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, individual web pages, AXS, Spotify Concerts, email newsletters, etc.
Building another event organization platform isn't the solution - getting people, venues, and organizers onto it would be an expensive uphill battle, and would further fracture discovery. But a thought of a decentralized open-source aggregation of a bunch of feeds has been popping up in my mind lately. These could be sourced from all of the above mentioned sources and somewhat standardized into a format with name, description, price, location, time. From there, it should be a simple matter to add filtering, subscriptions, and even a recommendations engine.
Has anything like this been attempted? Might it work? I haven't found anything yet.
Mobilizon looks like it's on the right track but my biggest concern is seeding it: the first version of any such aggregator should pull from existing repositories of events to allow discovery (while still forwarding actual registration to the original source site).
I do like the fact that they have an event-publishing tool and the option to self-host.
> Framasoft wants to create Mobilizon: free/libre software that will allow communities to create their own spaces to publish events, in order to better emancipate themselves from tech giants. We want to develop a digital common, that everyone can make their own, which respects privacy and activism by design.
I was never sure if Mobilizon was in this space - there is a difference between a system that lets an event organiser host events and one that lets keen people aggregate events from other places that aren't Mobilizon installs. Do we know more about their plans yet?
I'm building it because it is a problem I've faced among my friends and well.. the "millennial" generation to begin with. I'm building it first to be used among myself and friends.
I don't want to say too much because to me the solution seems so obvious and I'd like to have something out there and tried on a small scale first, but... the key is not to focus on events directly, but people.
If anyone would like to know more, my twitter is on my profile, DM me there!
Right now it is just me. I'm also currently torn on focusing on the consumer social space (not social network) or the business space. Both seem pretty promising targets but vastly different approaches to marketing.
I'd love to know more - your profile seems to be missing your email though (the main email in your HN profile is default private; you have to add it to the About section to be visible).
Thawd focuses on getting groups of people out to events, not just one at a time. The idea is you tell the app what you want to do, and Thawd will find other people interested in the same thing and use personality matching to create groups of people who can hang out and have a good time together.
Hoping to get submitted to app stores by EOW.
(and yes, turns out getting users is easy, getting events is the hard part!)
I built a site like that focussed around adhoc events for people of similar interests. But when I looked at the business model I saw a few difficulties:
* If it was effective users would probably stop using it and switch directly to something like whatsapp
* Judging by meetup, a few people actually create events and greater percentage attend. This seems common across many platforms - 5-10% of users are actually producers, but a much larger are "passive" consumers. My site focussed on adhoc events and I wasn't sure enough users would create them
* The real issue was needing to promote it hyperlocally, meaning each new location needed marketing. A site focussed around groups can build a history of events for each group which aids discoverability/SEO. But a site that's all about adhoc events doesn't have that benefit in the same way if members are more amorphous (my site was all about creating e.g. an event to play tennis that afternoon, so depended on locality).
I couldn't solve these issues and abandoned it. Good luck though.
Originally I was algorithmically generating events using Google's wait time information, but I switched models to having local businesses post up events. If it takes off I'll let people post their own events as well, but that has some serious safety concerns in comparison to events at public venues.
This is a relief for me personally, because I've also been thinking about building something that fits this need, and seeing how many people are trying to enter the space by now makes me realize it's about to get very crowded and now I don't feel nearly as bad not getting involved.
Am interested in learning more but your contact info is twitter without DMs open (have to be mutually following). Mind opening DMs or posting your email to the about field on HN? Thanks!
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.
It would be great to have all this data but... It's not sufficient because anyone can post anything so it becomes a magnet for scammers. One, they'll make up events for non-events like just listing their bar exists. They'll also fill out fake schemas just for SEO, example fill out an event "Viagra cheap!"
Of course I guess that's no different than crawling the web. Just saying that even with the data itself you need some serious spam detection to make it useful.
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.
>Has anything like this been attempted? Might it work?
It has been tried, and early attempts failed. Jon Udell was one of the drivers behind the Elm City Project, which merged many RSS feeds of calendar information into a uniform resource. [0] Maybe its time has come again.
Yeah, I was thinking about this too: why not try to implement the "Who is hiring" model (i.e. a quasi-standarized text format) to events using social networks that allows to search by tags, such as Twitter and Mastodon.
One site that I've found with a wide-ish breadth of events is https://evensi.com. They however seem to have too much choice and it's difficult to narrow down to a small relevant list of events. There sometimes are too many options that are vaguely interesting but too few that are genuinely engaging. Meetup works quite well in this respect as you can select your interests and it's not too difficult to scan the entire list if that doesn't offer a decent choice and it's certainly something Eventbrite lacks even though they have vast inventory (It's better designed for ticketing rather than discovery). I've tried to crack this and have put together a site to recommend you 5 interesting events each day over the next week. (Also all free entry with some food and or drink). Currently in fairly early stages and covers London. https://onlythebestevents.com
It’s definitely been attempted in the past. For example, there was Upcoming.org, launched in 2003, acquired by Yahoo!, retired 10 years later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upcoming
Checking one of those boxes: a friend of mine made an app called MicChek (iOS only) that will tell aggregate the events going on for a certain date. It's actually useful when you find yourself with a free night, especially in a strange city.
Another alternative aimed at technical meetups is https://meetabit.com which we built at Toughbyte.
I organize a number of technical meetups, such as HelsinkiJS which is the biggest developer meetup in Finland, and have found Meetup.com lacking. To scratch our own itch, we built Meetabit which includes some additional features such as the ability to accept talk proposals and sponsorship offers, have speaker profiles, archive of talks and related materials, export data etc.
