I think it comes down to commitment from the leader. So many meetups have flaked out leaders, which is really bad. I've been to a few meetups where I was the on

I think it comes down to commitment from the leader. So many meetups have flaked out leaders, which is really bad. I've been to a few meetups where I was the only one who showed up! Not only that, but I'm a member of quite a few groups that had one meetup and ended. I find this odd because meetup costs money to the leader. I've found that the best ones are the meetups that have a narrow theme and a committed leader. It is always a bad sign when there are many organizers. The ones that are super general like "let's have random fun!" never seem to work out. I think it partly comes down to the culture and general interests in the city. A live music or hiking meetup in Austin is pretty pointless. The former because there is so much of it out here, and the latter because there really isn't enough challenging hikes to really pull it off consistently. LA has live music, but considerably less free music than Austin. LA has amazing views and mountains, which Austin appears to be lacking. A few good ones in LA were the hiking groups, which had very consistent leadership and had too many meetups for me to attend. The programming meetups were very much hit or miss. The programming meetups in Austin are more or less advertisements and tend to last for way too long, which makes me, and I'm sure many others, abandon them quickly. For the most part, I've found meetups in LA to be more interesting, but the main thing that bothered me out there was all the "I'm having so much fun!" posts when there was clearly no one there having fun. I wish I had a good idea for a group, but I don't and I'm not quite feeling committed to running one full time either.