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WeWork Buys Meetup; Here Is How Meetup.Com Will Change

52 points by skmurphy 9y ago

skmurphy 9y ago
This is from Nov-28-2017 but I think think the analysis is still good. Meetup made some significant changes to their interface recently that have let to a lot of dissatisfaction and complaints from organizers complaining[1], I think these date from a regime where the focus was on growing attendees. I agree with this analysis that they will start to focus much more on organizer satisfaction because it's the organizer who determines meetup locations and WeWork wants to see these in WeWork facilities to introduce attendees to their offering. [1] https://medium.com/meetup/web-redesign-explained-5f5a4ae7e420 https://medium.com/meetup/web-redesign-explained-5f5a4ae7e42... see comments for more than 100 detailed complaints from Meetup organizers about deleted functionality in new interface.
- donretag 9y ago
  Nothing new when it comes to Meetup. They did another major redesign several years ago, and organizers were furious. They encouraged organizers to file tickets in their ticketing system and vote on the ones they want. The top five tickets were all marked as "Will not do" by Meetup. I gave up being an organizer. Facebook does not work for tech groups. LinkedIn is supposedly bringing back Groups. Skeptical, but anything should be better than Meetup.
rapnie 9y ago
good article. what i liked from meetup is that it emphasized meeting face-to-face.. something that is getting rarer all the time with our increasing tech use, and may now be de-emphasized in favor of wework stuff
- odonnellryan 9y ago
  I've been to some very quality meetups actually. I should go to more.
  - Kagerjay 9y ago
    I went to meetups in big tech cities and less tech-oriented cities, the ones that I liked the most were the ones that had a permanent space in bigger cities. The one I liked the most was in LA, called nullspace labs. You could learn things like soldering, assembly language, gamedev, webpenetration(Radare32), and lots of other interesting topics that you wouldn't necessarily find good resources on youtube. I think meetups with a clear goal in mind (e.g. Tennis-Only meetup, Javascript-Only meetup, Python-Only meetup) and have much more engaging / interesting conversation topics long term. Short term its nice to get to know 1 or 2 people at a large meetup ("Entreprenuers", "Young and Active"),or when visiting a new city for the first time. That and meetup.com is just a load of notification spam if you just randomly join meetup groups. Some meetups IMO are very spammy in nature, especially those related to B2B, "entreprenuership" or "business" or "strategy" since its mostly consultants peddling their skillsets or startups. You'll find way more engaging topics on reddit for these. So I'm pretty excited to see Meetup and WeWork merge together, hopefully this new change would be good. Possibly higher quality meetups overall
anonytrary 9y ago
Meetup: A community of people looking for a place to meetup. WeWork: Nothing short of bachelor pads for people to meet up in. This might be old news, but it's still interesting. It's a shame companies like Josephine are shutting down, WeWork and Meetup could be a vector for that kind of thing; or maybe even something like p2p classrooms. Everyone chips into a fund for a speaker, if it reaches the goal, they book an appropriate room within radius R of some agreed location. I don't know if people use Meetup for teaching sessions, though. They probably do? Yoga, etc.
83457 9y ago
Slightly off-topic but Meetup's redesign over the last year really sucks. Not sure what is going on there
- carwyn 9y ago
  The biggest issue has been the half-broken hybrid nature of the redesign. It's still not finished with significant inconsistencies between desktop and the mobile app. For a paid for service the state it's been in is disappointing.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
crankylinuxuser 9y ago
Meetup majorly pissed me off. I've never been back. I was going to the monthly IoT meetup up to about 2 years ago. The current maintainer was moving across the US, and wanted to transfer the group (nonprofit) to me. Seemed simple enough. We go through the steps and then I get hit with the gotcha: pay $15 a month! Uhhh, $15 a month for what amounts to a email list and a webpage? I don't think so. Perhaps I could export the list and use my own platform? Nope! But they do offer great suggestions, like charge dues. In the end, I "let" the group die.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  That's honestly not a bad price for the service they render. It's not just about emailing people, they can recommend your group to users, host a whole discussion forum, etc. Shame that you can't export the contacts, but I really don't think that's an unreasonable fee.
- paulgb 9y ago
  Isn't the fact that without meetup, the group died, proof that they provided some value? It's not like you couldn't send an email to the group saying "let's organize through this google groups mailing list instead", so I assume you needed the marketing features of meetup.
  - crankylinuxuser 9y ago
    No, I wasn't able to do anything until I paid $15/month to use it. I would have been happy in exporting the contact list and running it on my own mailserver and webserver. A single list of 200 people isn't hard. But I couldn't even get the data if I had paid.
    - ebbv 9y ago
      The group wasn’t worth paying $15 one time to save? You realize this story makes you sound bad, not Meetup?
      - 9y ago
dawhizkid 9y ago
I’m amazed there hasn’t been another startup trying to be a better meetup, especially now when there’s so much attention on loneliness and lack of social interaction.
- f2n 9y ago
  I would love to see an open source meetup alternative, maybe one that I can host myself for my meetup.
  - dawhizkid 9y ago
    you mean decentralized? (i'm kidding, sort of)
donretag 9y ago
"None of those are direct sells to business users. These need to be updated to highlight meetups that appeal to business users with call to actions like: Meet local entrepreneurs Grow your business Improve your marketing Learn about taxes Get more clients" One my of biggest complaints of Meetup (which are many), is that many (social) Meetups nowadays are basically advertisements. It is not about building a community, it is about having a meetup to advertise their services. The huge monthly fee is part of the reason. This article basically wants Meetup to move more into that direction, which I would not be surprised if it did. There is also an increase of tech meetups whose organizers is not a technical person, but a sales person. These meetups also tend to use eventbrite instead of the meetup RSVP interface so that they can harvest emails and sales leads.
opensports 9y ago
A serious number of Meetup organizers have been really upset by the changes to the Meetup platform (sudden removal of features / zero customer support / redesign / switch of focus) after spending, in some cases, almost a decade on Meetup and paying thousands in monthly fees. We've been helping move sports and fitness groups off Meetup since the fall and the amount of inbound Meetup organizers just keeps increasing.

