Meetup has been acquired by Bending Spoons | Hacker News Reader

Meetup has been acquired by Bending Spoons

meetup.com

135 pointsdevops000127 comments

The old days were great for tech events. Amazing speakers in every major city. All tech cos and startups fighting to sponsor and host events in their offices. I remember getting some great meals and bridge views at Google in SF at the HTML5 group, hah. If you were a poor, bootstrapped hacker in the city those days, you could pretty much get fed for free and begged to quit your startup and take a job most days of the week.

I’ve just been given the reins myself to be the organizer for a large (defunct) tech group. I’m still figuring out exactly what will bring people back and kickstart things. From my discussions with organizers in other groups, they are having a difficult time finding companies willing to host. Concerns about liability even though the pandemic scare is over still persist, time demand on internal employees and lack of rapid hiring are big blockers. The environment has definitely changed.

I really hope the pendulum will swing back again.

In my experience these meetups at offices typically relied on uncompensated overtime from several employees. I wish employers would compensate or give time in lieu for such recurring overtime asks, rather than pretend it’s extracurricular fun that the workers asked for and shall get as a favor. For hosts and organizers, a pizza meal isn’t substitution for compensation that pays the rent.

The employees used to ask employers to allow usage of office space and to sponsor food.

It's not the employer who's asking for a task to be done.

Why would you expect the employer to consider this work time that should be paid?

Sure, often hosts and organizers employers use the events as a recruiting strategy and to promote their engineering brand and so on

Yes, that's their upside and why they used to sponsor. But I've never heard of an employer asking its employees to run these events.

It’s common!

Besides if the employer uses it as a recruiting event and has recruiters involved and so on, it is work regardless of who asked for the work. Stop giving your labor away for free

You wouldn’t take unpaid time to fix tech debt you had to convince your employer to allow either

i have been hosting events at my workplace before but i think that's different. tech debt only affects work. but if i want to host an event, and i get the option to host it at my work place or elsewhere, the chosen location should not affect my pay. in fact, i would not want to get paid so as to remain independent, and be allowed to run the event however i want. i'd appreciate my employer offering the location and even sponsoring food maybe, but once i get paid, it is no longer my event, but my employers, and depending on the nature of the event, i may or may not want that.

of course, if my employer does host an event and directs me run it, then i'd expect to get paid for that.

Organizer of python Atlanta here. Reach out anytime.

Thanks! I went to the relaunched Python meetup group event in LA to talk to their org leads. Nice peeps. They were looking for speakers and places to host as well. Just had it at a beer garden, which seems to be a popular “venue” right now.

If you see this and have their contact info, please have them reach out to pyatl through hello@pyatl.dev

Boston here and what we see now is the only company consistently hosting is google and exclusively for kubernetes meetups. Organizers for several meetups have communicated struggles to get anyone to host. A big part of it seems to be the bigger companies that used to host literally left Boston as a side effect of acquisitions or downsizing closing the Boston offices, leaving only buildings further out in the burbs (Burlington for example) open. A lot of the hosts that were acquired but sill in town were bought by companies like Vista Equity Partners who seem to have an outright distaste for engineering community as a whole and reject requests from their own staff to host events.

The flip side is even when a host is found, its sometimes in the burbs because that's where the bigger office space is that's still a tech space and asking people who work or live downtown to commute to a specific suburb just for a free slice of pizza and a pitch to work for a company who is RTOd and has no downtown presence gets zero interest

Yeah I get that distance issue. At least I’m in Wilmington when I visit family there so I’ll see what’s over in Burlington next time I’m out. I recall going to a devops meetup at Datadog when they first opened their doors in Boston. It was a nice change-up from all the ones run by consulting partner firms.

Personally, I wouldn't get on a car or the train for a slice of pizza, but I would to catch up with friends and talk shop :)

I wonder what individual-led meetups look like in your area. I host in person in a sprawly Southeast US city and get 20-25 folks showing up consistently. I find that if you offer value, people will show up.

COVID really hit the scene over here in South Germany. There were a bunch of meetups that tried online meetup events during lockdown for maybe 2-3 times, but then eventually they all stopped.

And it's not language- or topic-specific either: Java, JS, golang, cyber security, devops, all types of meetups really aren't what they used to be. You're lucky when you organize an event and more than 20% of registered people show up, even when you made them pay 10 bucks for it that they get back on arrival.

