Comment by jollyllama | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jollyllama | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah. I'll qualify what I'm saying by specifying I'm talking about the USA.

There used to be two good, big dev conferences a year in my metro area. Now there are zero. The meetup realized it's now or never for them and recently tried to get rolling again.

Regarding cities and urban areas, the social unrest of 2020 and its aftermath must also be taken into account.

Broadly speaking, there's two things going on. One, just getting out of the habit of regularly meeting and socializing has been detrimental to the social capital. Secondly, the national political dialogue ended, and in many cases people have applied this accordingly at a personal level.

I think the increased prevalence of work from home is a huge factor for meet ups and urban activities in general. If I'm already out and about and likely nearby it's an easier sell to get me to go to a meet up. It's harder if I'm being asked to head to a central downtown just for the meet up, but there aren't enough interested people in my suburb to support a more convient meetup.

I've certainly found that myself. Even pre-pandemic, I was mostly working from home (or traveling).

When I was in an office, even if an evening event was definitely out of the way (as was typical), the fact that I had to get in my car anyway meant that it wasn't that big a deal to go into the city. I find the bar for leaving my house to take an hour drive to an evening event is a lot higher and mostly I don't do it.

Perhaps. But shouldn't there be a lot of people living in the urban area anyway? If not, that's kind of a change from the booming urban neighborhoods of 2013-2019.

While many offices are not within city limits quite a few others are and pre-COVID there was certainly a lot of net commuting into cities for the workday. There's presumably less of that today in general and it's one thing to do an after-work event in the city if you're already there vs. having to go in.

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