It does what we need and we haven't been actively developing or promoting it recently, but it has still grown organically to around 10K users and multiple meetups organized each month. We are likely to put more resources into it given the recent changes at Meetup.com. Worth adding that the service is free both to organizers and attendees; our long term plan is to have the same business model as Stack Overflow by promoting relevant jobs to members.
I'll draft a blog post explaining things in more detail, but in the meantime feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Also, if you'd like to take the service for a spin and your city isn't listed, shoot me an email at oleg@toughbyte.com and I'll add it.
PS. Nicolas has added us to the linked post since I made this comment, many thanks for super quick responses!
Isn't Eventbrite also a valid alternative, that has the advantage of bing a mature, feature-rich offering? Free events are free, and their profits come from supporting paid events.
The FreeCodeCamp one is pitched as a self-hosted solution, which means it won't have a network of meetup groups like meetup.com does. If you have a big network of meetups yourself (like, say, FreeCodeCamp), then sure it works. If you're just a small meetup group, it'll be no better than just hoping people find your site on google as is.
I've never heard of them either. Meetup's demise will be a great opportunity for them, but I think a lot of them will be hobbled by having off-putting names.
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 specific service.
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.
one group i am in uses meetup for event announcements, but manages the event on their own website. it's really just to enable people to find them on meetup. meetup never sees any rsvps except some that rsvp by mistake.
the only thing that virality helps with is event anouncements. finding all events in the same place, that is what makes meetup.com useful. the actual registration, and what not can be done anywhere else without causing to much friction.
For smaller group, people updating attendance is really useful. I've cancelled meetings when not enough people could attend, or change venue if more than I initially anticipated acknowledged. This is not easy to do on a simple github.io style static site.
oh, of course, but it doesn't have to happen on meetup.com, you can use any other service, from the many suggested in this discussion.
of course having two sites is more complex than having it all-in-one. that was the whole benefit of meetup.com, but that benefit is now going away.
one reaction is to reduce the dependency on meetup.com for groups. we need meetup.com to help get the word out, but we can use other tools for the actual group management.
I run a corporate sponsored meetup and the $2 fee is a non starter. My budget is for the venue, stickers and beers, this would increase the cost of every meetup by 50% providing nothing in return.
Edit: After reading a bit more about it, the cost is to the users, not organizers, which makes even less sense. Why would anyone ever RSVP instead of just showing up?
This is a serious question -- you really can do a venue, stickers, beers, and other stuff for $4 pp? Because I am struggling to see how that works. My rough guess from having thrown events would be $14 pp for decent food, beers and some nicer-than-soda non-alcoholic alternatives, etc.
The venue should be available for free if your meetup is attractive to people that could be potential employees of the hosts. And why do you feel the need to give people free food and drinks? Reframe the issue : Everyone who attends should be motivated to come to the event for the content, rather than free food on their way home.
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.
Meetup is a resource for me. My guess that this change would complete end every single meetup I know of except for a few tech meetups - and these probably have alternatives and so wouldn't want it either.
It seems like this also illustrates a complete misunderstanding by the meetup company of how the meetup app is used by their users/customers. Among other things, it's standard for people to find group, sign-up maybe once and then not sign-up further but continue to attend regularly - the group I run and the group I've previously run were like that. Meetup was/is about discovery. Expecting potential attendees to pay is absurd, regular attendees wouldn't feel obligated to register and so wouldn't pay. The confusion is complete.
Agree very much. I do attend a few non tech meetups, like movie meetups & hikes for eg. 2€ fee over the movie ticket rarely makes any sense. While proper tech style meetups may actually have organizer costs and such, a meetup where the whole point is meeting a bunch of people over a coffee or so with minimal organizational requirements doesn't make sense with the fee.
Doesn't Meetup also "ban" itself from development countries, where $2 is a lot? In some places, $2 is like $26. — Or will Meetup charge less, based on local purchasing power?
People skipping the RSVP and just showing up "unofficially" is already a problem with Meetup. This is going to create the exact wrong incentive for that.
Next up: movie theaters that charge $2 to anyone who doesn't talk during a movie, gyms that charge $2 if you put dumbbells back on the rack instead leaving them strewn around the floor, traffic cops giving tickets for properly using your turn signal, ...
The thing is, as a meetup organizer, I prefer someone who shows up but doesn't sign-up to someone who doesn't show up at all. At least for ongoing attendees and I host weekly and monthly "hobby" events when once someone shows up once, they don't have much incentive to sign-up for future meetup events and that's fine for everyone. I still don't mind paying for meetup because it's a way for new people to find the event.
But in that situation, attendees paying meetup is absurd but in just about any situation, attendees paying meetup is absurd. Meetup already has an option to have attendees to pay the organizer for attending. They might consider that for the events where this option isn't used, it is realistically because this could not work, you can't get money from people for that stuff.
Depending on the event, showing up without doing an RSVP can be worse than not coming. I think generally it depends on whether the RSVP is being relied on for something, for example an accurate headcount for a restaurant reservation.
For a regular meetup, it's not nearly as important to RSVP. Maybe even overly formal. I go to a weekly thing that's organized through Meetup, and I still RSVP every time, though, for a few reasons. One is it puts it on my calendar automatically. Two is it helps newbies feel comfortable that somebody is going and they won't be the only one there if they show up.