The biggest event I've attended to last year were Chaos events (Gulaschprogrammiernacht / GPN, CCC etc), BSides events, and that's pretty much it. All other events kind of either died out, or have been taken over by software consultancies holding the same old "we are cool with PWAs, Angular and FuGu, now hire us!" type talks that they never change and repeatedly broadcast to as many who will listen.

I tried to start a cybersecurity / devsecops / golang related meetup again, and we're now around 10 regular people of the former ~150+ ones. I am now thinking of starting a dedicated developer forum (maybe even in German), because even reddit isn't what it used to be in this regard.

I don't know what changed specifically, but I think the threshold of "when" people consider going to an event changed radically through COVID, and they rather be a lazy ass in the evening than meet people. Maybe that's the global social depression everyone is talking about. Dunno.

Did you observe similar behaviors?

> And it's not language- or topic-specific either: Java, JS, golang, cyber security, devops, all types of meetups really aren't what they used to be. You're lucky when you organize an event and more than 20% of registered people show up, even when you made them pay 10 bucks for it that they get back on arrival.

20% is pretty good. As long as you can find a free space, attendance shouldn't matter that much. It does vary by seasonality and weather though (very few people want to go to a tech meetup when it's great weather, or additionally if the weather is so bad they don't want to leave the house/office).

Same in northern Germany :(

> Maybe that's the global social depression everyone is talking about. Dunno.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with this, is this a reference to something like [1]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935605

"Only part of the people who register show up" has always been a thing. Depending on what kind of meetup you have, you've just got to account for that. I don't think it's a big deal. It's hard to tell if it's worse since COVID.

I do know that a lot of these social things (meetup, couchsurfing, facebook events) died out during COVID and that in many places the bounce-back has been lacklustre at best. I don't really know why or what to do about it, but the old days of "move to a new city, meet lots of people on meetup.com events" seem to be gone for many places.

The housing crisis + inflation spike might have contributed to the loss of this "move to a new city..." think you mentioned. Younger generations have a much harder time getting income, a stable one, and paying the exorbitant costs of living.

Yeah we're back to ~40-50% noshow rate which was normal before the pandemic.

MUC++ organizer here, yes we are probably the exception. We are based in Munich which is south Germany and did stick to roughly one event per month, even though we went online only during the pandemic. We have been doing more on-site events for the last year and are back to a ~40-50% no-show rate. The Rust Meetup is also doing better than ever. So I'd argue your experience does not generalize to all tech Meetups in south Germany.

People are still out there exchanging Covid. Meetups are a great way to catch it still.

Is this an argument for or against meetups?

It's an explanation of why I won't attend any, and I assume some others as well.

it's going to bounce back. CCC is one of the biggest events which just happened for the first time after covid (also the summer camp). i think these big events will motivate smaller events to eventually reactivate too.

keep up updated on that developer forum. i am interested in joining (in german or english)

> . From my discussions with organizers in other groups, they are having a difficult time finding companies willing to host.

Don't rely on companies to host. Myself and my co-organizer tend to use a co-working space that we are members of, and tend to refuse the corporate sponsorships we are offered.

We probably don't get as big a crowd, but the people we do get tend to be really into the subject matter so it's a great group of people.

Mind you, the core of us have been at this for over a decade so that probably helps too.

Yes, I’m looking at joining a new space and part of my selection process is asking if I can have events there (without paying). More neutral territory is great.

However, someone’s got to get the pizza bill! I’ll probably cover it to start and maybe reach out to dev tool / B2B startups to see if they are interested in helping out.

I second this. Coworking spaces or maker spaces are great if you are doing a show + tell metup. The one I host is more of a social one, so we can get away with meeting at pubs.

Hi! I'm a founder of lu.ma which a lot of Meetup hosts have migrated to in the past year. We're kind of a mix between Meetup + Eventbrite. You can see some tech events we've featured here — lu.ma/explore

I'd love to see if I can help you get your community up and running again. Feel free to reach out - victor@lu.ma

In terms of funding / sponsorships, I think it's certainly harder than the market a few years ago since there is just less free money for tech / startups, but we've seen a lot of new tech communities thrive. Also, a lot of people are willing to pay to attend events!

The lack of an easily accessible search function/option to select a city (Seattle) other than SF/NYC/London/Paris/Dubai was a little annoying to me, and then the login gate when I try to click explore again was a little frustrating.

Thanks for that feedback! We are still pretty early on discovery so we don't support cities other than the cities listed there for public discovery.

