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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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