Having attended several meetups in London, RSVP is usually required for building security reasons, they need to know in advance the names of who is coming into the building depending on the hosting venue
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 non-human. You get lured into a business' office with free food and drinks or stickers but then you have sign up forms, recruitment pitches and vendors giving talks about some technology but it's all focused on using their service around that tech.
I miss the good old days of 2600 meetups in the late 1990s. Everyone meets in a public place. There's no set schedule other than where to go and when it starts. Then you actually meet up with people and talk about things that you have in common. You can leave in 30 seconds or stay all night. There's no commitment, agenda or sales pitches.
Meetup doesn’t “run” these. You’re just picking boring ones. The only meetup I attend is a bunch of random motorcyclists who go up the coast highway every week. Never felt bored.
They don't run them, but it's sort of intrinsic to their platform that low-budget meetups can't access it, and those can be some of the best because they don't have to answer to sponsors.
I run a "meetup" that is not on Meetup, in part because of the cost (I'm fortunate that in a technical niche community in NYC, word of mouth spreads fast).
I've started a few meetups and a format that works well is the following:
- have one company as the sponsor, providing venue, food and one technical talk - this ensures that the organizers don't need to deal with money which is a big admin headache
- have around 3 talks total, but keep them short, to around 20 minutes + 5 minutes for Q&A
- start the event 15-30 mins late to allow for people to show up late and giving those that turned up early the chance to talk to each other
- make sure you end quite early, leaving time for people to mingle afterwards
We also built our own Meetup.com alternative called Meetabit (https://meetabit.com, see my other comment to this post) and to promote it wrote a few blog posts which go into more detail, which you can find here: https://blog.toughbyte.com/tagged/meetup
We soft launched it in a few cities only and it was easier to implement that way. I've added Tokyo for you now though. If there are any others you'd like me to add, post them in a comment here please.
I'm not sure to which meetups you are going, but Meetup.com is just a platform with a great reach. There'll always be corporate sponsored meetups in cities, but if there would be no Meetup.com they'd post it on Twitter or sponsor conferences in the city. I actually like it to check out other offices in the city from time to time and I don't mind the one talk from a person of that company, it's just fair as they provide the venue and food.
Especially if you are coming to a new city it's a great place to find out what's going on and find your group. It's nice to have a centralized place for that and makes it very easy to connect with people. (At least in my experience here in Berlin)
I use it in the distant past for language and photography socializing in a big capital city. I looked not long ago and most groups were now tech based that were clearly startup pitches and other "business" related things instead of cultural and social. Everything seems to get ruined by people trying to squeeze money out of it like the internet in general. I was just thinking today for some reason about when Omegle started and it was cool talking to normal people all over. Less than a year later it was overrun with scammers, spam for websites, and other nonsense. Skype is another example even further back. Everything that gets any attention ends up like this...twisted and ruined for profits. Has really ruined my faith in anything and anyone at this point because it all just gets gobbled up in pursuit of riches.
So this is the norm? I thought the only meetup.com thing I ever want to was just a bad one. Was advertised as a meetup on a very specific hobby I had recently taken up. When I got there it turned out to be more like 10 minutes of discussing that hobby and an hour of listening to a pitch about joining their hackerspace. It was pretty disappointing and I left with a bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing.
Exactly. I started and run the largest crypto meetup in Aus (~3300 members). I've been very conscious about this problem for a few years and have been wading through trauma/drama to steer the ship back to basic pub meetups with no sponsors and no speakers.
Another huge problem are co-organisers. You bring them onboard because they're happy to take turns organising events and it takes the load off.
I never start meetups with the intention of getting a job or business opportunities, but that's often why co-organisers join. You think, sure, everyone's a volunteer so it's fine if they get something out of it.
Then years pass and those co-orgs are deeply involved to the point where their livelihoods depend on the subject matter (Ethereum in this case). And they want to keep the sales pitch lecture model, since they almost always slot themselves in as speaker when it's their turn to organise.
You suggest changing the meetup name to be less tribalistic and to change the format to drop speakers and sponsors. HUGE drama. You put it to a vote, 5-3 agree to the change. The other 3 decide to clone the meetup under the same old name, email all members telling them to join, steal the Facebook and Twitter accounts, harass me everyday for a week over Telegram until I snap, then screenshot my response and spread it through the community.
I actually find this isn’t my experience in NYC, admittedly I actively avoid such talks and go straight to collective hack nights or special interests (Eg. Postgres devs or similar niches).
I've never been to a specific Docker/Kubernetes meetup. Have you considered specific DevOps meetings or SRE specific stuff to ask for recommendations? My sphere is in postgres, python, and HackR. Again, avoiding talks in general and more going to community-oriented meetups like hack nights.
The oldest meet-up (not Meetup) I went to I think worked because 1) bald faced ads were not allowed (except during a ten minute period at the beginning) and you were not invited back if your presentation turned into one.
And 2) about 15% of attendees went to a bar afterward to talk shop.
I’ve really started contemplating adding #2 on my own to meet-ups if the organizers don’t.
Running a monthly meeting is a lot of hard work and many people get it wrong, or can’t keep the wheels on.
Maybe the topics were too trend related. I can assure you that emacs / clojure / haskell meetups I attended were nothing but great times. Good crowd, some famous guys, 99.99% interesting talks.
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.
I know, I'm just saying a bunch of other tech meetups that I've been to have been the total opposite experience of what those 2600 meetups were like back then.
So much has changed in ~20 years around tech in general. I wonder what a current day 2600 meetup is like. I may go check one out.
90%+ of all tech meetups in Austin are this. Such sad garbage. I'm in NYC now, and haven't been going to meetups because I feel burned out on them from having so many bad experiences.
