms on it, rather than the email/sms/whatsapp mess we have right now.
There are problems with a club comms app that, to my knowledge, haven't been solved:
Many sports club members don't have smartphones, and don't like smartphones if they have them. You ask these people for contact details and they point you to the Yellow Pages. Most of these people are just social players, but some are in teams. You cannot win a technology argument with them, but your communication system needs to reliably reach them.
Even people who are comfortable with tech will have a 'yet another app' problem. I would. You need to give me a reason to install an app. I don't want your app because its another place I need to look to see messages, and it's yet more notifications that I might miss. Other people have different reasons. To get over my problem, and everyone elses, your offering needs to be rock solid.
All that said, I still think there's space if well executed and integrated with the rest of the club. For example, it should automatically create a channel for people in a box league. It should be integrated with the booking system, and lights (seriously, turning lights on from the phone would be killer). You should have an account balance, which is used for bookings, lights, and the bar.
If you can do all that, then you have something that doesn't yet exist. You've also achieved everything I could do in a few days with a discord bot and some python scripts.
I completely agree communications is going to be tough. I really don't want to build yet another chat app. There just aren't any drop in solutions though. Especially not with group messaging. The question has to be what your messaging for. If it's just notification messages, that can be solved with e-mail/sms/whatsapp.
Anyway, thanks for your feedback!
IMO, you're not far off from what may be the way forward for event planning/broadcasting. A lot of people are actually using Eventbrite as an alternative to Meetup because it's free and removes the membership hurdle, and it also has fewer rules than Meetup. At a bare minimum, Eventbrite + an email list would be viable.
As far as messaging/community, yeah, there's Discord, but Discord likes to do sweeping bans on servers they don't agree with. Your "Bay Area Russians" Discord server could disappear overnight and your entire community is gone. And yes, I have experience with that happening. Signal would be preferable, maybe Telegram, since they're less scary to normies than something like Matrix.
But their income model isn't that great. I was paying $90 out of pocket every 6 months to keep it going at the end (I think when I started being an admin I was paying around $45, so it doubled in only a few years), and I was having a hard time justifying paying them $180/year to keep our group, which was going through a bit of a rough patch anyway (especially when the pandemic hit and I didn't want to host any in-person meetups anymore). I know the admins of several other local groups and they also killed their groups for the same reason.
I also really don't like how you can't actually close the group, just leave as an admin. Technically our group is still around, just some random person swooped in to take over to only post paid speed dating events (the group was originally for geeky interests, like board games, movies, conventions, role playing, etc). It feels dirty to me the site allows and encourages that behavior (spamming emails to everyone in the group "Don't let this meetup group you're a member of go away! Pay to become an admin now!")
I still use them as a user, but I don't think I'd ever start a group on there ever again. I created a local board game playtester group and used word of mouth at game designer conventions to get to ~10 people and kept that going through a Facebook group chat and posted Facebook events, that seemed good enough.
I too am (well, was would be more accurate) a Meetup organizer. You're right that the fee is steep and the culture of the site is that no users want to pay for anything, even if it's just a buck. Thing is I think that Meetup could have justified that fee by providing a lot more value to organizers. Meetup really isn't very sophisticated; if you get rid of the forums that nobody actually uses, it's one of the most basic CRUD apps you could possibly make. And that's okay, except ~$20 a month (honestly I forget what I've been paying) hardly is justified by a junior dev CRUD app.
Here's all the things that Meetup could and probably should have been doing that they still aren't:
- Support an option allowing people who don't have a Meetup.com account to RSVP
- Likewise, support fungible tickets for events that people can share
- A group message/email composer that isn't a sack of garbage
- More effective event promotion that competes with Eventbrite
- Related to the last point, make events front and center on every page (like Eventbrite) instead of self-congratulation
- Slack and Discord integration
- Just admit that nobody wants to download the Meetup app
- Promote and incentivize in person events over online ones (Let's face it, COVID isn't that relevant anymore and turning meetup into Zoom meetings will kill it. Zoom isn't "meetups", and acting like everyone needs to still hunker down in fear will make Meetup totally irrelevant in the long term when being a coomer-doomer is no longer cool.)
- Allow locking in RSVPs within 24-48 hours before an event
- Allow automatically charging or banning users who are no-shows
- Do more to help organizers find and work with venues to host meetups
- Support the option for democratically-run groups
Last I remember, Meetup either has none of those things or does the in a way that is poorly supported or surfaced.
To top it off, the site is a bunch of wasted space. Compare it to Eventbrite where the events themselves are front and center. The top of the fold on Meetup.com for years has been occupied by useless copy, design elements, and maybe the search box if they feel like it. Right now the search box is below the fold.
So yes, it's not a good deal for organizers monetarily speaking, but both the user and organizer experience is anything but stellar. Meetup is perpetually stuck in the MVP phase; they've hardly gone beyond the basic CRUD app, and that doesn't cut the mustard anymore.
So there's no early way to revenue, and since Meetup is probably only worth about $50m (ignoring the $200m it was sold for to that office company that was desperate it IPO), it'd be a struggle to get funding for marketing while you're gaining traction, since ultimately the market leader isn't worth much.
My app added some important missing features over meetup, but they'd be expensive to run. I'd strip them out but then I'd just have plain old (but empty) meetup again... so I think it's difficult to innovate in this area.
Not as popular as Meetup by far, but it is a working alternative.
Over 100 members now but I don't believe it's because of Meetup's network since this is 1) a virtual meetup and 2) spanning multiple categories.
It's ridiculous to me that Meetup.com still requires a city two years after a pandemic and has no means to make virtual meetups as first-class as in-person ones.
But it's still an ok platform and there's nothing else I'm familiar with for scheduling public events like this. I am paying for it though so maybe I should be more demanding or take my money somewhere else..
[0] meetup.com/hackernights
As per discord, it can be a quite nice tool for building communities, however there's a lack of locality in almost all of the servers I've interacted with, so discord ends up serving a different purpose IMO.
We have about 10K members and run events every 3-4 weeks (online at the moment). We are still going strong - we get about 100 people at each event.
I have noticed that we are not growing as fast as we were. I wonder whether meetup.com has slowed down in terms of growth in user base. Or maybe we are just at saturation point.
There's non-profit and free groups I would definitely run. I was offered one such IoT meetup. Again cause of the $15/mo (which I couldn't at the time afford) that group died.
These days, I just ignore Meetup. Let something better come in instead.
It doesn’t matter what you’re into, you’ll probably find a group.
I use it for hiking, kayaking and social events. It is so easy to meet people on there and just find things to do. Most of the groups I belong to, the events fill up and end up with waiting lists.
If you’re new to an area and/or just want to meet new people, it’s hard to beat Meetup in my experience.
Useful service.
Anyone successful using eventbrite to find groups?
There's definitely still trepidation on attendees part, but it's still there.
I actually have 2-3 events scheduled a week local to me in UK that I actually go to.
We also have our own site, but that is more for videos and whatnot, rather than sign ups: https://boulder-ruby.org/
We mostly use the sign up/announce functionality. I suppose we could replace that with a google form and standard website, but we have over 1k members. How many of them would move? We don't have that many twitter followers and no email list. I suppose an email list would be a replacement, if folks would sign up.
I had a friend who was building an alternative (sinking money and time into it for years) and he recently ceased operations. His thoughts: https://twitter.com/coreysnipes/status/1498714532931416070
The tldr: too many good competitors; maybe it is time to look around.