Ask HN: What should I do with meet.hn? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What should I do with meet.hn?

257 pointssirobg168 comments

Hey HN! A few weeks ago, meet.hn was released: (Show HN: Meet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41539125)

We are now about 1700 hackers willing to meet each other in almost 700 locations worldwide.

Since then, some requested features and bug fixes have been implemented:

- locations are now searchable and not restricted to a simplistic city-country pair

- locations work with diacritics and diverse languages

- new socials: personal website, email, Mastodon, Discord, GitLab, Google Scholar, YouTube, etc.

- upon user request, I can now showcase your local meetups on your location listing, as it's done for Old Toronto: [1]

About actual meetings, I'm aware of around a dozen so far, but I think many more occurred.

Why am I writing this post?

About 80% of the ~1700 signups happened in the first 36 hours after launch. As expected, signups dropped pretty quickly, and now it gains about one new user every other day.

I think a ton of global value (and local joy) can emerge from HN users meeting each other. That's why I'm writing this post. To answer the question: how can we meet more? and how can meet.hn help?

What I thought about:

1. Implementing RSS for each location: helpful for RSS users only, and not that useful if there are no new registrations.

2. Email notification system: wide audience, but requires users to give their emails.

3. Turning meet.hn into some sort of an atproto [3] project, or at least leveraging it somehow. Might be more Bluesky centric (if we use labels, for example), but maybe not?

4. A bookmarklet which, once clicked when on a HN post, would insert a meet.hn logo next to all user names of users commenting there and registered on meet.hn

5. An HN "proxy website" which would copy HN in every way, but would add the meet.hn logo just like the bookmarklet described point 4 would do, but everywhere and automatically.

6. Create Telegram (or equivalent) channels for each location

But all of these ideas are unideal fixes. The lowest common denominator between everyone on HN... is HN. Hence, meeting right from HN would be best. An MVP for this could be to have a "willing to meet" attribute with a boolean value (like the "showdead" or "noprocrast" attributes). When enabled, an icon would be shown next to the user name in threads.

I talked to dang, and even if the idea of implementing something on HN is not out of the question, it is not on the roadmap yet.

Let's discuss all of this in the comments. Looking forward to hearing what you think.

[1] https://meet.hn/city/43.6534817,-79.3839347/Old-Toronto

[2] https://meet.hn/city/43.6044622,1.4442469/Toulouse

[3] https://atproto.com/

View on HN

I run a club for a certain car.

The thing is, people generally don't want to be responsible for organizing meetups. Many will happily attend but not host.

My guess is you need to find community leaders who can handle and own the responsibilities involved with hosting meets in their areas.

At the end of the day I don't think a website is going to help convince people to take on that kind of role. It's more of a personality thing.

With my club, we use Facebook events and generally just screenshot the details and further disperse them that way to discord, slack, instagram, etc. But none of that is enough alone for someone to host. Even when it's as simple as picking a meet location and time and sending out invites.

Internations, a social platform for the expats & locals, actively encourages people to become event organizers. It makes sense to recruit people willing to host.

also, many will signup to attend and bail last minute

Very true. About Meetup.com specifically (a couple of years ago at least), attending rate was something like 15-20% of the people who RSVP'd.

I get about ~40-50% attendance rate from meetup, but we've been going for years so the regulars are pretty consistent.

Higher indeed. 40% no shows for a meetup I run (60-100 slots, meeting monthly)

This is solved by charging $19 or so.

Well yes, but 100% attendance of zero people is still zero people.

Great way to guarantee I won't attend your meetup

If you distributed the $19 to the people who did actually show up... you would actually get people to show up... maybe there's some kind of business plan embedded in your comment.

That is a fascinating idea that I'm surprised I haven't heard before. I guess implicitly it sort of happens when the money is spent on food or drinks.

Double-digit is too high, you'd have people showing up just to get paid - which is not what you want.

There might be a sweet spot around $3-5 for that model.

Even better: charge $5 to book; attendants will be refunded the fee; any leftovers will be used for refreshments at future events.

True, but this is also an emergent behavior of the Meetup UI. It has no (clear) way to say "I'm interested, might attend, can't commit right now, please remind me day-of." So if you want that reminder — if you want it on your calendar — you have to RSVP as if you were really 100% coming. Meetup doesn't (clearly) offer any other option.

I've RSVPed myself with this intent plenty of times. I'd use a "maybe, please remind me" button if it existed.

Contrast Doodle.com, which offers a "yellow maybe" option intermediate between "green yes" and "red no."

Thanks for the perspective!

I think I have a communication problem with meet.hn.

People seem to assume it has been created to setup these kinds of large meetups.

In fact, I created it for small or even 1-1 meetups in the first place. Meeting a single person or a small group of people seems much more interesting, easy and valuable to me.

Of course I'm not assuming everyone thinks the same way, but don't you think there is an audience for that in the HN community?

I'd consider the demographics of people who regularly visit HN. Not to put a slight on anyone but I think a good chunk of people on here probably don't enjoy in-person meetups.

Again, IME it's not the size of the meetup but the responsibility.

Even in my example, the average attendance is maybe 10-20 people. Sometimes as low as five people.

And some areas only have 5 or fewer regularly.

We can't even get lead devs on camera.

Hmm if I wanted to meet up with one person from HN, I would just contact them using the details in their profile. If there were no contact details, I wouldn't meet with them. I don't quite see the value for 1:1 meetups I guess.

How would you know this person is located in your area or in the area you might visit some time?

I guess you would have to dig, right?

Well, with meet.hn:

1. You don't have to dig

2. People are more willing to meet on average than a random person on the internet

3. You can also check other locations and other people super fast

For in person with unknown people I think large gatherings can break down the fear wall as people can assess before commiting.

For most hn users offering something virtual would be more more inline with expectations and removes those local barriers.

What might work better is an HN forum with regional or city subforums (structured based on HN member density). First get HNers living close to each other to communicate, then they will meet up by themselves.

Of course, there’s the moderation issue.

In my opinion (as some who recently moved out of a big city) it would be very valuable to have an easy way to meet local HN’rs. Either for group sessions or 1-1 or something in between.