Hopefully the new charge that meetup is foisting on attendees will kill the platform and we'll see some of these alternatives take off.
Remember, you can't make friends unless you pay your corporate masters!
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 "build it and they will come"? Same applies to events. "Set a date and they will come" - doesn't work that way unless you have an existing audience.
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...
I think the risk to meetup.com is that the established meetups for groups like programmers or other career/professionals, the ones most likely to be important enough that people would pay $2 to attend, are also precisely the ones least in need of meetup's audience, since they are established.
Also, charging $2/person means about $0.25 goes to Visa/Mastercard/PayPal/whoever does the payment processing, which is about 12.5% of your revenue skimmed off the top immediately. Charging the organizer more, and everyone else nothing, works better from that point of view even if the attendees chip in a few bucks each to compensate the organizer.
Of all the business models one could imagine for this site, this seems like one of the less well thought out.
As an organiser, I'm genuinly stunned by how poorly thought out this model is.
It fundamentally changes the relationship between me and my attendees. Suddenly they are paying to attend. The fact that I get non of that money is irrelevant to the person paying. That's a big psychological shift for free events like mine.
I have the opposite hope - I hope they do destroy their audience. Meetup.com hasn't had any real change or innovation in 10 years and it's time for some new players to shake up the space.
> Personally I don't mind paying 2$ 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.
Personally I don't mind paying 2$ to attend a meetup.
I'd prefer having pay $2/attendee as organizer myself to the system of making attendees pay. Because they.simply.will.not.pay and will not attend. That is how the Internet has worked since forever.
This is really bad for me because meetup actually has been extremely useful for me and, as you say, there's a good change they are simply going to loose that audience completely with nothing replacing it, at least for a while (or Facebook replacing it and that kind of sucking).
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?
There is some irony that everyone is rushing to build their own competitors because Meetup decided to charge $2. Let that sink in. You're effectively limiting yourself to a LTV of a customer of less than $2 per attendee of their events now. You'll end up in the same vicious cycle of needing to charge for something if you want your platform to survive.
Meetup was making money before they took VC funds and eventually sold to Wework. Their old model of charging $15+ to organizers seemed to work. I paid it for years because of the extra traffic and not wanting my events to be hijacked. They never let you own your own audience though.
I co-organize a handful of Meetup groups, and we already pay a non-negligible annual fee. There's definitely money to be made.
Most people seem happy shelling out $100-200 per year for a membership. $2 per attendee per event is simply exorbitant, noone will be able to afford that.
It's so bizarrely extreme, I can only assume it's a psychological "anchoring" tactic - a patently ludicrous number that makes the "real" offer (2-3x fee hike) more "reasonable".
So we started our meetup group before meetup.com existed and rely more on eventbrite. If I had been running our events through meetup only and on this fee structure, I'd be paying $400+/month vs the $15 I was ok with paying before to offer a secondary listing of my event. I think the ceiling of fees people are willing to pay is closer to the $15 though.
Baseless pricing structures make me livid. You get to charge for convenience, you get to charge for your head count, you get to charge for your pet projects and future growth, but if you try to charge me non-trivial amounts to insert a row into a database I'm going to take a work-day and attempt to build an in-house replacement (ymmv, only works for very simple use cases).
People already pay for Meetup.com. As an organiser I think I'm paying around $180 a year and that limits me to three meet-up groups under my ownership.
From what I've seen, no one is complaining about paying for Meetup's services. It's the unfairness of the charge that is the problem.
Why is it unfair? For one, meetup attrition is often in excess of 50%. So, 100 people RSVP, you pay $200 for that one event (more than the previous annual fee), and maybe 50 people show up. It's also out of scale with what similar services charge. Another problem is that it makes running a free/community meet-up unpredictable financially. I'm happy to stump up $180 a year if it means Meetup.com makes it easier to grow the audience for a group I run as a hobby. I'm not happy for that to become, potentially, 12 times that.
People are demonstrably willing to pay for Meetup.com. They're not willing to open themselves to unpredictable and, frankly, wildly higher fees just because Meetup's parent company is going through a hard time.
People are happy to pay but there's a limit. I pay that $180 for a Meetup group yearly but that's already crept up from... $120, I think, over the past few years, and I was already starting to wonder if I was going to keep paying it.
If they increased it another $50 on me, I'd probably just kill it and move as much of the group over to Facebook events (doesn't help the group has been in a lull lately either since I've had a year of planning for my wedding taking up all my time).
So I think they figured this change would let them get more money in the long run without having a bunch of Organizers drop their Meetup groups with a big price hike, but they're going to lose groups this way too and I suspect it's going to make things worse in the long run.
I can't think of any other way they can make money without exploiting their users somehow. Either Meetup turns their userbase into machine learning datasets, people spend some pocket change on it, or Meetup doesn't exist. (This same dilemma exists for most non-data center/non-ecommerce internet companies. People feel that a row in someone's database isn't worth paying for even though it took significant labor to create.)
I mean it's not like going to an event in real life is free in the first place. You have to pay for transportation and so on. You spend your precious time. If it's important to you, why be stingy over 2 bucks.
They are what?? $2 to just to say I'm attending an event? What a blatant shakedown. I should also become a corporate executive and steal a bunch of money if this is the level of thought the job requires.
I rarely even say I'm going unless there are a limited number of slots. I just show up. Hopefully they won't hide the location or ical download unless you pay the $2. That would be super shitty. This is a pretty big shakedown, and I don't see it ending well for Meetup.
