Interesting timing on the Meetup $2/attendee fee, coming right after parent company WeWork collapsed.
Meetup.com alternatives
131–140 of 300 posts
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#132I fear this $2/attendee grab by Meetup will drive more people to Facebook for finding and planning and advertising events. Sadface. The understandable reason: Facebook is "free" and most of these better alternatives will be fragmented and mainstream unknown for a long time. Maybe one overarching event-search service could help the fragmentation problem, if it doesn't already exist.
They already walking back their massive own-goal:
https://www.meetup.com/lp/paymentchanges
UPDATE October 15, 2019 1:30 pm ET
This payment change is currently only a limited test for a small number of groups. Organizers of these select groups have the option to opt-out of this test. We will not be making any significant payment changes in the near term. We are committed to providing advance notice before any changes go into effect.
We’ve also updated our FAQs below to address specific questions.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#133I use the Dutch Erbij app to organize meetups myself - https://erbij.app
However, for browsing I still use meetup.com
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#134I co-organize a React meetup, and seeing the price change update last night made me so... upset and confused - that I decided to build an alternative. My plan is to charge organizers (like meetup does today) to cover costs - but never to charge members to attend free events. I've been looking for a solid project to spend time on, and this just became it. I put up a landing page this morning, and I've already started…
There are many other Meetup alternatives being started or in use, included some not listed in OP article. This is not good. There's too much fragmentation in this space and it'll be hard to have the self-sustaining critical mass, and cross-pollination across communities that made Meetup.com effective. I'm in tech, sports, and social Meetup groups. I don't want to join 3 new sites to replace this one.
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Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many other Meetup alternatives being started or in use, included some not listed in OP article. This is not good. There's too much fragmentation in this space and it'll be hard to have the self-sustaining critical mass, and cross-pollination across communities that made Meetup.com effective. I'm in tech, sports, and social Meetup groups. I don't want to join 3 new sites to replace this one.
Yes, I worry about that too - any ideas about how to fix it? One of the things I liked about meetup was that many (most?) groups were hosted on it, but I think what this has shown is that meetup had a kind of monopoly in that way (which wasn't good!)
My idea would be to clone Meetup.com as much as possible and aggressively pitch it as a "Meetup alternative." Use similar color scheme and branding, and have a Meetup.com migration tool to import existing groups and user accounts. The changeover has to be as smooth as possible, there are many non-technical Meetup organizers. It needs to stand out from the other Meetup clones. People don't know where to go.
Really though I don't think Meetup is going to die. WeWork is selling it, there's no way the market would just let this huge captive audience of active users implode. Maybe FB wil buy it.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#136OT: Am I the only one who thinks that most meetups are crap? The idea of meeting like-minded people is tempting but the reality is always different: Crowded places, stuffy air, weak talks, lame sponsors, 1-to-n presentations, no real interaction, stale drinks out of thin plastic cups, odd devs
I've only ever been to a few, but I found at lest two really nice: a Perl meetup in SF that wasn't really social at all but had great tech talks; and a Perl dinner (at a conference) in Vienna that had Very Odd Devs who were also super fun to talk to. People working at small regional banks can be way more eccentric than you'd guess!
It seems like all the problems you list are easy to solve, except odd devs, and I'm not sure that's a problem.
Admittedly, I'm too busy/lazy/unmotivated to solve them myself, but I can't believe there aren't some fun ones out there.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#137I am wondering which of these alternatives has a similar audience like meetup.com. The audience is the real killer feature of meetup.com. I know of no other place where it is so easy to gather people. Just post a new event and people will notice and sign up. If you switch to a self-hosted solution you will have to find an audience through other channels. Which, for many Meetups, is quite the challenge. Remember "buil…
If you're just looking for people, wouldn't Facebook work?
I would think that self-hosting is preferable in that things can better reflect the character of your meetup instead of everything being generic (I never liked Meetup.com for that reason).
Also, it's good to avoid lock-in.
So what about an aggregator for everyone's meetups? Maybe an API somewhere that you hit with your meetup info and that's a place to find the audience, but the aggregator tries to push them to your site?
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#138So many posts say "Meetup.com sucks but they have 'the community'" I don't understand this sentiment. Your town or city is the community - not some random web site. And your town, if it's like mine, has one ore more newspapers that maintain community events calendars. And Google manages events now with Google search. I google "beer event pittsburgh" and Google shows me the results. What exactly is the value-add of me…
The value add is discovery. Since many meet already be on meetup.com, they then discover another meetup which also might suit them. All these alternatives might have the functionality that meetup does, but none of them provide exposure. Everyone loves to hate on ads nowadays. They do not want to be tracked, etc, but I would love to see an ad-supported version of Meetup. It is too expensive at $15 a month for many sma…
I still don't get the "discovery" thing. I hear about events either via word of mouth or from posts on Facebook. Or if I'm looking for an event I Google. How would I "discover" events on meetup.com or another event service?
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#139A lot of the alternatives posted look like they'd be a good fit for my group. However, I feel the discoverability isn't there. The local UX meetup will likely choose one platform. The local frontend developers meetup will choose another.
Reliable, consistent members will follow the group regardless of the platform but I've always liked how easy it is for a local developer to just stumble across my group.
The best part about running these meetups are the random devs that decide to come to one event and stick around.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
A per-person charge makes free/volunteer-organized events largely a non-starter. Any charge is a huge friction for people signing up for something. And unless it's a corporate sponsored event (and often even then), the $5 or so per person who actually ends up attending is significant. Probably people/companies will just depend on word of mouth and other channels to promote events and not depend on discovery through a…
Yup, if this goes through, we'll need to move all our meetups to email notifications, which will kill virality but given that no-one's going to pay for a meetup, is probably the better solution. I fucking hate WeWork (i was really worried when Meetup.com was acquired, and it appears that I was correct to be).
I would have been OK with We buying Meetup if they offered their space for meetups ... but alas ... they did literally nothing and likely we'll see that the product was killed in the end.