We do have many events happening in Seattle tho so we should add discovery there in the next couple months .

this looks great, as does meetabit.com, mentioned in another post. the problem is that having so many different sites makes it difficult to find events in one location.

i think it would be good to consider a protocol to exchange event information so that a visitor can look up events from all these different meetup sites on one place. an aggregator or something the way how mastodon shares channels between servers.

> they are having a difficult time finding companies willing to host

I’ve enjoyed using my company space to host group meetings (the first one I remember doing was the cypherpunks). But these days my current company is basically virtual with only a small lab space so it’s not so much that I’m unwilling but rather no longer able.

I've been to a lot of great meetups that weren't associated with companies but just met up in a Dave & Busters meeting room or whatever pub and talk about some tech topic, so more like a get-together rather than a formal thing. Then it slowly turned into sales events as it became less about "here's some cool tech" (which at the time often meant some new OSS web framework - but through that we got to explore the evolution of the web) and more about someone trying to do the "I have a great business idea, can you build it and we'll split the profits, 80/20" (aka. Work for Exposure, instead of proper startup culture). Then it turned into crypto-pumper events. And then the pandemic thankfully put an end to it.

If you live in SF then it's probably been a much better experience because you probably had a much broader field of participants and events, but in the smaller place I used to live in, it just became an example of hustle culture ruining every shred of joy that's left in tech.

(And yes, I know, "Be the change you want to see", but I've got no interest in running meetups myself)

Back in the days I've started eBay Tech Talk Germany. We started small, with only people from my company attending (as CTO I kindly asked them to attend). We grew steadily to nearly 100 people attending, my employer payed the pizza and the location was (later) a coworking space (free). When I left others then grew the meetup to 150+ people attending and made it really successful.

Later in the small startup of my wife, we started a sofatalk meetup. Starting small, we ended up with up to 100+ monthly people attending and made it to the Berlin Olympia Stadium (free) as a location and caterer - with the stadium in company pink :-) But this took lots of effort, lots of talking to people on Linkedin, inviting them, lots of work to get free catering etc.

I think, start small, keep a constant pace, have good talks and the meetup will grow. But it will take many months and hard work (my wife successfully started a literature meetup last year).

Just to provide another data point, I've been running the HelsinkiJS meetup (https://helsinkijs.org/) for 12 years and our upcoming event has had 230+ people register within a day, which is a record. We've also got sponsors lined up for the next 6+ months.

I should add that we ended up building https://meetabit.com/ to make it easier to run the events and it's now being used by around 10 tech meetups in Finland. So, if you're looking for a free Meetup.com alternative, you should check it out. If you have some questions, drop me a line at doreply@meetabit.com.

100%. COVID ripped right through the tech scene, and doing it online is nowhere near close to the same experience.

Help run the boulder ruby meetup and have for a few years.

I'll say that the energy is building and we're seeing more and more new faces at meetups. We're also able to do both in-person and online, which leads to some nice recordings: https://boulder-ruby.org/

I've been speaker wrangling for years and it's still pretty easy to get quality talks. Some local, some from folks zooming in.

We're lucky enough to have sponsored space and zoom subscription, but there are ongoing costs (primarily food) that we're trying to figure out. Used to be easier to get a company to kick in $50-100/month. Now, as you mention, there's less hiring, so there's less incentive to sponsor. I think something similar is happening with tech conferences in general, just from anecdotes.

It's hard for me to know what is general slowdown and what is specific to the ruby language, though. But I've definitely seen a number of other tech meetups stop meeting over the past few years. I get an automated message about wantint to take over the group.

Meetup has historically been a great resource for technology events in my area… but I've found they've become quite "needy" lately. They tried to gamify joining/attending meetups, which leads to a lot of email noise. Maybe some people want to be in 100 meetup groups and attend a meetup every day of the week? But I doubt it's most users. They've also started showing "special offers". You often need to click through them to actually do what you came to the site to do.

I understand that Meetup was likely really hurt by the pandemic, but I hope this new leadership can find a way to make interacting with service fun again. It currently feels rather skeezy.

EDIT: As noted below, Bending Spoons also bought Evernote and that hasn't gone well. So, this might be a great space if someone is looking to compete!

Unfortunately, the heyday of technology events is in the past. Pretty much every business goes through a cycle of desperately clawing for revenue when the core business model falters.

Yep, those tasty formation and travel budgets are also being squeezed in the quest for profits, reducing the market size for these tech events...