Sadly I agree with others that people will just moved to Facebook events :(
I think it's insane that Meetup thinks they can get attendees to pay $2 per event when a lot of those same people only show up at events to grab a free slice of pizza.
I suppose it's still economical if you plan on eating more than two slices but I doubt it'll work out for them.
> 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 effect is interesting nonetheless.
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.
We've been cranking away at a better group event/planning platform on https://guestboard.co for a while now (basically Slack meets Evite), but with this news, we're switching up our product roadmap to include recurring events much sooner. Would love the input from any/all. Possibly considering an interim solution of simply cloning an existing event and carrying over the guest list from previous?
We'll also be prioritizing a "discovery" search tool to be able to find public events without needing to encounter an invite link from an organizer.
And before you jump down my throat(!) a common feedback point has been improving the RSVP function to allow attendees to join without a full registration, and this new invite/onboarding flow will be releasing in a week or so :)
I saw someone from your team post on r/Sasquatch awhile ago and I meant to check it out. Seems like a lot of great features... but yeah, discovery is really important.
For public events, discovery is supreme - totally agree. We started as a planning tool for groups to cut down on massive email chains and group texts (hence the festival/Sasquatch use case :) We've got more cooking, especially with this change of events (ha).
OT: 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
It's been a random mix for me. The non-tech meetups (hiking, board games, etc.) that I've attended were often better experiences on average than tech-related ones, which were often a bit too focused on business interests.
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.
I mostly don't go to tech meetups, or any meetups where the only reason it exists is for networking. Those usually aren't that fulfilling. Sometimes if it's an interesting topic it'll get me, but usually not.
I mainly use meetup for board game nights, hikes, hack nights, game jams, movies, dinners, crafting, karaoke, and exploring new hobbies (there's a photography one I just joined recently).
None of those are usually in crowded places, stuffy air, have any sponsors or presentations, and have plenty of interaction.
I'm building Mixily.com as a general event-organizing tool. Like an alternative to FB events, but with better styling, features, and privacy policy. It launched in July and works great for one-off events.
For recurring events, we have some features in private beta, like pre-set guest lists and a forum. Email me at andrew@mixily.com if you want to try it out!
Very interested to see all these Meetup competitors developing! Seems there are kind of two main buckets here: simple tools focused on organize events, and platforms that are more a two-sided market where event discovery / matching interests and attendees is a factor as well.
For hosting small dinners and learning events, I'm looking mostly for the former, and one tool that's quite new but looks very promising is Mixily: https://www.mixily.com
It's a nice streamlined tool, prioritizes privacy, and has a number of solid features like messaging and event reminders, date polling (like doodle), comments wall, variety of privacy settings. Also some other very cool things in beta, like contact lists, and ticketed / donation-based events.
https://calagator.org/ is a calendar for tech meetups and events happening in Portland, OR. I'm still curious if there's something similar for Seattle.
So 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 meetup.com? An honest question. I attend all kinds of events and I almost never come across meetup.com.
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 small groups.
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?
>How would I "discover" events on meetup.com or another event service?
Meetup has a search engine that allows you to find events by date, location, or subject matter. So I could
- look up events near me for this coming week.
- look up events within a certain radius from a location.
- look up events based on my interests.
> if I'm looking for an event I Google.
That's the fallback. I think what Meetup provided was a single site that people visit to find local events that fit their interests, which also allowed community-building.
Imagine you want to have some small hyper local group such as Memorial Park Dog Owners. Obviously, members will not pay for such a group, but the organizer is on the hook for almost $200 a year. Hard to create community with such prices.
Active groups of over 250 members? The pricing starts getting better.
> Imagine you want to have some small hyper local group such as Memorial Park Dog Owners. Obviously, members will not pay for such a group, but the organizer is on the hook for almost $200 a year.
It is 4 big macs a month. It is 3 Starbucks coffees a months. It is 3 cans of soda bought as singe units in a super market a month.
If a group cannot afford it, then maybe stop pretending that the group needs RSVPs or other services. Use a paper and a pen and pin an announcement on the bulletin board of a park.
The group does not pay for the meetup, the organizer does. Most social meetups are created by the kindness of the organizer, who want nothing in return. $15 a month is a lot of kindness.
My fictitious group was an example. I do not like dogs. :) But your solution goes back to my original comment. The article lists functional alternatives, but there is no way for someone to find the group, unless they explicitly searched for it. Most end up searching on Meetup and Facebook.
> My fictitious group was an example. I do not like dogs. :) But your solution goes back to my original comment. The article lists functional alternatives, but there is no way for someone to find the group, unless they explicitly searched for it. Most end up searching on Meetup and Facebook.
The article lists other solutions that will either:
1. Start monetizing via data mining and ads. This is a very dubious proposition for sites targeting small communities unless those sites convert every single inch of space on screen into ads or unless community management part of it is a just another place to stick ads like it is for Google and Facebook
2. Charge the money from either attendees or organizers to support a going concern, causing the same kind of freak out meetup is currently experiencing.
3. Shutdown
The "those who pay the least whine the most" is showing to be true here as well.
> Yes. 4 big macs a month for a small meeting that noone is making money on is too expensive. You're absolutely right.
That's the type of argument akin to "If you do not have a funded retirement you should not have a latte": if someone thinks that saving a money on a latte is going to make a difference in his or her retirement, then they have a structural problem that not having a latte won't solve.
> There are free solutions, Meetup can turn over and die.
Yes. They are called email lists or pen and paper.
