Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#21

Post by edenlinger » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

ddek wrote: post #16

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 advertis…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#22

Post by fundamental » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#23

Post by glcheetham » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

Apfel wrote: post #7

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

Interested. Can you link your meetup group in here?

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#24

Post by hughrr » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#25

Post by And1 » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 2:42 PM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#26

Post by ravenstine » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#27

Post by martingoodson » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

We use it for the 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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#28

Post by mark_l_watson » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#29

Post by fidor » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

ddek wrote: post #16

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 advertis…

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

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#30

Post by bachonk » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

mtmail wrote: post #4

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 lists other alternatives

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.