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Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

• Apfel 5y ago
  I run a Mandarin Chinese meetup with a few hundred members every week in the UK. We've had several new contributing members post pandemic and everything is pretty rosy. Meetup.com still works as a means to get new users
  • glcheetham 5y ago
    Interested. Can you link your meetup group in here?
• flave 5y ago
  I've been playing around with an idea in this space for a long time but made no progress on it. Meetup.com is now rubbish (mostly singles events, walking tours, scam investment talks etc) and Discord is too geographically distributed to be the right answer. I've seen a handful of apps that claim to work but none have achieved network. Been thinking about launching a no code app that basically sets up whatsapp distribution lists plus a low touch website. That's all that's really needed.
  • arisAlexis 5y ago
    Not rubbish at all, there are many interesting events happening but not in all cities
• taubek 5y ago
  We are using Meetup for organization of IT related events.
• mtmail 5y ago
  We run 2-3 events per quarter, well at least now after all the COVID restrictions. We stopped using meetup.com after their price changes in 2019, a $2 charge for each attendee didn't make sense for a free event. We now have our own mailing list and a simple signup form (Google Forms, now reform.app). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21257661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21257661 lists other alternatives
  • bachonk 5y ago
    If you're hosting free events and need signups/newsletters/distribution lists in one place, interested to hear your feedback how how well everyspacehq.com would work. We're early and mostly enterprise-focused, but shoot me an email at tom@ if you're looking for a single tool to manage this.
• ToddWBurgess 5y ago
  I one of the organizers of a meetup called Coffee and Code in Toronto, Canada. We used to be a bi-weekly meetup in cafes pre-pandemic. After the pandemic started we moved online to a weekly Discord. We still posted the meetups on Meetup and now attract an international audience. 2 years later we are still going. Now that restrictions are lifted in Ontario we will be going back to in-person meetups and probably by the end of the month we will be posting them on Meetup. I am optimistic that we will be able to bring people back.
  • MrWiffles 5y ago
    Comparing this to some of the other comments, I'm jumping to a conclusion here, and doing so to see if you agree with this thinking - It sounds like your success can be attributed to, at least in significant part, having a strong/sticky "base" BEFORE the pandemic started. Would you agree/disagree that? More applicably to guiding the OP here, would you say that if you guys DIDN'T have that sticky base of attendees that you'd be as well-off or even around at all post-pandemic? In other words, was it just popularity that got ya'll through (obviously you and yours did all the work, not saying otherwise!), or can you point to something else that the OP can replicate? Again, not at all to "throw shade" at you here, just trying to see if your outcome is a reasonable expectation, and how applicable/likely it is for the OP, especially given the wide disparity in outcomes mentioned by others. Either way I'm happy to hear your meetup is doing well!
    • ToddWBurgess 5y ago
      No offence taken. We do have a fairly regular group of core users that are usually there. Of course this core group will change with time given life commitments and other things that come up. Not uncommon for regulars to disappear for a while and show up later when life permits. Something we have discussed about our longevity is early on we decided against using webcam meetups. All our meetups are voice only. I had a lot of feedback from people early on they preferred the voice only meetup. Now almost 2 years later, we question if this decision allowed us to avoid the webcam fatigue that most other groups seemed to suffer. It probably doesn't hurt we are in Canada's biggest and hottest tech hub.
• Canada 5y ago
  Organizer of weekly meetup that's run for years. Also have a telegram channel for it. By all means have your own site, and definitely have a discord or telegram or slack (whichever is better suited to your audience), but meetup does bring new people.
• cpach 5y ago
  As a user: Yes, indeed. Every time a new Meetup group is started in my area, I get a mail notification. Which I find valuable. The signal to noise ratio is high.
• mooreds 5y ago
  We do use meetup for the Boulder Ruby Group: https://www.meetup.com/boulder_ruby_group/ https://www.meetup.com/boulder_ruby_group/ We also have our own site, but that is more for videos and whatnot, rather than sign ups: https://boulder-ruby.org/ https://boulder-ruby.org/ We mostly use the sign up/announce functionality. I suppose we could replace that with a google form and standard website, but we have over 1k members. How many of them would move? We don't have that many twitter followers and no email list. I suppose an email list would be a replacement, if folks would sign up. I had a friend who was building an alternative (sinking money and time into it for years) and he recently ceased operations. His thoughts: https://twitter.com/coreysnipes/status/1498714532931416070 https://twitter.com/coreysnipes/status/1498714532931416070 The tldr: too many good competitors; maybe it is time to look around.
