31–40 of 54 posts
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…
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.
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 peo…
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.
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 - 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.
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
There are problems with a club comms app that, to my knowledge, haven't been solved:
Many sports club members don't have smartphones, and don't like smartphones if they have them. You ask these people for contact details and they point you to the Yellow Pages. Most of these people are just social players, but some are in teams. You cannot win a technology argument with them, but your communication system needs to reliably reach them.
Even people who are comfortable with tech will have a 'yet another app' problem. I would. You need to give me a reason to install an app. I don't want your app because its another place I need to look to see messages, and it's yet more notifications that I might miss. Other people have different reasons. To get over my problem, and everyone elses, your offering needs to be rock solid.
All that said, I still think there's space if well executed and integrated with the rest of the club. For example, it should automatically create a channel for people in a box league. It should be integrated with the booking system, and lights (seriously, turning lights on from the phone would be killer). You should have an account balance, which is used for bookings, lights, and the bar.
If you can do all that, then you have something that doesn't yet exist. You've also achieved everything I could do in a few days with a discord bot and some python scripts.
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.
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 h…
Anyone successful using eventbrite to find groups?