I first started using Meetup in the middle to late 2000s in the Bay area. It almost kick started my tech career after meeting a ton of people at a computer music event. I wasn't quite ready yet and made a detour through moving to LA, starting a pirate radio station and then becoming a carpenter in the art world for 5 years.
Meetup was there for me when I finally re-engaged with software engineering and computers. I would go to events almost weekly and met tons of interesting people who taught me about all sorts of subjects from 3d printing to category theory. I got to see the inside of many different startups and eat a ton of bad pizza.
All the way up to the pandemic i was a regular participant. I don't think I have been to a single event since the pandemic. I still live in the same place and do the same sort of work. I have a really hard time motivating myself to use the site and whenever I do, I find the schedule rather sparse. I have heard the same story from others many times.
Perhaps this is post-covid trauma? Or perhaps this is part of the price we pay for shifting so hard to remote work? Or perhaps this is the result of the shitty Meetup UX making it difficult to find groups I relate to? I don't know, but I suspect it is all of the above.
I miss the sense of IRL community provided by my local meetup groups.
Getting back to meetups (including those outside of Meetup.com) has been slightly strange. As some of my previous favorite meetups became more popular, the type of audience they attracted has changed.
There's much more of a self-promotional vibe to a lot of the talks I've visited recently. Several speakers have actually flown in from other states to present at local Meetups via sponsorship from their company, then delivered what was clearly a very rehearsed presentation. At one point someone from Google flew out to deliver a rehearsed talk about their work. I was actually interested in asking him questions afterward, but he acted like he couldn't get out of there fast enough. He just wanted to present, get it recorded for his LinkedIn and personal website, and get out of there.
One of the meetups I was involved with organizing has also struggled to filter out local presenters who are just going through the motions of resume building. In the past it felt like a small group of enthusiasts getting together to talk about things they were interested in. Now, half the presentations feel like somebody decided they were going to be a presenter first and then looked for something to talk about second. We have a real problem with some people putting on presentations that are more than 50% memes and animated gifs.
Maybe I've got a rose colored glasses thing going on, but it feels different now that it's becoming a competitive resume builder activity rather than a fun get together.
Our local conferences are starting to feel the same way. A significant number of the talks from the last big conference I watched felt more like cheesy motivational speaker content.
The non-commercial side of things - evergreen interest groups - got eaten by Facebook, who doesn’t need groups to make money, just to engage users.
Everyone too young to have anything to do with either Meetup or FB are in some private chat.
Running a club with events on meetup is great only until you need your community to contribute to the growing cost of running a successful club. At that point, you are no longer their customer — your members are a commodity and they give you just enough to stick around but not enough to function in a sustainable way. We all know communities are basically revolving doors for burnout, lack of tools and support is a big reason.
[1] https://embolt.app — public launch coming later this year!
Editing an event never goes smoothly, it pretty much always eats half of your edits, etc.
It's also not exactly free. But it's risky to try to move a large group onto some new platform, so here we are.
What we get is what you described.
I wish more editing forms were just a <form method="POST"> with <input value="whatever" /> and an <input type="submit"> for me to click.
No system designed around that would ever eat up half our edits.
Not defending meetup but people have every reason to try to override default UA behavior.
MeetUp didn't make any moves to exploit post-pandemic opportunities. imo it's dead at this point, there's so many zombie communities with stale recurring events that discovery is poor, and I've seen a high flake-rate for any events organized there (presumably too many low-engagement old accounts).
There certainly is some value in "this community has been going strong for X years" metrics in that Discovery loop for entirely new people looking for a "sure thing", but that's a trap for so many reasons: it led to Meetup doing what they did to destroy communities I followed; it led to stagnation in people afraid to create new communities simply because Meetup's Discovery engine was down ranking new stuff; arguably part of their multiple pricing change fiascos was that they weren't growing new communities as fast as old ones. There should have been other tools at Meetup's disposal to enhance their Discovery engine for new communities and for new forms of old communities rather than rely so heavily on old communities it "couldn't" let die.