52 points by skmurphy 9y ago

This is from Nov-28-2017 but I think think the analysis is still good. Meetup made some significant changes to their interface recently that have let to a lot of dissatisfaction and complaints from organizers complaining[1], I think these date from a regime where the focus was on growing attendees. I agree with this analysis that they will start to focus much more on organizer satisfaction because it's the organizer who determines meetup locations and WeWork wants to see these in WeWork facilities to introduce attendees to their offering. [1] https://medium.com/meetup/web-redesign-explained-5f5a4ae7e420 https://medium.com/meetup/web-redesign-explained-5f5a4ae7e42... see comments for more than 100 detailed complaints from Meetup organizers about deleted functionality in new interface.

donretag 9y ago
Nothing new when it comes to Meetup. They did another major redesign several years ago, and organizers were furious. They encouraged organizers to file tickets in their ticketing system and vote on the ones they want. The top five tickets were all marked as "Will not do" by Meetup. I gave up being an organizer. Facebook does not work for tech groups. LinkedIn is supposedly bringing back Groups. Skeptical, but anything should be better than Meetup.

rapnie 9y ago

good article. what i liked from meetup is that it emphasized meeting face-to-face.. something that is getting rarer all the time with our increasing tech use, and may now be de-emphasized in favor of wework stuff

odonnellryan 9y ago
I've been to some very quality meetups actually. I should go to more.
- Kagerjay 9y ago
  I went to meetups in big tech cities and less tech-oriented cities, the ones that I liked the most were the ones that had a permanent space in bigger cities. The one I liked the most was in LA, called nullspace labs. You could learn things like soldering, assembly language, gamedev, webpenetration(Radare32), and lots of other interesting topics that you wouldn't necessarily find good resources on youtube. I think meetups with a clear goal in mind (e.g. Tennis-Only meetup, Javascript-Only meetup, Python-Only meetup) and have much more engaging / interesting conversation topics long term. Short term its nice to get to know 1 or 2 people at a large meetup ("Entreprenuers", "Young and Active"),or when visiting a new city for the first time. That and meetup.com is just a load of notification spam if you just randomly join meetup groups. Some meetups IMO are very spammy in nature, especially those related to B2B, "entreprenuership" or "business" or "strategy" since its mostly consultants peddling their skillsets or startups. You'll find way more engaging topics on reddit for these. So I'm pretty excited to see Meetup and WeWork merge together, hopefully this new change would be good. Possibly higher quality meetups overall