• HWR_14 5y ago
  Meetup is great for discovery. Sure, your own site/discord is nice going forward, but people aren't as likely to find you by browsing on those. Although I haven't updated my perspective about meetup since COVID started, so while I thought it was very useful before, and believe it still is, I'm not sure it's traction survived (or resources if it faded)
• SpikedCola 5y ago
  Tangentially related: I live in a border town, and my Meetup search results/suggestions are all in the neighbouring country. This was especially irritating during the pandemic, when the border was closed and couldn't be crossed for Meetups. Presumably they do a lookup on location+radius and don't consider the user's country. I have contacted them to ask for help, and I follow up every month to remind them that it still needs to be fixed. But no luck so far. Any suggestions a) how to get this specific issue resolved and b) general advice for getting menial (but "important to me") things like this fixed?
• ransom1538 5y ago
  Depends where you live. In SF meetups for dev groups is awesome (uber, percona, etc). Where I live now it is pretty useless.
• umuur 5y ago
  [dead]
• Kalanos 5y ago
  Yes, I just signed up for a new meetup
• ddek 5y ago
  There's a few good things on with the London meetup groups, but honestly, no. I just haven't met many interesting people on meetup. The good independent events just use word-of-mouth and get more than enough people. It's best for sports, the park I live next to is really just a huge playing field, through meetup I can play football, touch rugby, or do some circuits there. I still think it's the main place to advertise/host technical meetups though. I can't think of anywhere else. You have to put yourself in the shoes of someone who might come to your event - how will they find you? Are they going to be actively looking for your event, or will you need to reach out? I'm no huge fan of discord for IRL communities because I like to separate my 'gamer tag' from my real identity, as do most people. I've had this problem lately, I love the discord app but I wish we could make IRL servers with real (or abbreviated, like 'John S.') names. It would be so much easier to manage and mod sports clubs if we could keep comms on it, rather than the email/sms/whatsapp mess we have right now.
  • edenlinger 5y ago
    I understand the gamer tag fear. To my knowledge, discord now allows for different display names on servers from your single account. I've used this for different servers where I want to use First L. naming or a character name from an mmo.
    • ddek 5y ago
      You can, but the setting is a bit hidden and when you're dealing with GenPop you have to assume they won't read anything, and find anything beyond basic features too complex. I mainly use the setting for sharing my timezone. The nice thing about discord is the server admin can precisely say what a server should look like, so people don't need to find and join channels. It's just there.
  • fidor 5y ago
    I've actually just launched the MVP for a sports club discovery website in the UK. The long term goal is to fix a lot of these issues you have with managing a club as well. You can see more details in my profile, and it would be great to chat about the problems you face. DM if you're interested
• noasaservice 5y ago
  I refuse to use Meetup primarily because how much they charge per month for a webpage and a minuscule email list. And their "just pass the costs on to the people attending" is farcical. There's non-profit and free groups I would definitely run. I was offered one such IoT meetup. Again cause of the $15/mo (which I couldn't at the time afford) that group died. These days, I just ignore Meetup. Let something better come in instead.
• CameronBanga 5y ago
  We use meetup for our local group, ValpoHacks, in Northwest Indiana. I would say that we average ~1 new meetup person per month that finds our group via Meetup.com. One of the more successful ways to find new interested people.
• fundamental 5y ago
  I still use meetup, though it is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to meeting people. Groups tend to either be small enough that it's a challenge to get around how tight knit the dynamics are or they're huge with mostly inactive members and almost never the same people event to event. I certainly haven't used meetup as much since the pandemic began as virtual events don't have a lot of appeal to me personally. As per discord, it can be a quite nice tool for building communities, however there's a lack of locality in almost all of the servers I've interacted with, so discord ends up serving a different purpose IMO.
• hughrr 5y ago
  Yes all the time as a user. It died a little bit over COVID but has picked up again now. I actually have 2-3 events scheduled a week local to me in UK that I actually go to.
• And1 5y ago
  Yep I do. I run a meetup that definitely didn't meet over COVID, but is getting back into the swing now. There's definitely still trepidation on attendees part, but it's still there.