I think you’re drawing premature conclusions from the dropoff in signups.

All users are probably in the “now what?” Stage. And if more people knew your site was a way to connect with nearby HNers (ie the value prop was higher and better known), you’d have a lot of interest. So classic chicken egg problem I believe. But there are many successful sites that have broken through this phase. In my opinion you should keep it up.

Kill two birds with one stone:

1) Add functionality to auto-setup digital meetups and invite people within 200mi or something. 2) Let people meet in groups digitally, and maybe that spurs them to meet in person.

Community leaders I feel like leads to having meetups conform to one personality.

Ideally, users need an actual reason to meet.

I don't know about calling them community leaders; someone has to find a place to have the meeting and let people know about it. That can be done without the entire meeting conforming to their personality. But at the end of the day, someone has to do some legwork or it just ain't gonna happen.

The community leaders in this scenario aren't leading the meeting. I guess it depends on the format of said meeting.

In my case, they really just set the location and time, in addition to making sure nobody is causing trouble, littering, etc.

Other than that, it's a free-for-all.

I think its more subtle. Whoever is organizing is setting the tone/nature of the meetings.

For example, there is a chess club I wanted to participate in, but the organizer always picks some loud bar, which just isnt my idea of a chess club.

Can that role be automated? Some sort of community vote on a text proposal from the system, along with rsvp, reminders, etc? people may have more skin in the game if they voted on a time/place.

Automate place and tine selection: under eight in the community? Beer hall with 4+ stars that don’t need reservations. 1:1? Coffee shop. Etc. send over some date time location tuples, hold a vote, maybe do a runoff, whatever.

I know that if I got a flash meetup invite to a coffee shop along with instructions on how to meet people (to the left of the door at 10am sharp) I might actually make time. Worst case I drink coffee, which I was planning on doing anyway.

Basically: take the initiative?

You can but I think people like the human element that "someone" has put this whole thing together.

At my events for that club, I don't lead anything at the event. I basically make sure people aren't causing any trouble or littering (none of this ever happens but it's just my assumed responsibility).

But I'll notice people asking around to know who set things up. Usually they find me and thank me because they enjoyed meeting other people and learning from each other.

Again, very human kind of thing I think.

That’s been my experience too. I have a friend who is very involved in a large (250+ people every week, same time same place) - she has a group of volunteers and a rota, who help and set everything up. Her job is mostly keeping those volunteers happy and dealing with the occasional troublemaker (usually in the form of someone forcing themselves into the volunteer role and trying to “make things better” without understanding why things are the way they are.

In my experience (which is a lot), like 80% of having a successful gathering is: Picking a date, Finding a location, Letting people know, Keeping it consistent.

I've been involved in organizing well over a thousand geek meetings, either as the primary organizer or on the "steering committee". You're probably right, most people don't want to be responsible for organizing it. But, at the end of the day, someone has to find a place and pick a date and let people know. You don't even have to go crazy with any of those, you could pick a coffee shop or restaurant, unless you get real popular.

>But, at the end of the day, someone has to find a place and pick a date and let people know. You don't even have to go crazy with any of those, you could pick a coffee shop or restaurant, unless you get real popular.

This is exactly what people don't want to do. Even when the meeting location or time haven't changed in two years.

Believe me, I've had people ask about when the next meeting will be. I tell them I'm unavailable to set things up. I tell them they can feel free to go through the motions, just create the event in the calendar and really just make sure nobody makes a mess or anything during the event.

It sounds simple but again, unless someone has the right personality and drive to be responsible for this...

A few things:

1. The location resolution is too high for regions - ex: all of the Seattle area should lump together and only break apart into smaller locations (Bellevue, etc) when zoomed all the way in.

2. Email notification worked for kismet, but I don't know what the uptake is.

3. Having a way to participate in multiple locations would be useful.

4. Profiles are interesting, but per another poster, finding a way to capture interests and make connections would be even better. Maybe a combination of profile + scrape of comments/submissions/socials to generate profiles (that are only accessible to signed up users)?

1. Do this ^^^ keep reminding us!

I think a 3 monthly submission to HN saying "Ask HN: who is looking to meet up" where the comments are used to meet but it is a bit of an ad for your site."

Get a nod from the mod before proceeding though!

pre-COVID there were regular HN meetups in different cities, I am not sure why the practice died off.

there was a pandemic not soon after that time, I believe.

I'm definitely a fan of a monthly "Meet HN" thread that others have recommended, if dang would allow it. The ability to post local events and find others currently interested in meeting up could be invaluable.

The biggest bottleneck of the website is constant visibility. I have meet.hn on my profile. I haven't had anyone reach out about it. I kinda forgot that it was there. Having a "Meet HN" thread gives people looking for local connections a consistent and visible way to find others.

I currently run local events on Meetup.com (one personal and one professional). At the end of the day, the audience size there is always going to be larger than through something like this, so I do agree with sirobg that the best fit is for facilitating 1:1 conversations.

Funny enough, I am meeting with someone from HN in Austin next week, but it was purely serendipitous from a cold outreach email where we happened to be working on a similar project and realized we were in the same city.

Random thoughts.

HN meetings are often organized on meetup.com, eventbrite, etc.... so maybe start linking to those meetngs?

Also, There's an organization called Pechakucha Night. It started in Tokyo by an architecture company. Their format was each presenter gives them 20 images, they run for 20 seconds each on auto-play. So your presentation is exactly 400 seconds long (6 mins, 4 second).

In any case, with no promotion on their part that I know if, people started organizing the same event in other countries. There are 1325 places in the world that have had one of these meetups. 57 meetups happened in November

They run a website that people can post their meetups.

https://www.pechakucha.com/

A similar example is Nerd Nite which IIUC followed a similar pattern. Started in one place. Others, inspired, copied.

https://nerdnite.com/

Anyway, the point is maybe they're a model. Have your site be similar. Maybe contact existing meetups and ask them to add to your event list.

I don't know if a format would help. Nerd Nite is generally three 10-20 minute talks with 20 minutes between. Pechakucha Night is usually 2-3 sets of ~4 talks with a 20 minute break between talks. Maybe suggesting a more fixed format, rather than just "hang out", is a better draw, more likely to attract people to the event?