I was thinking of an alternative that would allow anyone to publish a meeting with a standard data format (similar to recipes) and get picked up by a massive meeting indexer. But then I realized that event coordinators want a lot of control over RSVPs, sending messages to attendees, and the ability to collect money ahead of time to pre-pay for event supplies, etc. It really is annoying that you need a platform to handle this, but anything else might end up being too complicated.
I hate meetup so. damn. much! They have now become the shty equivalent of the yellow pages, needed but detested at the same time. The rents they seek with the desert of functionality conspires to boil my blood. I will dance in the street when they are replaced by anything, anything at all.
We need a community run service, not a for profit company.
If you're a recreational sports Meetup group you could try us at OpenSports (www.opensports.net). We only charge for paid events and don't have monthly fees. We've moved over hundreds of sports Meetup groups such as https://opensports.net/@cfrs, https://opensports.net/@sonsofpitchesfc,
https://opensports.net/@philadelphiavolleyball/. We offer the full gamut of Meetup features along with many others such as support for waivers, discounts, waitlists for paid events, etc. Transaction fees of $5% + $0.30 including Stripe credit card fees.
Meetup.com is a truly horrible site and corporation. They hold your meetup group hostage if you're an organizer. What do I mean by that? Since you have no contact information for any of your attendees, you can't reach out to them to move them to another platform. You can't shut down your Meetup either. Instead, you can simply resign as an organizer. This allows someone else to step in and take over. Taking all the hard work you did to create the meetup and giving it to someone else. It would be nice if Meetup could give you the contact information of all your members and also allow you to close a group without allowing anyone else to step in. In this way, they hold your group hostage, not allowing you to leave, and thus committing you forever for their fees, even if you never run another event again.
>Since you have no contact information for any of your attendees, you can't reach out to them to move them to another platform.
>It would be nice if Meetup could give you the contact information of all your members
Meetup has a spam problem, as greggman2 has pointed out.[0] Your proposal would make that worse.
>This allows someone else to step in and take over. Taking all the hard work you did to create the meetup and giving it to someone else.
Believe it or not, some people think this is a feature. I know of groups where the original organizer(s) had to leave the locality for various reasons, but designated successor(s) to keep the group going.
>allow you to close a group without allowing anyone else to step in.
Yes, that'd be good to have.
>They hold your meetup group hostage if you're an organizer.
Yes, all these contributed to lock-in, but some of these were features that some people wanted in the past, or at least that's my impression from using the site for many years.
I'm a meetup organizer as well (over 3.5K members and over 500 attendees to our mostly free events) so this is hitting us hard.
My team is working on a virtual event spaces app called Morphus, https://www.morphus.ai. We aim to create a 2.0 Meetup that helps anyone to spin up a virtual space and allow mobile, desktop, and VR users to join events.
As an organizer myself I'll be focusing on helping communities better manage their members and also create a more interactive and fun environment for everyone.
By the way we aggregate meetups from different sources and map them in the 3D world inside the app.
We've been working on it for the past 2 years and are now finally fundraising. If you can connect us with interested parties to create futuristic next generation event platform do let me know, very curious. (I know it's self promotion but I'm sick of meetup at this point)
I remember thinking that things like these will happen with Meetup.com more and more ever since they got acquired by WeWork -- and I've personally heard many organizers around me say that Meetup.com is getting worse and worse, but there's really not much to be done with the discovery dimension as they have the grand majority of the users.
I've since been working on an alternative: https://blinkmeet.com, but that didn't really account for much for various reasons.
I really do think that it's only a matter of time before Meetup.com goes down, this way or another.
Thank you for sharing this article. I was not aware of WeWork killing Meetup until now. I've already told three groups I'm in that I will be deleting my account by 10/30.
I belong to 2 large-ish meetups that in the past few months have been migrating to a Facebook page.
I have run meetups of all kinds, from tech to social; and I am now running 3 meetups and IMO this is not only a disaster for meetup.com but offers an incredible opportunity to take the cherry for:
* Facebook
* EventBrite
* a new startup taking over this space
Unless meetup.com rever its course, this is going to go down as the worst decision ever. I am sorry if We spend a lot of money on it, stil.... 2 wrong don't make one right.
I'm sure I'm in a small minority of the general public (though maybe not HN?) but I don't want Facebook to know about my meetup/event interests. It's not so much that I hate being tracked by Facebook though I do. For me it's more about just not wanting event stuff mixed in with my friends and family feed. They're separate things to me. I could also be I might not want to share what meetups I'm going to with friends and family.
It is surprising they couldn’t think of any business model where they don’t need to kill the chicken laying eggs. People participating there already gave away their contacts, location, interest. How about just ads with sponsors with matching interests? How about rev share where organizers support sponsors? How about recommending interesting audience to sponsored events? May be users can opt out of ad supported model if they pay subscription?
So I am a member of a number of boardgame groups with meetups that each happen at the same place either regularly or on a different date each month. When they do happen, I just go there, and never RSVP anymore because nobody cares. In fact, one of the weekly meetups would regularly have 2-5 people RSVP but 15-25 show up.
What prevents everyone without a headcount limit from doing more of that? :)
Yet another alternative, focused on technical events is Eventil [1]. It's born out of my experiences as a organizer of PolyConf [2] and RuPy [3] conferences. It's a side-project built to scratch my own itch. There is still plenty to be improved with bugs here and there. Several large conferences use this tool successfully to improve their workflow.
There is group management, ticketing without fees, call for proposals management, mailings, invoicing, sponsorship management et more. We charge 49/199 USD on per-event basis (no monthly fee, no % off ticket sales) depending on the event size. Free events are free and non-profit are 50% off.