I've been to one or two tech related meetups and they sucked. I've been to many many other meetups and had a great time. Still going every week or two.

Context / Plug: I'm a founder of a Meetup competitor / successor called lu.ma

I think Meetup got in a hard position because they didn't have very many paid events and their communities tended to churn off of Meetup. It's hard to make money as a community organizing tool so they tried a bunch of different ways of making money, including charging guests + showing irrelevant ads which both don't work.

Also, Meetup was in a very weird spot before the pandemic. They were bought by WeWork and then sold off in the WeWork crunch. I doubt any of the original team is still there.

Anyway, lu.ma is free to use for free events so if there's anything I can reach out with, feel free to ping me at victor@lu.ma

How do you guys make money ?

I'm surprised that LinkedIn hasn't done more here, at least for meetups that were work-adjacent like many tech meetups were/are. There's LinkedIn Local, but that's just a branding program and not a tool to facilitate meetups.

Meetup was vibrant in my area before the pandemic, but whenever I've checked in afterwards it's a ghost town of groups that are still there but haven't had a meeting in years. To some extent I think the pandemic has permanently altered the landscape of extracurriculars like those that Meetup was supporting, and I'm unsurprised that they're struggling to adapt.

I've run a couple of technology user groups, and even before the pandemic, demand was wavering. The advantages of in-person events (mostly for job seekers and recruiters) just don't outweigh the inconvenience for many.

Ditto, all the interesting things are gone and the only active groups are "Interesting Singles in their 20s and 30s" No more PUGs for D&D and board games. No tech meetups either.

I think a lot of non-tech events like D&D/running/board games/birdwatching/crafts/etc. now have left Meetup or never were there. I see a lot of these types of events promoted on Instagram and sometimes Facebook, because there's a bigger audience there. There are still some on my local Meetup, though.

I also sometimes see Zoom events, especially tech and business-oriented ones, where I frankly wonder if the live videoconferencing format is ideal or just an imitation of what people used to do in person. It's possible that podcasts and YouTube have eaten a lot of this market if people aren't going to get together in person.

> I think a lot of non-tech events like D&D/running/board games/birdwatching/crafts/etc. now have left Meetup or never were there. I see a lot of these types of events promoted on Instagram and sometimes Facebook, because there's a bigger audience there. There are still some on my local Meetup, though.

Perhaps that's why I no longer see them, I've deleted most of my social media so I don't have access to FB or IG for events.

A lot of the gaming communities moved to Discord near me. Unfortunately, most of the people offering to run a group only want to run it online, so I'll probably never have a replacement for my old in-person group that COVID killed prematurely.

Yeah, I'm about to fold my user group that I've been running for about 5 years now.

It was well attended in the before times, and we were able to move online during the pandemic which worked because people didn't have anything else to do.

Now we don't really get anyone coming, either in person or online and Meetup makes it really hard to figure out how to ask people "what do you actually want?".

I wonder if the inflation has made a lot of people tighten their spending. Many meetup events were at businesses where the expectation is that attendees are spending money. I suspect meetup groups are having a harder time finding white-collar companies with unused office space to let them host talks/socials in also.

People might also just be working more now

Nope, no cost to attendees and free pizza/beer.

I have a stable location, plus a couple of other locations that have been offered and that could be if the current space didn't want to host anymore.

I can only assume the topics and/or speakers are just not ones that people care about. But as mentioned, Meetup doesn't really let me get any form of feedback easily.

I can fire out an email to people who have ticked the box, but I have no idea how many have and therefore the potential reach. I've sent about 3 in the past 5 years, once looking for spaces to host us, once seeking speakers, and once to request speakers again and give a feedback form to figure out what people want.

Two people answered the form.

For a little context, this is a dev ops group but entirely flexible.

I've run lab sessions (that were attended pretty okay) where AWS gave us a bunch of credits for people to hack on lambda to explore different languages for Hacktober.

I had another where we managed to get a senior engineer from Pulumi, Hashicorp (for Terraform), and AWS (to present CDK) and got them to give a highlight and demo as to why pick them which I thought would be fun, and I found really interesting. For the heavy tech city that I'm in, it wasn't well attended.

Has anyone have thoughts as to what they would be interested in learning more about, more hands on?

As I said, I'm planning on folding because of the lack of feedback so this is more curiosity.