Also, random observation. Pechakucha night in my city used to be held in a big room with no seats which IMO helped people mingle. They moved it to a place with seats and everyone just sits in their seats with who ever they came with. Similarly, Nerd Nite was at reasonably large venue. They moved to some restaurant like venue and now it's nearly impossible to mingle as there is no room to stand near anyone.

I know you're not necessarily organizing any events but maybe a "guideline" on running events would be useful for encouraging people to organize.

I like the idea of the automatic format, I've been to a lot of tech meetups with bad formats, or bad speakers that way overrun their time.

Random thought(s): A monthly "Meet HN" post– for each area (per city might be too small?) decide a public location & time and list it.

Or: Maybe one (random) person of that area gets to decide a meeting time & location.

Or: each person can put a location in their profile and a bot will pick the location (randomly or by "count")

> A monthly "Meet HN" post– for each area (per city might be too small?)

Per city would definitely be spam! There are 720 cities as we speak.

Or it could not be, but it would require locating them under a specific route like news.ycombinator.com/meet or something.

i was thinking rather the meet HN would summarize for all cities, or in the comments or whatever. or just link to a overview site on meet.hn. but anyway, as i said: just random thoughts that were the first ones to go through my mind. might help coming up with better ideas.

Suggest users to add an email on meet.hn so that you/host can send email for meetups? They can add an anon throw away email if they want. You may want to verify the hn profile though (hn doesn't have oauth so may be some string in hn profile - okay, it became complicated now).

I mean a way to allow direct communication on city/country level. But if you do Telegram then you are part of a big noise - because every body, their dogs, and their dog's granny have a telegram channel now - many of them too active.

Or - let city/country host/admins make post on city/country portal on meet.hn make announcements, posts to which users can subscribe to if they want (you bypass all the implementation in this manner)

Something along the lines of a tweet 'will be programming @starbucks for next 4 hours' ... then if people are in the mood they can spontanously join up. I think this would help bootstrap the more scheduled meetups.

If I understand your suggestion correctly, it would require people to already be following the account that's tweeting this.

Also, it would probably require cross posting on Bluesky/Mastodon as from my experience with meet.hn user base, a significant % is not on X anymore (?).

If its geotagged, it would not require a priori following of the account, just some kind of location search/notification feed.

Oh so you mean that users would post anywhere (Bluesky, X, Mastodon, ...) and I would track these posts and then display them in the appropriate location on meet.hn?

Sounds pretty good! If that's not what you meant, please correct me.

That's more or less the idea, the actual mechanism is an implementation detail. You could host the messages yourself, or instruct people to update their hn_bio or RSS feed which will sometimes have messages like this :

hnmeet@present_time@location@duration.

This is the best comment about meetups of all time

One thing I found strange about SF is that I never found a group that would do the weekly hang. The weekly hang is a socially porous experience, it has a fixed location and fixed start time but everything else is improvised. Different people could dip in and out, people felt free to bring new friends, people they just started dating, friends from out of town etc. Some people came once and never again, others become regulars. The hallmark of a great weekly hang is that the entire initial cohort gets replaced but the weekly hang still persists.

It's a commitment in time that "busy professionals" ostensibly had no time for which is why I think it was so unpopular in SF but it really killed a big part of the vibe of the city for me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35608965

> is not on X anymore

Or never was on X :)

Edit: funny enough, the only HN user that registered for my city has X as a social profile. Guess I'll never know more.

Edit 2: tbh why would it be compulsory to have a profile on some social networking thing?

> why would it be compulsory to have a profile on some social networking thing?

It's not! In fact you have several other options if you prefer.

Speaking of meeting people, here's a new app for managing who you might meet from people in your contacts.

Ev Williams, founder of Twitter and Medium, introduces Mozi, a new social app focused on real-world relationships. Mozi syncs with contacts (hashed so Mozi doesn't know them), keeping data up-to-date and enabling users to connect with others planning to be in the same location and choosing to let a circle know. The app aims to facilitate in-person interactions and strengthen relationships, prioritizing privacy and non-performative features.

The idea is to take the media out of social media, make it just social again. Non-performative, and non-pushy / non-discovery, for "your" people:

https://ev.medium.com/making-social-social-again-0126fa5c6ce...

https://www.mozi.app/

https://www.mozi.app/privacy

With no apparent "network effects" yet, will this turn out like Path which was limited to your closest 50 people? Path was such fresh air.

Meanwhile, clay.earth seems better suited for things like meeting people sharing professional interests. But one imagines Mozi has plans...

> "willing to meet" attribute

The problem is I think everyone is willing to meet if they see mutual value, and unwilling to meet if they do not see mutual value.

The attribute wouldn't force you to accept a meeting in any way. It would just be used to display some kind of marker next to your posts on HN.

Then, if readers feel you are interesting to them, they would check your HN profile and contact you using the info in your profile (if any).

Every Austen novel condensed into a single sentence.

I live in the South Bay and would be willing to "host". But there's no way to announce a meetup or even reach out to some people.

If you want, I can display something similar to this at your location: https://meet.hn/city/43.6534817,-79.3839347/Old-Toronto

Hit me up if interested :)

Ok, I emailed you.

If I were to go out of my way to meet a stranger via a platform like meet.hn, then I would at least want to meet a person that had interesting opinions/experiences on subjects that we shared an interest in.

Say what you will about internet points, but they can be a decent signalling mechanism.

When looking over the ~50 accounts listed in my current country of residence, these are mostly all <50 karma accounts created in the last 1-3 years.

Which all points to very little engagement on HN (and looking at their comment/submit history confirms this), making it difficult for me to justify the use of my already scarce time in this way.

For me the biggest issue is to connect with people. Having a some form of opt-in automatic email chain or private chat for people located in the same city to discuss and connect would be great.

> For me the biggest issue is to connect with people

Could you elaborate? what is painful to you?

> automatic email chain or private chat

Any more ideas about that? I think it's similar to the suggestion I made in the post about creating Telegram channels for each location, but I'm not sure.