Luma is rolling out more discovery features, and I search twitter for "lu.ma San Francisco" to find other events sometimes.
Nothing that covers the feature set of Meetup though, but much better to use.
We still mostly find new members through the platform and word-of-mouth (probably about 50-50), but compared to pre-pandemic, the numbers are generally smaller. There is less being organised in general, but I suspect people have competing commitments, or are less enthusiastic about trying it out: I find many people sign up to join the group but only a handful will ever show up at any event. Attendance can be very seasonal too.
As a platform I find Meetup quite expensive given how buggy and slow it is. Participants complain about not getting notifications (it frequently fails to send me anything). There is lots of duplicated and flakey functionality, like chat and discussion groups. I'd love to use something else but I don't know if its worth the risk trying to drive people elsewhere.
Trying to foster a sense of community with tech platforms alone is also a bit futile - it really boils down to the vibe of the group and other participants, and it's a difficult balancing act as an organiser.
I'd love to see more activity in this area. Through digitalization, we're missing out on a lot of human interaction. Meeting up with like-minded people through social gatherings is a great way to get it back.
When I find one that seems remotely interesting, there’s only like 4 people marked as attending. Usually a husband and wife and probably their good friend of 10 years.
So I’m hesitant about showing up for board games for example where everybody is extremely close friends except me and they just have this event continuing from when it used to be bigger and have more people.
It’d be fine if the hosts were engaging with new people but I don’t trust that to happen. In my experience the hosts usually don’t know they’re supposed to lead the events and introduce guests and spot and resolve awkwardness unless they were in a sorority.
I imagine I’d show up to scope out the group meetup, but it ends up being a niche location where anybody there is obviously for the meetup. Or worse, I don’t find out they’re close friends until a 3 hour long game already started so leaving would ruin the game.
Or I show up to have beers and hang out and they turn out to be hardcore serious terraform mars players who expect me to know the rules because “why else would you show up to a random board game night?”
This sounds like a lot of worrying but these are all actually based on prior events I’ve gone to with acquaintances from work or new friends I don’t know well. Or like flyers in my apartment for something like a hosted Halloween party.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a good experience unless I’m the one hosting the event and can introduce guests and such, or a very close friend is hosting something so I can call him out to be a better host… But it’s a lot of work to get people interested in doing anything except sitting at home watching Netflix. That’s even before all the planning for the event and doing the hosting.
as it happens, i like board games too. the nice thing with board games is that you don't have to worry about how well the other players know each other. if they advertised their event then you are welcome by definition. regardless if you get introduced or not. most events i go to, there is no introduction. on boardgame events we just play. so just go and enjoy the game. don't worry about getting to know the others. that will come over time. you get to know each other through your playing style. whether you or the others are competitive or cooperative, etc.
go there a few times, and you will start making friends.
the terraform mars example is a unfortunate one. i never had that happen. there was always someone willing to explain the rules. i played D&D for months without learning the rules. i even hosted D&D sessions without knowing the rules. all it took was players willing to be cooperative.
Real answer: Discord.
1. Chicago Engineering Tech Communities and Organizations - https://github.com/driscoll42/chicago-engineering-and-tech-c... 2. Chicago Tech Community Events - https://chitechcommunityevents.softr.app/
The first is a list of all the tech/engineering orgs in Chicago I maintain. Many are still on meetup, but not all. Unfortunately there's not one calendar to find everything. The second is an attempt to make a calendar of Chicago tech events, but it's not perfect. I don't run it but I highly recommend it.
I do recommend joining local community slacks/Discords. There's a good one for slacks here (https://github.com/thisdot/tech-community-slacks), e.g. for Chicago there's the Chicago Tech Slack (https://join.slack.com/t/chicago-tech/shared_invite/zt-1cb3m...), but you'll need to explore around.
But then there was COVID, and I moved many states away, and it doesn't feel like that scene bounced back to pre-pandemic levels in either my old or new cities.
https://www.meetup.com/js-chi/ is still going strong, but some of the other events aren't happening anymore.
