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Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

I think meetup apps need to be aggressively anti-commercial. Meetup became a crappy stew of for-profit low effort AI flyer events designed to harvest money from people. I used an app called Nomadtable for a while but there too I caught organisers just trying to make money off of travelers. I'm also told women constantly get unwanted sexual messages.

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Meetup was fine enough before being acquired by private equity. Development had stalled and there were quite some bugs, but we could put up with it. My group has been slowly moving off it after the acquisition and subsequent entshitification. It’s ok to be commercial, but Meetup’s approach is spectacularly stupid.

This. I feel like over the long run anti-commercial should be able to win most consumer apps because they don't degrade and AI makes it even easier now. Doesn't seem to be that easy though. Signal and bluesky are growing but slow.

how would it make $ then?

these are businesses, after all. curious to hear what you guys think.

Yeah, I've had a bunch of recruitment agencies and similar companies try to create groups - I'm mostly managing to flag those and keep them down with a combination of auto/manual moderation.

Regarding the messages - that's one reason I've opted not to have user-to-user DMs. You can DM organisers of a group, but all messaging outside that is public (on activities and groups for example).

Sounds pretty promising, good luck. You could consider a reputation system too if you haven't got one already.

Thanks! Yeah that's on the horizon! I'm fondly reminded of the old vBulletin-style reputation squares [1] when I think of this - might be interesting to add something like that.

[1] https://www.theadminzone.com/resources/post-reputation-in-po...

Frankly, many of these things should just be public utilities.

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