Also, someone already said they wouldn't join a Telegram channel and would prefer Signal. That really illustrates the kind of challenges I'm facing in trying to bring the HN community together.

> Could you elaborate? what is painful to you?

People put one or many links to their accounts. Unless there is a email or an actual social media, it is very hard to pick one of these as a way of connecting people.

For example I saw a lot of accounts with just github (same goes with some of the social medias), I am not sure what to do outside of following it. I would assume there is also a understandable inertia to put your own social account or email directly here.

> Any more ideas about that?

Email-chain would be the easiest. I wouldn't rely on a third party service like Telegram or Signal directly as that would mean losing a lot of people because as you realised it is hard to convince everyone to agree on Apples to Oranges.

One thing that could also work is creating a some form of very simple forum board like interface on the website directly for people to post/comment their invitation/willingness to meet up or how they wish to be contacted about meeting up (maybe with a bit information about what they expect or what you can expect).

It could function like a Facebook Group in a way which served a similar purpose in past.

There could also be a Country/Nation board that will also share same posts as your city so more people can see them. If you would like to discuss in more detail, you can send me a email.

A lot of good points here, thanks a lot!

> Email-chain would be the easiest.

It would require users to share their emails to meet.hn, am I right?

> creating a some form of very simple forum board

Might be a good idea as well. It would require more work and maintenance but could be valuable.

Possibly unpopular here but how about a Discord server with a channel for every city? When you join Discord, a bot could ask which cities you want to join (allowing people who travel to join multiple cities, but maybe limit it to some sane number to prevent bots from trawling everything).

Haha and here I was going to suggest a discord channel for each location. I checked out the two cities I've worked in and was pleasantly surprised by the number of brave people who added their LinkedIn accounts, and doubly so when seeing some old colleagues as mutuals. Not sure I'd want to add meet.hn to my main, maybe make a "real me alt" specifically for that. I wonder if others have done the same since it's a lot of users with old accounts and no comment histories.

I made hn-pm.me exactly for that. You can sign up with your hn username only, no email required. You have to put a random key into your profile during signup, but you can remove it later.

I think the problem is people are either (a) in tech-centric cities - where there are lots of other meetups and already know lots of HN types around. Or, (b) there are only one or two people in their city, so can't sustain a meetup. (Q: how many of your cities only have one "hacker" in them?)

I could see it as a nice way to meet like-minded people while traveling: I used to use couchsurfing (which has kind of died out) like this: if traveling alone to foreign place, it's nice to meet some locals.

> (b)

I think dang's answer about this is on point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42411843

> I could see it as a nice way to meet like-minded people while traveling [...] it's nice to meet some locals.

Exactly what I had in mind as well!

I think dang was responding to someone in a mid-sized US town, where there are probably more HN users. I think in other parts of the world, there really may be not many.

You only need one person who seem interesting enough to want to have a quick chat with :)

Ok. If anybody reading this is Gautemala, drop me a line.

> 4. A bookmarklet which, once clicked when on a HN post, would insert a meet.hn logo next to all user names of users commenting there and registered on meet.hn

> 5. An HN "proxy website" which would copy HN in every way, but would add the meet.hn logo just like the bookmarklet described point 4 would do, but everywhere and automatically.

No, you need to flip the idea. Make a browser extension that adds a link to every username that is registered on meet.hn.

We do meet each other all the time, except at industry events. If perhaps we wore special HN buttons, maybe we could signal to each other our involvement with the community?

We need some Masonic style secret handshakes, make it seem like some kind of cult. Though honestly ranting about something that was front page the day before is probably enough to out you

Just come wearing hot grits. Oh wait...

I often glance at peoples phones on the train, hoping to see anyone just browsing the same sites as me.

No one: never seen a fellow HNer, blueskyer, mastoner, lemmyer

The Narwhal oranges at half-past-three?

I think firstly you should try to make meetups virtual and based on topics of interest? let the system get traction and then do physical things. Also allow users to have their own username so that they can choose to disassociate with their original HN account for privacy.

I would personally join a virtual online meetup on my favourite topic for sure! If not that, I would watch it later on youtube FOR SURE. It's like a discord for hackernews tbh.

I've added myself because why not? I think this is a cool project. Sure people are shy and I understand that, I'm shy too. Or I just don't know why contact someone just because he is on hackernews. But I've been on hackernews for more than a decade and I always used throwaway accounts and I realized that it is a waste to be too anonymous at a certain point.

Even when there were just forums, it was useful to have an identity on a forum, I remember meeting people with similar interests in the early 00s thanks to them, it's worth to try again.

EDIT: also can you consider add the personal websites as links? Socials are added but I think it's cool if we get to easily travel to users personal websites. Yeah there may be some abuse, but maybe it's worth the risk? Please consider this too

why do you say it's not worth to be anonymous while still using a throwaway?

internet today is very different from 90s forums.

imo it pays handsomely to be anonymous most of the time.

sometimes it's good but the problem with using only throwaways is that you don't get to build a presence which is a shame because a presence eases the mind of everyone if you wanna get in contact for business or anything else.

Also I've made this account to stop using throwaways, I've just added my website too so I'm definitively not that anonymous now (thanks for pointing out this would still look like a throwaway)

And here I thought "Yay, I can find more people in my area." Nope, it's just me, like I suspected.

Yeah that's the case for some locations indeed.

But next time you go on a trip, have a look at the map! You might be able to meet someone interesting there.

Btw, your socials are not displayed on meet.hn because you modified the text you had to paste in your HN description.

Just reporting, in case it wasn't expected.

More info in the note here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42411640

Yeah I realized, but preferred to keep my own format.

You may be the only one who signed up for this, but I bet there are lots of HN users in your area, for some value of 'lots'.

The question is how to connect people with each other.

Has HN ever published traffic stats by country? Just curious.

United States 53.76%

United Kingdom 6.17%

India 5.54%

Germany 3.53%

Canada 3.4%

Australia 3%

Others 24.6%

Does anyone know how those numbers are generated? e.g. are they one of those outfits that use a browser extension?