I've been going to events all summer, but I've heard it's very hard for organizers because of the pressure from participants who are trying to find jobs at these events. I see it as a great opportunity to get a handle on the latest developments in tech and also meet people in the local area who are programmers. But yah, there are lots of people trying to land those high paying tech jobs at neighborhood meetups and it's hard to have that conversation about like just chilling out a little and enjoying the company of fellow developers.
Many of my friends even met their spouses from this group (4 weddings, I think). Meetup was the best place to meet people outside of work. It was always difficult for me to make new friends as I got older, but the site made it much easier.
It's sad to see what it's become. I don't know anyone using it anymore. covid did kill a lot of meetups though. My friend group still hasn't been the same. We all still haven't met together in the same room/space since Covid started.
CS has moved to a pay to use model and they're putting pressure on their hosts. A lot of people have dropped their account.
I'm unaware of a competitor; Facebook and other public fora like Reddit lack privacy and professionalism (the latter I presume encouraged by Meetup fees).
Discord and closed fora etc lack professionalism and mainstream ingress.
Perhaps the situation in other regions and particular demographics is different, as the OP indicates. But it seems fine here.
There was that whole pandemic thing.
Second, nothing replaced it, at least not in the Bay Area for tech meetups. It had a few shaky years under erratic WeWork ownership, and then COVID dealt it a killing blow.
I really think people used to go to Meetup events to catch up with acquaintances and eat the free pizza. They were like low-pressure parties where you could talk to strangers about something you cared about. Most Meetup groups that went to Zoom had huge drops in attendance, because being on a call with strangers is awkward, puts everyone on the spot, and is generally not fun at all.
I think IRL tech meetups can still come back, but I think a lot fewer companies are willing to host. I've spoken to several organizers of small tech enthusiast groups that I care about; they absolutely hate the online format and are desperately searching for IRL options. I go to an IRL AI/ML event that moves around startup offices in SF; they have overwhelming interest and have to turn away 2/3 of the people that sign up, because they just don't have the capacity.
What's left on Meetup:
- dead groups that stopped scheduling events years ago
- groups that are managed by tech companies (in spaces like Web3) that organize events that sound general-interest, but are actually promoting their own services and solutions, and usually fold after 1-2 events
- non-sponsored tech enthusiast groups that run events on Zoom and get like 3-4 attendees per event
My takeaway is that online-only is absolute poison for organizing events where people can meet each other, and IRL is heavily blocked on companies willing to host events and feed people free pizza. All the IRL stuff I've been to this year has been attended and overattended, but there just aren't as many events compared to 5 years ago.
I can say that my pre-pandemic programming Meetup group has been tricky to re-launch. We did decently in virtual Restream sessions during the pandemic, about 15-20 attendees and many more watching the videos. Afterwards, it's much tougher to find free venues. I don't have recent contacts with many speakers. Most sponsors aren't recruiting and aren't looking to spend money on free pizza. Some original members aren't getting emails and notifications because they stopped them during the pandemic.
However, my tech happy hour meetup is more popular than ever. We relaunched it after the pandemic and it's been hopping ever since. By starting over with a new group and new name, we were boosted by a New Group Announcement that put our group in front of lots of new Meetup members. Being one of the active Meetup events in our area, we get higher attendance than pre-pandemic. Also, it's a joy to host these events as I have almost no work putting an event together-- no venue, speaker, or sponsor discussions.
It's a tale of two event formats-- one that used to work well and another that still does.
My take on online events is that people attended during the pandemic partly to be social. However, Zoom creates a problem-- as the number of attendees rises there's a significant burden to speak and to take up space in the conversation. I used Restream to allow conversations in chat and to highlight various comments and discussions. I had great hope when trying gather.town, but it didn't work well because most came to watch the speaker and left without learning how to mingle and socialize in a virtual environment that should have empowered smaller, organic conversations.
Meetup still runs strong in some areas.
For a time, FB groups carried the burden, but that fount's since dried up.
So I would like something like Meetup for that, but of course all of the groups on there are defunct.
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/locals-org-meet-network/id1511...