Meetup has a spam issue for lack of a better way to describe it.
One problem is there are people that post the same event multiple times. I documented one where they posted the same event 22 times. I'm not sure how they even do that. One way they do it is just to post the same event 5 minutes apart so looking at the list of things to do the same event appears over and over. All of these are the same event: https://i.imgur.com/o4fAxjA.png and there are plenty more of the same event further down the page. But it's not just different times. https://imgur.com/C1gMleC
I've seen one event which is clearly fake. It's always full at 101 attendees from the moment it is posted. I'm not even sure what the point is except maybe to harvest names from a waiting list? Like maybe the idea was if the meetup looks popular people will try to join? The event is clearly a marketing event (not about marketing itself, but an event designed to sell attendees on a service)
Another issue is just bars effectively listing that they're open. I don't know how to solve that. It's one thing if it's really a "meetup" like "model rocket talk at Bar ABC" but some listings just come across as "we're open"
The other big issue with Meetup.com is email spam. They have like 40 different things they can send you email for PER meetup and attending any meetup signs you up for all 40 things. I get that I might want to know about meetups I've been to before so maybe that's okay? But... They also end up signing you up to categories of similar meetups and so if you ever attended a new meetup you'll get added back to the category. Which I also get. And it might be fine except at literally 65% of the email I get daily is from meetup.com at this point. So it feels like something is clearly not working.
The finally issue I've seen is fraud? I've seen a meetup where the user kept posting things like 250 people have signed up! Hurry now! And then the next day 350 people have signed up for our party!!! The final count they claimed was 600 people but the venue only legally allowed 200 people. I brought it up the venue only held 200 people (listed on their website) and the guy just asked if I was attending his awesome event with 600 people.
A plea to anyone working on a meetup.com alternative - make sure good Open Data Feeds are baked into to whatever you do.
There is already a industry standard in ical/ics - this should be your first feed. Another reason to add this one - regular attendees of a group who are keen can import this straight into their personal calendars and get details of all upcoming events.
After that, I'm less opinionated on what format you should use. https://schema.org/Event will help your SEO so that's a plus.
Do others have comments on what open data format to use?
As someone who has worked on an event aggregator for years, getting good information out of event organisers is very difficult. If they are taking the time to update your site with info, making it so it can be passed on is really helpful. (If they want of course, privacy controls, but in my experience almost all events want more publicity)
> The pricing change is currently only a limited test for select groups in a small number of locations. We will not be making any significant pricing changes in the near term. We are committed to providing advance notice before any changes go into effect.
I've developed myself a minimal alternative at https://meetup.events when I was not allowed to run my Elm Study Group at meetup.com. It doesn't even have means to create events yet, but if you're interested in developing it further (Haskell + Elm), or contribute a design, or you are a potential user and need something – please contact me (via creating an issue on GitLab) and I'm happy to actually feature-complete the thing as needed by actual users.
UPDATE: actually, let me add the means to add/edit events there today...
This is disappointing. I've been using meetup to join mountain bike group rides in my area, they are scarce and not many people show up, but it's been a good experience. Adding a 2$ fee just to confirm assistance will completely make them go extinct. Any good alternatives for non tech activities (sports/social)? I'm already in some facebook/whatsapp groups but there's not much going on. The alternatives listed on the post seem to have either no user base or catered towards tech/corp events
$2 per atendee - what a brilliant way to kill the platform. No one is going to pay the fee and just migrate to facebook events and a million of other alternatives. This is hilarious.
A 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.
>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.
I think discoverability can be had via Google events search, Facebook, Eventbrite, etc.
Yes, there will be fragmentation, but I know people have found out about Meetup events via Eventbrite, and people have mentioned these on HN as well. So fragmentation is status quo anyway.
>I've always liked how easy it is for a local developer to just stumble across my group.
You could do what some organizers have been doing: advertise your events on multiple channels.
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.
> There's too much fragmentation in this space and it'll be hard to have the self-sustaining critical mass.
You do not need to have a single platform, though. All you would need is a single, in the best case open, index of meetup sites and descriptions. For that to work, you would need a simple protocol, e.g. myownmeetup.com/meetup.json, which the aggregators can crawl.
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.
> Yes, I worry about that too - any ideas about how to fix it?
Create an API that allows any site to be a front-end for meetups, you just store the data. Not sure how willing other sites would be to use this though.
I've organized about 500 events through that site. Charging attendees is a terrible idea that will kill Meetup.com and damage communities around the world in the process.
Hiking groups used to plentiful in the mid-Atlantic region on meeetup. Though it's been pretty dead in that regard for a year or two. Also similarly with tech meetups. Like the New York Tech meetup was or used to be a huge event that helped launch a good amount of well known startups. Where did that community go to (had the pleasure demoing there once with other fellow unknown startups at the time like Tumblr & Vimeo)?
Oh man... I actually saw Scott Heiferman speak at a Community 2.0 event yesterday and he seemed heartbroken about everything that's happening.
We made a pretty simple mobile app for social events called gathr (App Store and Play Store). Feel free to try it and see if it's what you're looking for. Ping me here: hojung@gathraround.com or request a Circle in app if you think it'll be useful.
These are interesting. Premise is a bit perplexing. Don’t have $2? Really? Even meetups for spiritual teachers who operate as a non profit suggest a $20 donation per event for instance.
Anyone know of a meetup for people interested in physics, meditation, and software entrepreneurship in the Bay Area? You’d think that would be easy to find given the areas demographics...