Been running Meetups for over 12 years. The pre-post pandemic era difference is insane, both on the organizer and on the attendees sides.

Used to have ~25% no shows, and no it's the other way around across all my Meetups. People subscribe but just won't show up. Venues are harder to find. Many organizers burnt out, .... Where we used to see 90+ people, we know are happy with 35.

It's kinda gloomy. Can't blame it on anyone either to be honest. Working hybrid means that any day of the week about half of the audience is working from home, many folks moved to the suburbs, and many others got burned by layoffs and simply don't have the same vibe about nerding away in the evenings after work.

Similarly, did anyone see a hackathon organized anywhere lately?

I'm really curious to see if they'll come back full force or will simply take another form in the future. where do people hang out together those days? Online?

I used to run a decent size event that would get about 70-80 people.

Part of me wants to try an bring it back, but I'm not sure I have the engergy or enthusiasm for it, and I'm just not sure there is the demand any more.

It feels like there are a couple of factors at play:

1) Working from home has become the norm for many, there are fewer people working in offices in town that would be able to just pop in after work. Suddenly you have to "commute" for the event when you've been at home all day. It's much more of a special effort.

2) It feels like the enthusiasm and excitement has gone out of tech. This may be UK specific, or perhaps it's just me, but being part of the tech industry doesn't feel so shiny as it once did. There doesn't seem to be that excitement about it. There is so much more scepticism/cynisism within the industry.

3) Covid in general just seemed to really change people's habits. It's taken real effort to get back into the habit of seeing old friends in person. I feel like a couple of years of restrictions and lockdowns kind of broke a whole generation of adults and it's taking us a lot longer to rebuild those habits than I ever thought it would.

Sorry to hear that, but I understand. I host a meetup currently, and #1 is very true. I see myself as competing vs. staying at home, so I want to make sure each event I host is memorable. I re-started hosting in December '21, so I'll say that there is a subset of people that WFH that do crave social interaction and will make the special trip. I get 20-25 folks show up every month, so I know there are people out there.

#3 is hard, and I can relate. It took a lot of activation energy to start hosting and attending dinner parties with friends again, specially after just having Zoom meetups for a long time.

> 2) It feels like the enthusiasm and excitement has gone out of tech. This may be UK specific, or perhaps it's just me, but being part of the tech industry doesn't feel so shiny as it once did.

Just conjecture here (from a fellow British person), but I think it might be something to do with tech employment that's changed. Listicles and blogs about Google's workplace culture were being churned out week on week in the mid 2010s, and working at a startup was portrayed as a futuristic, modern type of employment where you published a crowdfunding campaign, arrived at a makerspace to draw sketches of gadgets and GUI mockups with a team of enthusiastic colleagues, then, I don't know, did a TED talk before going out for a drink. The results for searching stock image sites with the term 'startup culture' bears witness to that stereotype!

I was never part of that, so I can't tell how accurate that portrayal was. However, since then, the press has now moved to reporting scandal after scandal: fraud in high places with companies like Theranos, well-meaning but naive founders falling victim to hostile takeovers, all punctuated by the routine whack-a-mole of cryptocurrency scams.

So perhaps it is not that technologists have become less enthusiastic as a whole, but the enthusiastic ones don't join many startups and FAANG-adjuncts any longer. Without the blank cheque of such an employer, financing a £££+ trip across the country for a meetup isn't so viable. I would certainly go to more conferences and hackathons if money weren't something to consider.

And on a personal note; your comment history suggests that we're not so very far away geographically, so make sure to post on HN if you do decide to restart your event :)

Thanks for your additional comments folks, it's good to hear from other experiences.

It still love Tech as much as before, but I also saw the "vibe" change over the past years. I was wondering if it really was a thing, or mostly me growing older :). It seems it might be a combination of both.

Hah, yeah, I think that's a pretty accurate portrail.

There was a real feeling that we were part of the future. Now we just seem to be part of turbocharging the worst aspects of ultra-capitalism.

Combined with the endlessly frustrating hype-cycles, it really doesn't surprise me that it's all lost its shine. I was reading some comment last week by someone bemoaning the cynicism around LLMs/GPT etc, and I couldn't really agree with it. Being in my mid-forties, I have been around for at least half a dozen major hype-cycles (including the previous couple of AI based ones), all of which have, at best taken a lot longer to come to fruition, and at worst have had sod all impact on the world. I can understand why people are sceptical that "this time it's different".

