Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meetup.com alternatives

phacks.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 300 posts

Re: Meetup.com alternatives

#61

Post by lone_haxx0r »

djsumdog wrote: post #18
ziftface wrote: post #7

> I’m considering alternatives to Meetup.com for our meetup (should it still be called like that?) It should be. It's just an English word that predates the app, and is also used in the same setting/context as the use of the word within the meetup.com app, so I really hope there wouldn't be any trademark issues. Kind of a clever name, since it causes this confusion. I'm not sure if that was intentional, but the effec…

If there are trademark issues, it's important for all of us to use it as a generic term immediately. I remember years ago some people organized a meetup using Twitter and called it a Tweet-up. Make sure that if Meetup ever goes to court over a trademark, there's enough evidence of generic usage out there that it's not defensible.

A meetup with Twitter users sounds like a nightmare.

Re: Meetup.com alternatives

#62

Post by flurdy »

gyre007 wrote: post #19
nickjj wrote: post #14

This is a good reminder of why I stopped going to most local tech meetups ran by meetup.com. Not because of the upcoming $2 fee, but because most of the time it's a 2 hour tech meetup where you spend 15 minutes mingling at the start, then 1 hour and 30 minutes listening to advertisements disguised as talks where you sit down and remain silent and then another 15 minutes mingling at the end. It feels so corporate and…

On top of that large majority of the Meetups now seem to be run by companies trying to sell you stuff of recruitment companies trying to poach people

I am ok with recruitment companies organising meetups. But mostly as it is in their interest to attract plenty of relevant people to the meetups over and over again.

So it is a fine balance between good talks, and how much they will advertise their recruitment business. I can stand a little, but not too much. The ones I have been to have had a good balance. LJC in London is/was organised by one and seemed to have a good balance.

But I have been a little annoyed at other companies creating rival meetups on the same topic in the same location. Especially if the original group is not oversubscribed. It just creates some confusion and people miss out on some meetups.

Re: Meetup.com alternatives

#63

Post by davidy123 »

iamspoilt wrote: post #29
jborichevskiy wrote: post #11

Somewhat related note: as someone living in a major city I find it increasingly hard to discover relevant events happening soon/around me. Events I'm looking for span a range of interests, artists, bands, topics, hobbies, and causes - hence no one central location has a list of everything relevant to me. So I'm forced to regularly dig through Meetup, Eventbrite, Facebook, Google Events Search, individual sites, indiv…

That’s the first thing I thought after going through the linked article. We strongly need some aggregating tool for all events happening around a particular location.

No, and looking for tools (or Portals as they are groaningly called) is where the Web went wrong. We need strongly aggregatable data, not a tool. In fact this data format already exists in schema.org, which is an open, community-driven effort by Google, Bing, Yandex and others. https://schema.org/Event

schema.org is used by about a third of web sites to allow them to be self contained but make their information discoverable and reusable in a precise way, and it is the skeleton of the much-promised semantic web. The main factors working against it are Facebook and Amazon, who have enough mass and selfishness to want to be self-contained worlds.

That is the only reasonable way to "decentralize" this data so anyone can use it. Add your recognized sites once (or perhaps have a recurring crawl) and anyone can have their own feed of events, just like RSS. It's just that developers and startups don't like the boring work of following standards, they'd rather build a tool.

[edited to add details about schema.org]

Re: Meetup.com alternatives

#64

Post by spookthesunset »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #56
manojlds wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Anecdotal. Not all are bad, and in my experience, most were good. 2. How is that meetup's fault? It's like saying HN is bad because of bad comments.

2. Many people said that 8chan was bad because some shooter posted there. Maybe these people think the same about meetup.

8chan is bad because they did nothing to prohibit people from posting the kind of crap that leads to shooters showing up on the forum....

Re: Meetup.com alternatives

#65

Post by aabbcc1241 »

There are more than enough alternatives. One could just organize meet up in Facebook group or telegram group as well. You just need a place that many people sharing the similar interests gather to spread the meet up time and location.

Re: Meetup.com alternatives

#66

Post by bradlys »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #60
jborichevskiy wrote: post #11

Somewhat related note: as someone living in a major city I find it increasingly hard to discover relevant events happening soon/around me. Events I'm looking for span a range of interests, artists, bands, topics, hobbies, and causes - hence no one central location has a list of everything relevant to me. So I'm forced to regularly dig through Meetup, Eventbrite, Facebook, Google Events Search, individual sites, indiv…

So I'm forced to regularly dig through Meetup, Eventbrite, Facebook, Google Events Search, individual sites, individual web pages, AXS, Spotify Concerts, email newsletters, etc. I'm in a small town and it feels like "word of mouth" is the standard here. I'm wondering where one would even begin to try to aggregate any information whatsoever.

For even small communities within a large city, word of mouth is still huge. Very few people show up to the events I go to because they found it online. It's 95%+ word of mouth. ("oh yeah, my friend Bob told me about it")

It's no different for me. I rarely go to events I've seen only online. I also use word of mouth as a source.

I'm going to an event this weekend because a coworker broadcasted they're speaking at it. I won't be able to see their talk due to a prior commitment but I'm going to see plenty of others thanks to knowing about it.

Re: Meetup.com alternatives

#67

Post by arielm »

The technical aspect of creating an event list an way to manage RSVPs isn’t hard to compete with but it’s meetup’s community that made it a destination for new organizers. That, is hard to compete with.

Re: Meetup.com alternatives

#68

Post by dTal »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #60
jborichevskiy wrote: post #11

Somewhat related note: as someone living in a major city I find it increasingly hard to discover relevant events happening soon/around me. Events I'm looking for span a range of interests, artists, bands, topics, hobbies, and causes - hence no one central location has a list of everything relevant to me. So I'm forced to regularly dig through Meetup, Eventbrite, Facebook, Google Events Search, individual sites, indiv…

So I'm forced to regularly dig through Meetup, Eventbrite, Facebook, Google Events Search, individual sites, individual web pages, AXS, Spotify Concerts, email newsletters, etc. I'm in a small town and it feels like "word of mouth" is the standard here. I'm wondering where one would even begin to try to aggregate any information whatsoever.

Hmm... wordofmouth.com ?

Re: Meetup.com alternatives

#69

Post by darkarmani »

Geeflow wrote: post #4

I 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…

> Personally I don't mind paying 2$ to attend a meetup. The old/existing pricing model seemed much smarter for everyone involved though. Organizers pay to get access to the audience. The audience pays nothing so that the audience, the real value, can be maximized. I hope that they won't destroy their value with this move...

So there are a lot of fitness meetups that run multiple times a week. The Barcelona before work beach volleyball meetup is one that comes to mind. It already uses whatsapp as well, so i can see them using Meetup for the even, but whatsapp for the confirmations.

Meetup.com is making a terrible mistake.

Re: Meetup.com alternatives

#70

Post by tantalor »

degenerate wrote: post #3

The list: https://emamo.com https://kommunity.com https://joinmobilizon.org/en https://cete.io (not yet launched?) https://eventy.io (not yet launched) And the not-yet-build one by FreeCodeCamp: https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1183845054449930241 I've never heard of any of them. Opinions?

http://eventful.com
Post reply on HN