anonytrary 9y ago

Meetup: A community of people looking for a place to meetup. WeWork: Nothing short of bachelor pads for people to meet up in. This might be old news, but it's still interesting. It's a shame companies like Josephine are shutting down, WeWork and Meetup could be a vector for that kind of thing; or maybe even something like p2p classrooms. Everyone chips into a fund for a speaker, if it reaches the goal, they book an appropriate room within radius R of some agreed location. I don't know if people use Meetup for teaching sessions, though. They probably do? Yoga, etc.

83457 9y ago

Slightly off-topic but Meetup's redesign over the last year really sucks. Not sure what is going on there

carwyn 9y ago
The biggest issue has been the half-broken hybrid nature of the redesign. It's still not finished with significant inconsistencies between desktop and the mobile app. For a paid for service the state it's been in is disappointing.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

crankylinuxuser 9y ago

Meetup majorly pissed me off. I've never been back. I was going to the monthly IoT meetup up to about 2 years ago. The current maintainer was moving across the US, and wanted to transfer the group (nonprofit) to me. Seemed simple enough. We go through the steps and then I get hit with the gotcha: pay $15 a month! Uhhh, $15 a month for what amounts to a email list and a webpage? I don't think so. Perhaps I could export the list and use my own platform? Nope! But they do offer great suggestions, like charge dues. In the end, I "let" the group die.

nerdponx 9y ago
That's honestly not a bad price for the service they render. It's not just about emailing people, they can recommend your group to users, host a whole discussion forum, etc. Shame that you can't export the contacts, but I really don't think that's an unreasonable fee.
paulgb 9y ago
Isn't the fact that without meetup, the group died, proof that they provided some value? It's not like you couldn't send an email to the group saying "let's organize through this google groups mailing list instead", so I assume you needed the marketing features of meetup.
- crankylinuxuser 9y ago
  No, I wasn't able to do anything until I paid $15/month to use it. I would have been happy in exporting the contact list and running it on my own mailserver and webserver. A single list of 200 people isn't hard. But I couldn't even get the data if I had paid.
  - ebbv 9y ago
    The group wasn’t worth paying $15 one time to save? You realize this story makes you sound bad, not Meetup?
    - 9y ago

dawhizkid 9y ago

I’m amazed there hasn’t been another startup trying to be a better meetup, especially now when there’s so much attention on loneliness and lack of social interaction.

f2n 9y ago
I would love to see an open source meetup alternative, maybe one that I can host myself for my meetup.
- dawhizkid 9y ago
  you mean decentralized? (i'm kidding, sort of)

donretag 9y ago

"None of those are direct sells to business users. These need to be updated to highlight meetups that appeal to business users with call to actions like: Meet local entrepreneurs Grow your business Improve your marketing Learn about taxes Get more clients" One my of biggest complaints of Meetup (which are many), is that many (social) Meetups nowadays are basically advertisements. It is not about building a community, it is about having a meetup to advertise their services. The huge monthly fee is part of the reason. This article basically wants Meetup to move more into that direction, which I would not be surprised if it did. There is also an increase of tech meetups whose organizers is not a technical person, but a sales person. These meetups also tend to use eventbrite instead of the meetup RSVP interface so that they can harvest emails and sales leads.

opensports 9y ago

A serious number of Meetup organizers have been really upset by the changes to the Meetup platform (sudden removal of features / zero customer support / redesign / switch of focus) after spending, in some cases, almost a decade on Meetup and paying thousands in monthly fees. We've been helping move sports and fitness groups off Meetup since the fall and the amount of inbound Meetup organizers just keeps increasing.