One of my goals for this year was to get out and be more social, and so I re-joined Meetup, and I was shocked to see how few tech events there were, at least in Paris. When I was just starting out as a programmer, there was a tech meetup I could attend every single day if I wanted.

Several commenters mention tech meetups languishing post-pandemic, but in my experience Meetup is still an awesome way to engage with the non-tech community in various activities from hikes to board games to movies. I've met several good friends through meetup. No comment on the acquisition, but I hope the platform continues to thrive.

Same. I haven't found a product that matches Meetup.com's reach. I've tried Facebook, but it's full of scammers and crazy people, too much for me to filter, but it has worked occasionally.

Why does meetup have so bad search when you have an account? It literally does not show events in a town with 30 events per week when you are logged in.

Seriously it feels like some product manager sabotaged the search, since you get better results when not logged in

Same xp

It seems Bending Spoons is on a shopping spree, it would be interesting to know how they are leveraging the financials for this. In terms of technology prowess they do not seem to be lacking.

They are buying everything for cheap, nobody wanted to buy Evernote or Meetup. It's more like they are gravekeepers.

There's a lot of money to be made in sunset industries, where you acquire cheap and keep it barely running for those still paying.

Fixing meetup, or making something that works is a fun mental-challenge.

Something like geo-specific chatrooms that unlock IRL functionality once you get enough members, and remove it if nobody shows up might be worth a try.

Or maybe most people in the US live in low-density suburbs and won't go to anything because parking/driving is a hassle, idk.

They seem akin to the investors buying old dying malls for cheap and optimizing for revenue generation at a lower scale.

https://www.investors.com/news/the-investors-who-see-plenty-...

Meetup has overwhelmingly been a net-positive for me over the past couple of years unlike most technology platforms these days. I've met some great people locally and felt much more in tune with my IRL community than I would have otherwise.

That being said, I've also been sad that Meetup appeared to be languishing as a modern web property. It really needs a "glow up" and general attention to UX so that it feels in line with other major local-based platforms such as AirBnB. It feels like nothing much has been done to improve Meetup since before the WeWork acquisition way back in the day, and if anything it's gotten cheesier with all the crappy ad popups.

Perhaps with a parent company that is squarely focused on software and design, Meetup can find its footing again and be that premier destination for all things local event communities. (Can we even talk them into adding ActivityPub support so Meetup's part of the Fediverse? A man can dream!)

Congratulations on the acquisition!

I re-started using Meetup again last year for IRL events in Chicago and I discovered a thriving tech community in my local area. I'm hoping that community can continue into 2024, and that Meetup will be the platform that hosts it. Otherwise there will be some other forum website, I'm sure we can hack one up.

Yes, there are the common complaints such as 'too many job seekers' and my personal favorite 'no I'm not on LinkedIn!' but I just want to tell everyone here that contrary to many of the comments on this thread the 'Rona, the AI bubble, and all of the news of tech layoffs did not kill the spirit of IRL meetup in Chicago.

I hope all of you will get out of the house this year and try going to a meetup. And meetup organizers, pro-tip: free pizza! Pizza keeps everyone coming back for more.

this is exactly what happened in vienna too. when i was there i had more pizza in a month than i usually have in a year. :-)

Meetup is so absurdly expensive for a glorified calendar and email list that they have driven away every group except for tech company sponsored ones.

$180/year for the cheapest plan drove me away. Facebook groups let you do a similar thing for free.

Let's hope it's run better than when it was owned by WeWork. WeWork paid $156 million, I wonder what Bending Spoons paid.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22728947 (Meetup spins off from WeWork after being bought by them for $200 million.)

Damn I remember the days when we had lanyrd for conferences in tech, and the old meetup for..meetups, feels like so many days ago.

The quality bar dropped sadly.

Nearly all these comments are about tech meetups. My first introduction to Meetup, though, was a long time ago for non-work groups: hiking, movies, dinners, cooking, dogs. I still go to my movie meetups sometimes. There still are hiking events. I thought of Meetup as something that ought to be a 501(c)(3).

I have to say that the tech meetups I belong to have about 10x the number of signups.

Mine too. I used to co-host a "New in town" meetup and had a blast the whole time.

That's the problem for Meetup and most SaaS apps: they aren't running a charity, and need to match up their offerings and demand with those who are willing to pay for their service.

Better as a charity, IMHO.

I hosted a movie meetup to see Moneyball. Afterwards, I asked the group, "How many liked the movie?" Every hand went up.