Those numbers seem mostly in the ranges I posted back in 2018 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521). But the total views they report at https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com is way off. I think they report 11M monthly (I can't view the site anymore), but the actual number was 209M in November. There's a lot of bot traffic in there, though, so it's a bit hard to interpret.

Edit: on the other hand, 16% of those 209M hits were by logged-in users, who tend not to be bots, and the ratio of logged-out to logged-in users is always high (I would have said at least 10 to 1), so maybe 209M isn't so far off.

I did once, a long time ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 (March 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444556 (Feb 2018)

It's on my list to do this again!

There is even one user at North Korea. So you are not alone.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I've often thought having an official real-time chat would be great to bring the community a little bit closer. There have been a few unofficial chats created and proposed, or chat channels on existing IRC servers, but nothing's really had enough traction to stick around for long enough. I'm thinking something like an IRC server that could be joined via a web-based client accessible via a link up the top, authenticating you based on your existing HN login. I imagine it would be accessible via any IRC client though I'm not exactly sure how authentication would work in that case.

I suggested this idea to dang and he expressed a similar sentiment to you regarding bring the HN community closer.

Did something change with how the locations are managed? I tried to add myself and used the lookup for London, which then gave a lat/long as part of the address, like your examples. But then I noticed that I was all alone and the "rest" of london in a 30+ group have their location without lat/lng.

This is what it gave me when entering London, UK:

meet.hn/city/51.5074456,-0.1277653/London

But compare with, e.g, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jones58 - meet.hn/city/gb-London.

It looks like that's affecting other cities like Paris too - a large "original" group, and then a solitary one with lat/lng.

Yes, I had to make a change about urls in order to support locations from all around the world. lat/long ended up being the only unique thing in common.

To do so, I implemented a search using OpenStreetMap. The thing is, OpenStreetMap can give several results for a given location (and rightfully so). Example with Paris: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Paris%2C%20France.

When I updated the way meet.hn handles location, I migrated all city ids like the one you mention "gb-London" to a new one using lat/long.

The problem is: when users select a location, they can end up at another (close) location suggested by OpenStreetMap. To mitigate this pb, if locations have the same full name or OpenStreetMap id, I don't display them in the location selector.

Also, I put locations of type "city" first to nudge users into selecting cities more and hopefully end up with less problems of this kind.

Code about this is here: https://github.com/borisghidaglia/meet-hn/blob/808143d36841b...

There is something to be done, but I only had overly complicated ideas to fix this.

Very open to suggestions. Don't hesitate to open an issue/PR for this on GitHub.

I made a (now deleted) root comment about this, but saw someone else commented about it to.

All the links people have in their profiles basically doesn't work anymore. Maybe you could at least setup a redirect from the URL without the coordinates to the one with the coordinates, assuming when they set up the link, they used whatever first result you got back then. Basically run both versions (not literally), but redirect from the old one.

Good practice to keep URLs alive one way or another for as long as you can, as effectively all the links the initial group of users put no longer works as expected.

I would choose (3) -- i.e., an ATProto project. The idea would be to have public but "local" discussions that could lead to in-person interactions when people feel comfortable.

P.S: I just signed up. I am in the Chicago area. Would love to grab coffee.

Very helpful that it's open, as while I wouldn't share my info, I would absolutely pop in if I knew one was going on.

there's an old thread about how to run an event that doesn't suck, but it may be for more structured events than meetups. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32876804

even a lightning round with the t-shirt slogan of what you're either building, thinking about, or challenged by, some structured Q&A, and around a table instead of ted talk would do it. pretty much the startup school office hours format.

Try to pre-organize meetups in large cities. Email potential participants.

That's one kind of meetup indeed.

But imho (large) group meetups are the least interesting/valuable. Ideally I would like to boost small or even 1-1 meetups first. If larger meetups emerge later, great!

Meeting 1-1 is way harder to organize. You need a specific reason to go.

What do you mean by "a specific reason"?

Personally, I like meeting interesting new people for the sake of it.

There's certainly a customer segment such as yourself who is both:

1. Extroverted(likes meeting new people for the sake of it)

2. Is willing to devote time to this format.

I assume small, but it's there.

You have 2 options:

1. Accept those constraints, find a few more of those type of people, and really focus on exactly what sort of product they want.

2. Try to loosen those constraints. For example, reduce the anxiety of a meet up somehow. Or pick mechanics that make it easier to arrange a meetup (maybe you reduce the scheduling overhead by building an immediate-match Omegle-style product)

Good luck! Would love to see this succeed!

Connect with HN companies located in the respective cities to host regular "What are you working on?" events where folks would have time for show & tell, then socialize.

That’s a great idea. Basically, a regular “what are you working on” with slightly higher stakes because you’re doing an IRL demo. I would definitely go to that.

Just subscribed to support the initiative.

Not really sure if I would like in person meetings, but a more relaxed (than HN) communication channel with alikes would be nice. Perhaps Telegram channels might be a good idea. Would be also nice to have a global (or less local) channel as well.

Also I wonder what the official local channels language would be? As a non native I'd probably still like for everything to be in English, which might sound weird to many.

I used to run a 2600 meeting, and attended and helped organize LUGs and PUGs. Here's my experience:

- At first, when a new meeting starts, very few people will show up, for at least a few months. If people like it they will keep coming, and slowly ranks will increase. After a while word of mouth will bring more people.

- You need to advertise it a lot of places, not just one website. Wherever your audience might go (out in the world, or online), go advertise there. This doesn't have to cost much money. I literally printed out flyers and posted them up everywhere near where my meetings would be. This brought in people. A local meeting is about connecting with local people, in person, so go places where people go in person. But also some people rarely leave the couch...

- It's very important to show continuous evidence that stuff is still happening, people are attending. Post a weekly/monthly update on a website, with some idea of what went on. Post pictures if you have them. If you really want to post on tiktok, IG, youtube, etc, you can, but it's not necessary; literally any place (that is accessible to everyone - i.e. a simple blog) that shows things are happening is enough.

- Let go of the idea of using some whizbang tech to keep people apprised of what's going on. Local meetings are about one thing: showing up and talking. Forget the mailing lists, rss feeds, bookmarklets, etc. Just post a status update on a free blog somewhere. Show up every week/month/whatever. That's enough to encourage people to attend.

