Hacker News Reader

In my experience, any meetup > 10 people becomes useless because you cannot really make meaningful connections and large meetups usually have a fixed agenda where everyone is out there selling their own stuff.

I now will not attend a meetup unless it is extremely small group (<10 people). Those are hard to sustain though.

View on HN

Speed meetups could work where you'd go to a series of meetups in a row. Venues could allocate space for this, say 5 separate rooms and every few months you'd go to a bunch of meetups all on the same day. Small gatherings with a larger space where people could keep talking once the set period is over if need be.

Even a local park on a sunny day would work and you could "kick on" into the night if things were going well - no obligations or pressure.

this. the meetups i was a part of devolved into product pitches and people looking for jobs

The coworking space I was at back in 2013 held regular weekly meetups in the common space. Sometimes cool tech was shown off, but a ton of promo talks was common. I won't say no to free pizza though.

Sounds like the same problem with <activity> meetups. Some people are there for dating, some people are there for <activity>.

Thing is, people have to realize this because mixing the two leads to misery.

Maybe they have to be explicitly told not to put their foot in it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com