Then I asked, "How many are baseball fans?" No hands went up.

Good times.

Impossible here in Texas.

I strongly dislike sports. It is extremely difficult to find other men that do here. By "extremely difficult," I mean "you're going way out of your way to find them"

Meetup was a great place to find those people, but the platform seems mostly dormant.

These were almost all immigrant, mostly women: Indians and Chinese. Hey, this is California.

Bot?

Prepandemic,Meetup in Bangkok had regular language exchanges which were excellent for both practice and networking. post-pandemic, it kind of died off. You need local organizers who are dedicated.

Bingo. Local organizers are so key.

I run a local data science focused tech meetup group here in Washington DC, and it's hard to beat the discoverability of meetup. We've tried diversifying over the years, and it's hard to beat the discoverability of meetup. It's the opt-in digital equivalent of putting up fliers.

Whoa. I missed this one.

I used Meetup for years to power the "Tech Events Network" with 50+ US city-based accounts like https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents

Over the ~5 years I ran it, it was up to 4M+ impressions/month with a massive newsletter and pushing tons of traffic to tech groups, mostly hosted on Meetup. Then Meetup changed their API policy and said this was "an inappropriate use of the API" and poof, gone.

Frustrating as hell because group leaders loved it and most of the traffic was going to them anyway. Arg.

Yeah we use Meetup for probably 3-5 events a week at our makerspace. Their gradual decline has had us ready to stand up our own minimal replacement but Meetup.com is so good for discovery, SEO, etc.

Their API changes have been a big pain in the ass for us. Just let us pay for access to the older API and we'll gladly do it. Then they turned off RSS feeds and nobody can get any answer out of them about whether it was intentional.

Now that companies are less inclined to have meetups, meetup needs a way to bring the ecosystem back without tanking sales. I've thought about having a tech meetup, and would like to leverage meetup's marketing, but

1. I don't know if this will be a recurring thing more than 2-3 times

2. Without company support, I have to put down my credit card as the organizer, even if the event fizzles out.

I would pay for meetup! But I would not pay more than a fair rate for 2-3 events, unless it truly takes off. Looking at the contents of meetup, I'm guessing smaller organizers are in a similar boat. No one wants to pay a monthly subscription for small things, so people who are unsure stay out, and smaller metros just don't have anything but timeshare-y sales pitches that give the organizer an ROI.

Meetup should

1. Make the organizer interface free.

2. If you want your upcoming meetup to show up in the list, you pay a one-time per-event fee that is more than the per-month cost of a subscription.

This should hopefully bring their market back for tech meetups.

Not sure that’s the solution. I think the issue is poor attendance of existing events, not lack of events.

My perception in a non-major metro is that the existing events are all really low quality, and that the quality passion project ones are gone. There are plenty of meetups for people trying to get me to buy their SaaS, but shared interest groups that don't stand to make money from their events have evaporated.

I host a Meetup just to meet new people interested in startup. I started it because there wasn’t a startup focused Meetup in my area. It’s hard for me to imagine that the $70/6 months is what prevents someone from hosting a high quality Meetup. There is so much more time value (and even money) to hosting high quality Meetup than the fee they collect.

I've been hosting meetups online and in person since 2014 and launched a new one that meets monthly in the Southeast US in 2021. It's grown from 5 people to 45. We usually get 20-25 people per meetup nowadays. In person.

I suggest you check out Eventbrite. Events with up to 25 tickets are free to publish. If you want to offer more tickets for an event, you can pay a one-time fee or sign up for the monthly subscription.

If you are just testing the waters for your meetup you could run it for free with less than 25 tickets and see if there is interest without putting any money down.

You would still need to promote the event where people you are targeting hang out. Social media, forums, town subreddits, etc

Thanks! Yup, that sounds like what I need. The additional marketing to get people in the door would still be a thing with meetup too, but if Eventbrite will let me have a link to a meeting without signing up for a subscription, that would be a huge help!

If any meetup people are looking at this - what Eventbrite offers is what I want from you! I would even pay for it on a one time basis, given that I know there are or were a lot of tech people who used to watch meetup for new events.

I feel like Meetup has always been a somewhat bad product. Stuck in the early 00's. When they started charging crazy amounts to organize a meetup I got sick of them.

Recently we've been using https://guild.host to manage most of our Svelte Society meetups.