- For organizers: Make it easy to find the event and the people. When people can't find it, and then post somewhere about how nobody was there, that can make it seem like the meeting is dead.

- Reputation is important. If your site lets anyone organize a meeting, but the organizer fails to come through and keep it going, and people show up and find nobody there, word will get around that those meetings aren't serious, and new people won't try to attend. The way 2600 did it worked well: you organize your own meeting, show evidence that you're consistently with it, and after a while the magazine would list you as an official meetup.

- The 2600 route was often literally just hanging out in a mall food court. The LUG route was usually a business/school/etc that would sponsor the group, giving them a place to hang out, sometimes even catering cold sandwiches and chips/soda. I'd let users figure it out themselves, but a guide on how to set up a meeting would help them.

- Having a chatroom (we used IRC back in the day) is fine, but it's not a replacement for the local meeting, and often ends up being an entirely different "thing". It can scare some people away, and can create a weird atmosphere. I would be wary of officially tying them together.

- You would do well to include explicit verbiage about how inappropriate behavior will not be tolerated, that all are welcome, have a zero tolerance policy about harassment and discrimination, etc. This helps the organizer, as it can be difficult to address inappropriate behavior without an explicit policy to point at. It also helps the maintainer of this list, as you can remove meetings if you hear complaints and the organizers don't nip it in the bud.

Organizing is a lot of work, usually unappreciated. Good luck to those who want to take that on!

Many fond memories of sporadically attending 2600 meetings thirty years ago and playing "spot the fed" at the Citicorp building, "in the lobby, near the payphones". I believe they still hold them on the first Friday of the month, though I've not attended in decades.

This is a super cool idea, in fact, its been a few months since I have been thinking on making something like meet.hn + findkismet.com, let the people share in which city they are and make introductions to people from the same city.

Thanks!

It is just broken somehow. No matter what text I generate on that site, I can never add to the map, always an error and telling me to wait a minute to try again. Maybe instructions are not clear enough. Does it need to be the only text in ones profile? That would be silly. Does it need to the at the top or at the bottom? Then it should say to.

Meet.hn inspired me to write hn-pm.me, a direct messenger exclusively for hn users. You could only sign up with your hn username by putting a random key into your public hn profile during the sign up flow.

It had exactly one sign-up which I unfortunately lost with a database migration.

Did I mention the word sign-up too often? Maybe you should sign up…

And yes, this is a shameless plug

> It had exactly one sign-up which I unfortunately lost with a database migration.

I find this really funny for some reason.

Some cities already have this kind of community which is pretty active so people don't see the point of signing up to this. For example, I'm in Tokyo we have an almost monthly HN meetup, HN Tokyo [1].

[1]: https://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/

You can try to force initial communication, like randomly connect 2 users in close proximity to one another.

What do you mean by "connecting" them?

It could be as simple as an auto email sent to both or through one of the social channels that they both use.

I would love to see local city and town meetups coming up. Your service is suitable for that at least based on the name.

I am outside of metropolitan Seattle and there are no meetup at all. I would love to meet fellow tech tinkerers and just build a network.

Doing nothing else is the simplest thing that might work.

You have implemented the big idea and had success attracting users and are still attracting them.

The hard problem is local community building. It is not adding generic features that are available from iOS, Android, and HTTP.

Actual meetups is the meaningful metric. Achieving market liquidity (people who want to meetup can find a meetup, people who hold a meetup have people show up).

Ultimately, communication should happen around the site person to person, not through it. It should be between people not bottlenecked.

If there is a lesson from HN, it is the 90% of iceberg below the surface is what matters most. Good luck.

Perhaps doing nothing other than remind us meet.hn exists

I think this is almost impossible to really do without some kind of metaphysical ingroup belief.

As someone without a religious bone in my body, it seems obvious this is what non-religious people have never really figured out how to do well.It is the achilles heel of the non-religious, rationalist.

The network almost needs to be based around some borderline ridiculous beliefs or it just ends up as a boring business networking cocktail party.

Burning Man is probably the best example of how to do all this well.

Could HN be a borderline belief?

Belief is one small part.

Skin in the game and costly in-group signaling mechanisms are others. Unfortunately your definition of freedom is “anything that hinders me from pursuing a whim in the moment I have it” then these are all very unappealing.

implementing this via profile links is strange.

this should just be a link at the top here. people post the city and date. done.

why should it be more complicated than that? you even got the idea of people posting meethn exactly like that earlier on.

Launch meetups at $X per seat. Provide drinks, food, whatever and a whiteboard space where people can discuss ideas. Personally, I would love to talk to other startup minded (even if working at the local bank for 30 years) type people.

Nice idea, im always looking to meet others, around philly. It'd be helpful to have a daily email of users in my specific area, or maybe a monthly one for people in close by cities e.g. nyc for me.

I see its value, thanks for posting

I think setup an automated partiful with meetup invites for people who sign up, the location should be an easy going place that wouldn’t mind if 1-2 people show up, or 5-10 do. Sounds interesting, I might give it a go.

Is there some allowance for listing multiple locations? Specifically to address students listing both their home and university campus.

re: federation, I'd prefer ActivityPub to AT, just ecosystem-wise.

> multiple locations

Not yet! Might be wrong but it does not seem to bother people much as you are the first to suggest it iirc.

I like the idea though! It's just that I'm still at the stage of trying to push people to add one location first. So several locations per user is not on the menu yet.

+1 for multiple locations. I have my home, my fiancé's home, and work; depending on day and time I will use either one of them as base. These cities and towns have very distinct strong identities.

Plus, with multiple identities the map would likely look busier, removing the sad "sigh, it's just me" moment in less tech-centric areas.

In order to avoid abuse, I would set a limit of 3 or 4 locations max. This would also allow the travelling crowds to have a spare location to be used as "target city" while on the road, without constantly adding back their home one.

This is great but i think Would people gather around hacker news as topi? Or within HN community you would need subtopics like I would totally go for meet up on AI + hn members

Reference to the first meet.hn thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41539125

I added that to the text at the top. Thanks!