• ravenstine 5y ago
  Sure, people over 60 still use it. I'm sure that it's different in other regions, but Meetup is effectively dead in the LA area. Even before COVID, I noticed a steep decline in usage. I think Meetup simply didn't do enough to improve the experience. There's a few reasons I can identify, but that's kind of off topic. IMO, you're not far off from what may be the way forward for event planning/broadcasting. A lot of people are actually using Eventbrite as an alternative to Meetup because it's free and removes the membership hurdle, and it also has fewer rules than Meetup. At a bare minimum, Eventbrite + an email list would be viable. As far as messaging/community, yeah, there's Discord, but Discord likes to do sweeping bans on servers they don't agree with. Your "Bay Area Russians" Discord server could disappear overnight and your entire community is gone. And yes, I have experience with that happening. Signal would be preferable, maybe Telegram, since they're less scary to normies than something like Matrix.
  • cableshaft 5y ago
    Speaking as someone who's gone to hundreds of meetups for various groups and was an admin for a 1400 member (~200 active at its peak) meetup for a while, I don't necessarily think the problem is they didn't improve enough. I still find it functionally useful enough. But their income model isn't that great. I was paying $90 out of pocket every 6 months to keep it going at the end (I think when I started being an admin I was paying around $45, so it doubled in only a few years), and I was having a hard time justifying paying them $180/year to keep our group, which was going through a bit of a rough patch anyway (especially when the pandemic hit and I didn't want to host any in-person meetups anymore). I know the admins of several other local groups and they also killed their groups for the same reason. I also really don't like how you can't actually close the group, just leave as an admin. Technically our group is still around, just some random person swooped in to take over to only post paid speed dating events (the group was originally for geeky interests, like board games, movies, conventions, role playing, etc). It feels dirty to me the site allows and encourages that behavior (spamming emails to everyone in the group "Don't let this meetup group you're a member of go away! Pay to become an admin now!") I still use them as a user, but I don't think I'd ever start a group on there ever again. I created a local board game playtester group and used word of mouth at game designer conventions to get to ~10 people and kept that going through a Facebook group chat and posted Facebook events, that seemed good enough.
• martingoodson 5y ago
  We use it for the London Machine Learning Meetup - https://www.meetup.com/London-Machine-Learning-Meetup/ https://www.meetup.com/London-Machine-Learning-Meetup/ We have about 10K members and run events every 3-4 weeks (online at the moment). We are still going strong - we get about 100 people at each event. I have noticed that we are not growing as fast as we were. I wonder whether meetup.com has slowed down in terms of growth in user base. Or maybe we are just at saturation point.
• mark_l_watson 5y ago
  I like meetup.com. I once hosted meetings on digital ocean. In my little mountain town, many people use it to host large public hikes that can be great fun. I also use it for Clojure meetups. Useful service.
• caseysoftware 5y ago
  No, don't host your own site. I ran the DCPHP group for years on our own site. We grew from ~10 to 400 over a span of 5 years. It was great. When I moved, the new leadership moved it to Meetup and grew from 400 to 1000 in a year. Meetup is the discovery platform for just about everyone out there. In covid times, most groups stopped meeting in person (some stopped meeting at all) but Meetup is still THE place for discovery. If you're deep and well connected into your local community (based on geo, not tech), you personally can probably skip it but you're also probably an outlier. Anyone less connected or new to your city or the field itself won't know how to get started without it. Side note.. for 5 years, I ran ATXTechEvents - https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents - and 50+ other cities broadcasting out via Twitter what was going on and that helped double meeting attendance but I realized pretty quickly, it was existing members. It drove some discovery but was more of a reminder system.
  • omarhaneef 5y ago
    I think caseysoftware pretty much captures the value proposition. I'll add that as a user who wants to go to meetups, I don't want to be hassled by emails, chats, logging into a discord (that I use just to participate in this one community), and so forth. I want to look at a single app, see if any talks are of interest, click yes and add to my calendar. And because that app is already meetup, I don't want to add a second app. Its like adding a second or third chatting application. p.s. most (not all) of the other criticism seems to be aimed at the issue of getting people to consistently meet up at all. An alternative app or messaging system would not solve this issue, and may make it worse.
  • wly_cdgr 5y ago
    But....10->400 over 5 years is quite close to being the same raw rate of growth as 400->1000 over 1 year? And given the challenges of the initial stage of growth, it arguably translates to a significantly higher stage-adjusted growth rate? On these numbers alone the best we can probably say for Meetup is that it performed about as well as your self hosted site
    • caseysoftware 5y ago
• 300bps 5y ago
  Meetup is freaking amazing. I have no idea why everyone doesn’t use it. It doesn’t matter what you’re into, you’ll probably find a group. I use it for hiking, kayaking and social events. It is so easy to meet people on there and just find things to do. Most of the groups I belong to, the events fill up and end up with waiting lists. If you’re new to an area and/or just want to meet new people, it’s hard to beat Meetup in my experience.
