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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

I prefer to invite people individually, and create a group chat with those who confirmed. Nothing is more demoralising than 24 hours of people saying they won’t come, in the group chat, right before the event.

My flake rate is close to zero, mostly because people personally told me they’ll join.

It doesn’t hurt to get the group chat hyped up on the day of the event. The activity is enough to get people excited. I also pin the time and location so people find it easily.

Besides that, just chill. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Once a few good people are there, the thing mostly runs itself. Try to relax and enjoy your own party.

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Creating a group chat with everyone invited is a terrible idea because of the snowball effect of the first "Sorry, can't come, but have a good time for me!" message triggering a neverending stream of similar cancellations until sometimes the entire event ends up cancelled on the day of.

People are way less flaky if you invite them 1-on-1 (even if you copy/pasted the invitation message) vs. a group chat.

I miss the days when Facebook events worked well for getting people to attend a party.

Now, nobody is on Facebook so those event invitations get missed and you need to hustle much harder with individual chat messages to get people to attend.

Partiful works well?

Very high flake rate like 2/3

In my social circles Partiful feels like it's becoming a good replacement for the golden era of Facebook Events. At first you had to invite people manually by sending them a Partiful link, but now they have their own internal invite system where you can invite your "mutuals" (people you've partied with) directly on the platform. It's become the clear standard for house parties in my sphere. Not quite as good as Facebook events used to be though.

Oh man this definitely makes me wax nostalgic for that golden era ... it was 2013-2016 for me. I would throw an annual holiday party w/ my roommate in SF every year and I recall being able to just go down the list of my FB friends and click "invite, invite, invite" and everyone I cared about would show up and we all had a wonderful time. Sigh.

Is this truly a thing that now nobody is on Facebook? I thought it was only me!

It's the abandoned shopping mall of the internet. All dead save for a few properties.

This is ridiculous. When I throw parties I tell a couple of my friends and tell them to tell others and people just show up. Americans are living in some sort of parallel dimension.

There are certain kinds of styles of gatherings that do much better when there are 40-50 people present, rather than 10-20. If you are going for a low pressure hang and want 10-20, it's easy enough to just tell friends and tell them to tell others, you'll hit those numbers easy. If you are trying to do something a bit more memorable and you want to guarantee a higher turnout, you have to invest more effort into ensuring attendance. If you can get 50+ people to "just show up" without putting effort in, that means _someone_ (one of your friends) is putting the effort in, you're in college, or you're just super hot and famous

Or you live in a society where people are naturally inclined to go to parties because it’s normal to do so frequently.

If that’s the case then you’re competing with other parties for those 50 so you’re back to it being hard

This dismissive tone does not encourage pleasant conversation. Mind the website’s guidelines.

I don’t see how it’s dismissive. It’s adding a perspective the GP hasn’t considered.

Low pressure hang of 10-20 people.

Reminds me of an acquaintance who told me he was an introvert; he said after 20 hours of being around people he'd need a couple hours to recharge.

Just depends on the set. 10 people can just be five friends and their partners around one table. 20 people who don’t all know each other feels more than twice the size.

I am not American. Adults with obligations are harder to get into the same room. When you do it regularly, you have to get better at it.

Sometimes you also need to know who will be there because if half the group flakes out, the logistics fall apart. Not every party is a house party.

indeed. It's a flaky culture where half the people you do invite may not make it last minute. Let alone any friends they'd invite. Turns out hyperindividualism doesn't work well when you want to engage in social gatherings.

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