It might be something to target businesses that are interested in advertising themselves or perhaps as a means to circulate that they are hiring.

Cheap compared to marketing costs really.

Last night I went to a local tech event and met 4-5 other people who mentioned hacker news, none of which know about meethn or don't see the point because local events to your usual location are already organised by some benevolent person.

If you list socials on meet.hn, I assume it means you are pro-social and open to meeting up. I see it as being more useful if travelling, an excuse to reach out and meet new people in a new place.

1. RSS waning

2. Probably wouldn't use email

3. (don't care)

4. would be more practical as a simple browser addon (meetHN / country flag) or userscript (maybe there's a userscript to addon tool given it's probably a few lines of JS)

5. This idea could be more interesting if it added some kind of meshed chat or something - the community you have made from my perspective appears to be HN people who are pro-social and open to connection (whats the point otherwise). http://news.meet.hn could become a new default if it added more value than just some visibility of meetHN users - without aa value add to make it sticky it will fade away and be forgotten, an aside micro community makes this more interesting... but moderation... hmm, warnings, blacklist .. could become unmaintainable so the value-add has to be enough to warrant it

6. Not sure this would be useful as people near each other already have tech events and communities with moderation and organization apparatus facilitated by tech group organizer people and the moderation aspect would be more distributed?

The amount of signups suggests there's something here, I'm inclined to think more as a distributed group of people with a shared interest open to connection. Seems like a subcommunity type deal, and 5 makes the most sense to me, proxy site that adds enough value to warrant using it, layered subcommunity is a cool idea

Interesting to see more hackers in Europe than the USA.

I wonder if that's representative of the distribution of HN users.

create whatsapp / signal group for each city and drop a user into it when they sign up

2600 has had meet ups goin’ since forever. The meet up in Dublin is particularly active.

I was promised local friends.

I would be up for signing up for email notifications for events in my area.

I’d join Signal groups for my cities, but not Telegram ones.

The fact that there are only about 30 hackers in NYC says that people don't want to sign up. I am quite sure there are many more than 30 people who saw your post at least once and would be interested.

There is something I don't see other people talking about that likely contributes to this.

I don't want to put my username out there and let people associate me with this username. Many people do, but I don't, and I suspect many other people don't. In fact, this is a throwaway account -- I think the 4th HN account I have. That said, I very much would like to connect with other people offline with my real name.

Why? I have a lot of experience, I read a ton of things on HN and other places and have a lot of knowledge of many things. But I also have strong opinions that other people don't agree with, and may occasionally write those opinions in a not-so-nice way. (I don't find that necessarily a problem -- that is what Internet is for, and I should have a bit more freedom than what I say or how I say things at my company, especially criticism). In addition, I do want to hide my identity here, so that people don't dox me when they don't like what I said (I can guarantee you that happened), or people who know me IRL can associate me with this account based on things that I say.

I share a lot of knowledge in my comments, and run knowledge sessions at my company. I would love to network with people. But I don't see myself signing up on meet.hn -- I'll go with meetup.

"But I also have strong opinions that other people don't agree with, and may occasionally write those opinions in a not-so-nice way."

Personally I learned to interact with people in a nice way, even though I very much disagree with their strong opinions (if they don't have to shout their opinions every 5 minutes from the rooftops)

I believe HN meetups could work the same? Focus on the curious technical things and not on whether we like Musk or not?

I likely would have a look at the profiles of people who also go there (I just did for my area) - but if it is not a toxic troll, I don't care if there ever was something weird. I certainly have my strong opinions and topics that trigger me as well ..

I disagree

I never use this account on the Who wants to be Hired thread

It doesnt matter that I can be cordial in discussing views, having views at all is counterproductive to being hired

there are real frictions you are dismissive of, other groups like women also feel underrepresented in OPSEC concerns they have while guys in tech have a huge blind spot for why anybody would want to remain unlinked from their profiles

So your intention would be more professional networking? Mine would be more casual. Doing hobby projects together or just enjoy hn discussions offline .. and well, my strong opinions are part of me and don't want to hide them when I am living a private life. (But I also don't need to present them at every opportunity)

I don’t have any intention of using a hn meetup service

Just dropped in to this thread you were having with someone else because there are concerns that had an additional perspective to elaborate on

30 people in NYC signed up while many more were aware? Most use existing public account to crosslink it?

Obvious

> Personally I learned to interact with people in a nice way

Good for you. I think some people can't learn that, at least without some sort of a therapy.

I friend of mine really struggles with filtering what he says to other people. He doesn't want to be like that I think, at least he has regrets of how he's behaved. But it doesn't really improve.

Yeah, therapy might help. I never had a professional therapy, but I did used to have something similar - a strong urge to present my opinions at every opportunity and a strong urge to win every debate. So all in all potentially annoying ...

I’ve had diplomatically phrased and cited comments on HN called an “inherent flamewar” because they go against hivemind consensus — eg, pointing out BLM leaders described themselves as “trained Marxists”.

I think it’s reasonable people don’t want to present the profile on HN as their “first impression”. People have different aspects to themselves in different fora and that’s not only okay, but healthy.

I think what makes something like you describe become inflammatory isn't the surface level fact, after all you're just conveying information, but the underlying message you might have been trying to convey with that information which isn't necessarily as neutral.

If you said something like: "I think it's cool that despite Marxism in America being a niche line of political thought thanks to our history that a movement as large and successful as Black Lives Matter was informed by Marxist thought due to its early leaders. And it seems that time has made Americans more open to Marxist ideas now that it isn't connected to a global conflict."

I don't think that is inflammatory at all and very well meets the bar of intellectual curiosity HN looks for. But if you brought up this fact in the middle of a discussion of the moment then, whether you intended it as one or not, folks will likely read it as a dogwhistle since it became one in counterprotest circles.

So strange this comment got downvoted. It's reasonable and genuine, and doesn't seem to violate the guidelines.

The guy above though definitely hides something.

If you're going to post like this, you should supply links so readers can make up their own minds.

We don't moderate when HN commenters "go against hivemind consensus". We moderate when they break the site guidelines. If you didn't do that, it should be straightforward to link to where the mods got it so wrong.