Wow they held out for decades. We used to go to a nontech vegan families meetup. One of their coders was in the group so we got the scoop that they did their own capital raise and really resisted selling out. I guess a mix of dramatic slowdown in their business and the founders and investors wanting an exit.

Apparently getting acquired by Bending Spoons is a guarantee for layoffs[1]:

- In September 2022, Bending Spoons acquired FiLMiC... In December 2023, the original FiLMiC team were laid off

- In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote... Evernote laid off all of its existing staff

- In January 2024, Bending Spoons acquired Mosaic Group, a mobile app developer. The acquisition also involved the layoff of all 330 existing staff

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons

For anyone looking for a non commercial option, https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ has made some great improvements lately.

Wasn't there a self-hosted event management app put out by a French startup awhile ago? My memory is foggy on this. They had colorful branding and a mascot.

Probably Mobilizon: https://joinmobilizon.org/en/

Yep, that's the one. Thanks!

There is also alf.io

2019 I started a meetup group. My wife had died end 2018. The group was for widows / widowers and it was explicitly for social purposes. No chatting up, no hookups, no 'hunting'.

It was good and a few people made friendships, a few others - myself included - would meet regularly for coffee of an afternoon. Being able to talk, to listen, to understand with others who had lost their partners of multiple decades was helpful.

Covid happened.

Meetup then decided to start charging even more.

I was already paying purely for them to host and display some text. Their extra charge put me on the hook for whoever attended. More people = more money.

No, just NO.

End result was group deleted, we all lost out and meetup seen as hostile.

This news?

Fuck you.

Same owners as Evernote. Meetup has already led the market in enshittification, and they right next to another enshittified brand.

The usage will continue to plummet as long as they squeeze premiums out of organizers. It's sad really, all the old groups are essentially being held for ransom.

Hopefully this improves the quantity and quality of meetups in my area, which seems to mostly be ESL, toastmasters, book clubs, various fringe nutters, barhoppers, and old people who want to go on short walks.

at least you have that. Here, it's mostly churchgoers and "business networking"

Bending Spoons also owns Evernote, which has been thoroughly enshitified. This doesn't sound good for Meetup.

Reality hasn't been good to Meetup. At this point, it's just a matter of squeezing the juice out of a dying tree.

What did reality do to meetup?

People stopped going to in-person events.

I visited more events post-covid than pre-covid.

There's a group of people who were eager for events once the pandemic "ended", but that group is much smaller than those who used to regularly go to events and stopped. Companies like Meetup need scale to be successful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic

As a data point, I used to organize a Meetup in the very city Bending Spoons is based at. The last meetup was right before the covid pandemic hit. We never had a new one. We keep using our Telegram channel to exchange news and experiences.

many places are bouncing back. give it some time. and do promote the idea. likely the problem is that the pre-covid organizers have moved on, so it takes a new generation of volunteers to organize something.

Product-wise I'd argue that Evernote was in the middle of a deshitification but was financially running on fumes, and the move to Electron was the right one although the release was rushed and it alienated the user base. I find it interesting that BS is a native mobile shop and now they have to manage some frontend built on top of Electron.

Growth-wise is another thing, I think they have decided to get rid of the free users and in my opinion they have skimmed too much from the free tier which is basically a "try before you buy" now.

Maybe I’m an outlier but I continue to use Evernote. It works well as of last 6 months (have had an account for over a decade) and find it just works well enough to not abandon.

Be aware: Your next renewal will be double the price it was last year.

they also own Filmic, which has also been thorooughly enshittified. Not holding my breath for Meetup

I've been using Supermomos recently for events, they enforce going to events you sign up for in a gamified way so it works well.

This is just the beginning of tech P/E firms scooping up apps.

meetup has been bought by wework before and survived the wework crash, so i am less worried compared to other buyups. this is probably not an exit of the founders.

Meetup is great in North America, meh in Western Europe and a ghost town in Asia and Eastern Europe, outside of enclaves like the digital nomads in say Bali.

Not only that, half the "meetups" are online-only, with crypto bros trying to get you into their latest scheme.

And another quarter are legit, but they're attended by crypto bros trying to get you into their latest scheme.

that's the effect of covid. some places are bouncing back.

i spent some time in vienna recently. i had a tech meetup event every day of the week. some days i had to choose between two or three events on the same day. many were sponsored with food and drinks. and they were all on meetup.com. the other alternative was eventbrite, and that had a mere fraction of the events compared to meetup.

You can filter online-only events.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com