• rbanffy 5y ago
  I haven't for almost 3 years...
• jacobrussell 5y ago
  I had a meetup group that never really got off the ground, but I had one person in my group that I was getting something like $10 a month from (can't remember the exact amount). I felt so bad I deleted the group because I didn't know if they knew they were getting charged. Tried to message the person a few times. I feel like this is probably a common thing with Meetup where there are groups with people in them that have forgotten, and they don't realize they are getting charged a small amount every month.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Jxl180 5y ago
    I never knew there was a payment model in Meetup. In every Meetup I’ve been in, the admin pays to host the Meetup.
    • jacobrussell 5y ago
      The admin does pay, but you can also setup the group where it charges members automatically. I changed my group from free to paid to cover what I was paying. My understanding is members have to review and agree before they are charged, but I'm sure people do it without thinking sometimes. People probably also join groups without knowing they are paid. Keep in mind this is just anecdata from my experience.
• rebelde 5y ago
  Eventbrite might be the new Meetup. I was searching Meetup for events of a certain type and got nothing interesting. Eventbrite had quite a few events. Anyone successful using eventbrite to find groups?
• rvba 5y ago
  Meetup shot itself in the foot with the new look that effectively "siloes" you from finding new events. In addition, instead of one summary email that could come once per week/month by default they bombard you with hundreds of worthless emails from evety small meetup. So you mass unsubscribe from everything. Their rework that happened some time ago is basically digg 4.0 level of failure. I still try to use the site when I remember about it. Yet it is so damn bad; poor search, poor communication, you cant even find how many meetups you attended (possibility of verified badges or w/e). But this is the best we got. Maybe one day they get some sane designers, current design basically sabotages their core product. This is still the best place for discovery of events. I think I went to around 80-90 meetups and it is a pity that they also introduced this terrible monetization (people from silicon valley dont want to pay 2 dollars per attendee, imagine how it looks for the rest of the world - lots of groups dont use meetup anymore).
• aloisdg 5y ago
  Mobilizon is a free, libre, federated solution build by the non profit behind PeerTube https://mobilizon.org/en/ https://mobilizon.org/en/ Not as popular as Meetup by far, but it is a working alternative.
• revlolz 5y ago
  Even before covid, meetup was dying due to the greedy monetization. It was great while it lasted and then came fake users, membership limits, insane fees. I sincerely felt screwed over by their changes where we were going to cruise by under the free membership limit and got dozens if not hundreds of fake users inflating the group requiring premium. They even hiked the fees after that. Most disgusting experience. I hope they reap what they sowed.
• nprateem 5y ago
  I spent last year creating a meetup competitor but also got stumped on monetisation. It's a difficult problem since you can't really charge new users since they don't know what value they'll get (plus you want events to get lots of sign ups to look popular), and also charging admins makes it expensive to start groups. You can't do this either while gaining traction since you want groups & events. So there's no early way to revenue, and since Meetup is probably only worth about $50m (ignoring the $200m it was sold for to that office company that was desperate it IPO), it'd be a struggle to get funding for marketing while you're gaining traction, since ultimately the market leader isn't worth much. My app added some important missing features over meetup, but they'd be expensive to run. I'd strip them out but then I'd just have plain old (but empty) meetup again... so I think it's difficult to innovate in this area.
• eatonphil 5y ago
  I just started a new Meetup this year [0] featuring devs working on internals of databases, compilers, emulators, browsers, operating systems, etc. in any language. Over 100 members now but I don't believe it's because of Meetup's network since this is 1) a virtual meetup and 2) spanning multiple categories. It's ridiculous to me that Meetup.com still requires a city two years after a pandemic and has no means to make virtual meetups as first-class as in-person ones. But it's still an ok platform and there's nothing else I'm familiar with for scheduling public events like this. I am paying for it though so maybe I should be more demanding or take my money somewhere else.. [0] meetup.com/hackernights
• Timpy 5y ago
  I just got home from a Meetup event and opened up hn to see this post. I had a great time meeting new people with common interests. I've tried Meetup in different cities and mileage varies. I didn't have such great luck in the US midwest, but it's definitely still alive and well.
• oaf357 5y ago
  Not since the pandemic