You do — and you know you do, when the opinion is sufficiently controversial. I understand you present that open-minded veneer, but you happily violate it by calling opinions a flamewar or similar slight, then censoring for ideological non-conformity.

You’re also being insincere by saying “we only do for violating the guidelines!” when “Eschew flamebait” is a guideline — and my accusation is that amounts to you censoring based on your (and the community’s) political biases. You’re dishonestly pretending I’m not discussing the biased way in which you apply that particular guideline — and intentionally ignoring my reference to “flame bait”/“flame war” in doing so.

We’ve had this discussion before and I’m not interested in hunting down comments from over four years ago.

If you say something like, "$fact $slur $ad_hominem $insult" and then you complain about being censored for $fact, you're being dishonest. We can all see the other shit you said. You're not fooling anybody.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how nice you are, what matters is you’re taking a side in a controversial topic. Approximately half of people will disagree with you, and that matters if you’re not anonymous.

With beeing nice I mean I can listen to a controversial topic and not take side or engage with it at all. Unless I feel like it, because it is the right space and time.

So I can and did enjoy time with people, who would otherwise want to murder me online in a political discussion ... but then in the right mood, it is possible to communicate also with those people about controversial topics without having a fight. In fact, face to face discussions are usually way more calm as it is easier to insult a anonymous stranger than a living being in front of you (but when those escalate, the consequences can be worse of course).

I sympathize. When I created my account in 2008 it was in no way unusual and had basically zero scope for IRL consequences to have a forum account where one said controversial things.

Today my HN account is by all accounts a major liability to making a living. For the most part I stand by what I’ve said as ethically necessary to be said, but it’s hard to effect change from a position of a structurally precarious likelihood. In retrospect, should have used a pseudonym.

Maybe it’s possible to get one’s username changed. That wouldn’t be a total fix, but it would put bounds on scope for IRL trouble.

I have no idea if such requests are honored. Maybe @dang has a policy on it.

They honor special deletion requests if you have reasons, but otherwise if you want to stay anonymous, I find it’s best to just create a new account and start over to prevent being profiled.

You’re sacrificing your privacy for karma points.

You make a good point but I’d put it a little differently in this case.

My HN comment history is effectively a blog in real time that documents 15 years of stages: when the software business was a real meritocracy or at least rapidly becoming one, then the absurd excesses that to my eternal shame I participated in and profited from, then the realizations that are accessible only to an insider near the apex of status and achievement in this cavalcade of nepotism and corruption who grows a conscience.

I’ve known any number of people who started in a similar place to where I ended up, people who at one time wrote popular books about the sleazy corruption, whistleblowers for lack of a better term. But one by one they’ve knuckled under and become part of the PR apparatus for this sticky and tricky and icky thing.

I know of like one hard-core whistleblower on this particular thing who went the distance (two if you count Snowden and bet your butt he was attempting to hold Silicon Valley to account via thoroughly real and eminently responsible disclosure), and Suchit is dead by his own hand at 26.

I wish I had cut my own hands off before building my part of this architecture of despair, which is regrettably a pretty pivotal part.

So even if @dang honored a deletion request, and it’s pretty likely that honoring such is a matter of law not of backroom discretion, is it really more important that I can get work in the Valley than to keep this artifact around? Maybe I wind up wussing out locally to carry the fight globally, but it’s not obvious. The thing about a world where few software companies go public, none do without serious insider connections, and there are like 3-5 possible ultimate acquirers who have no scruples around cartel behavior (as deemed by the United States Justice Department) is that it’s a pretty narrow group of decision makers who decide if any software venture can exist over time. Juicero is in: Moxie Marlinspike watches his back like he’s Jason Bourne or something.

No easy answers here.

> The fact that there are only about 30 hackers in NYC says that people don't want to sign up. I am quite sure there are many more than 30 people who saw your post at least once and would be interested.

FYI, I'm a very regular HN user and I missed meet.hn the first time, and only saw it because of this current post. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Definitely some people prefer to stay anonymous, but I personally woud love to meet other HN users in my area. But this needs to either be built into HN somehow, or maybe the monthly reminder thread that some people suggested would be a good idea.

physically yes, it can be tested for area based but online and in a time frame so its like a hackathon in time and place but don't have to go meetup and take the strenuous journey of a hackathon

Anybody from Malaga around here?

I'd love an API for this.

Honestly, feels like a solution in search of a problem. But it's awesome that you've gotten 1700 sign ups!

> I talked to dang, and even if the idea of implementing something on HN is not out of the question, it is not on the roadmap yet.

Sounds like you talked to him with the idea of trying to incorporate meet.hn into HN directly. What if you got permission to do a monthly "Meet HN" thread where people can link to their meetups on meet.hn, similar to "Who's Hiring" and "Who's Looking". Seems like it would give you what you want with regards to getting eyes on meet.hn but without any need for technical implementations.

But yeah, while it's a cool idea, forcing the HN aspect is probably going to be a permanent and severe bottleneck. There isn't any real solution to getting this in front of people on HN but not on meet.hn regularly (and speaking as someone who isn't interested, I'd be irate at any change that did do that). I'd encourage you to instead make this a broader meetup solution for people that fall into the HN niche of interests and advertising it more broadly.

this seems like the nomadlist but for hn readers?

I noticed some people are on the map with no socials. Whats the point? Add a way to contact you...

It's true that some people don't add any socials and don't have any info in their HN description.

But sometimes they modified the string they pasted from meet.hn and it broke the parsing, causing their socials not to be displayed on meet.hn.

That's why I would suggest to check their profile by clicking on their username.

Note: I'm not parsing socials across the entire HN user description because some people want to keep some data outside of meet.hn. By having a clear start/stop of meet.hn data, it allows me to parse only socials users actually want to display on meet.hn.

I suspect some people don't want to publicly link their real identity (via socials) with their HN profile. For contact an email could work better.

Grab meat.hn before someone beats (you) to it

Too late.

I have a whatsapp group of people working in tech living in Rio de Janeiro or traveling there. We do meetups regularly. It would make sense to try bring more people from HN to our meetups, people from Rio or passing by.

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