Interesting. When I hosted meetups, paying $20/mo wasn’t the end of the world. Now, finding cost effective space for large groups was very hard.
I think for meetups where the hosting companies are getting value, ie: recruiting at tech meetups, it’s reasonable for hosts to absorb attendee costs. So just give the $2 back to each attendee in that case, solved.
>When I hosted meetups, paying $20/mo wasn’t the end of the world.
>So just give the $2 back to each attendee in that case, solved.
Under the new model, organizers will be paying $2/mo for every attendee that RSVPs. For meetups attracting a large audience, this easily comes to >$200/mo, which is a 1000% increase.
>I think for meetups where the hosting companies are getting value, ie: recruiting at tech meetups, it’s reasonable for hosts to absorb attendee costs.
>Now, finding cost effective space for large groups was very hard.
Many large meetups are run by volunteers who have to seek out companies to sponsor the space, which you've already acknowledged is hard to do. $20/mo is affordable for them and can be done without seeking out additional sponsorship; $200++/mo isn't.
Ultimately, I think organizers will self-select: those who can afford Meetup.com's model, or who're already charging attendees, will stay; those who can't afford the new charges and don't believe in charging attendees will leave. This dissatisfaction isn't an overnight thing anyway, and the new pricing policy will be a push factor for some to do their own thing.
One important factor to add here is the free network effect which influenced hosts to use Meetup.
With this pricing, Meetup is closing the door to free network effect and not letting the host benefit from own efforts too.
As a small side project I've been working on a tool to find interesting events in London that also have some food or drink provided, I found that there was sometimes too much choice and not an easy way to pick the best upcoming events. https://onlythebestevents.com
Our meet up has been running for a decade. This has only been possible by making attendees aware that they own the event. Over the years people have moved on and others have stepped in to keep the thing alive.
By effectively charging at the door our meet up becomes a product people buy not a community they take part in.
If we allow that to happen it won't survive another decade.
There are already several alternatives to meetup.com; what we need is a standard like ActivityPub could be leveraged to allow for federation, discovery, and searching for user groups by interest, topic, location, and affinity (people in my user groups are also members of these groups...)?
I've been using Mixily (http://www.mixily.com) for events with friends and would happily use it to schedule individual meetup events. It's missing a main community landing page though.
How could someone pay even $2 for a meetup they've never attended? How would they know that someone would even show up? Especially if the organizer is now only paying $2/month to keep it going.
And once someone has attended a meetup, they're exchanged contact info with the organizer and so there's reason they'd have to pay meetup to attend the event.
It doesn't work that way in practice. People use Meetup because it handles everything from reservations to ticketing to email announcements to messages boards and things in between. A mailing list is not a replacement.
I believe each group has unique power due to its efforts in building a group, growing, and nurturing members.
With this pricing, Meetup is closing the door to free network effect and not letting the host benefit from own efforts. You should check https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara
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.
So, since there could be a fee now, will we not officially be the product for whatever behind-the-scenes data mining they're doing with our PII? I'd probably actually be OK paying a couple bucks/meetup for this.
Here in Seattle the local Haskell meetup has just "migrated" to a mix of GitHub, Slack, and Google Groups. The reason was the price of Meetup.com ($20/month IIRC).
I guess with this announcement many other groups will follow.
The problem is that how do new members discover this meetup? One of the really cool uses of Meetup I have found has been meeting new people and discovering new groups when moving to a new city. That discovery will disappear if everyone does their own thing.
>We are not, I repeat not, in the process of making a massive payment change for our existing customers.
The confusion was triggered by a limited test to a few hundred groups in two U.S. states. The payment options shared on social media will only apply to organizers who are part of this test. We apologize that the language on the page caused alarm and confusion. We would never make such a change without giving our customers advance notice.
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.
What I'm missing in a service like meetup is the creation of events. Got 50 people in an area who are all fans of something? See if they're interested in getting together.
I feel like every YC batch must get 100 applications for a Meetup alternative. I wonder why nothing has sticked or worked. I find every aspect of Meetup to be very 2010 and hard to use.
As someone who organizes several Meetup groups, I really hate this. I am going to continue to promote on meetup, but move the registration to our wordpress site to get around this.
Meetup was profitable long before Wework acquired it. People aren't bitter about service fees, they're bitter that Meetup is adding friction for _attendees_ when it's already incredibly difficult to get people there.
While I sympathize with this line of thinking, it's a question of value. Meetup is already charging organizers, while providing what is a pretty bare-bones app and mass email service. It's also a change that fundamentally changes the dynamic and incentives of the communities already built up on Meetup.
It's like if your local dry cleaner changed their pricing from $5/item to $1/square foot of fabric.
the people who sit here and scream OMG WHY DOES GOOGLE SELL ADS JUST LET ME PAY are the same ones that aren't willing to pay for anything and feel entitled to everything on the internet
i always thought facebooks greatest strength was their events. i never attended anything through meetup so far. it should at the very least be mentioned as an alternative. not everybody likes sharing data with the Zuck, and that's legitimate, but it's arguably the market leader. and it's free.
Reddit or HN are actually ideal platforms for meetups. All you need is list of links for tech meetups. Either a subreddit like /r/nyc_meetups or just a weekly "What's Going On" post where people can post about events. We're already on the network. I don't see why we need a separate website just for the physical act of coming together.
what about just the old way, google groups or email lists?
otherwise, I still see certain business model shall work for meetup, how about when meetup charges a fee for its members then it shares some percentage of that fee with meetup? otherwise it will be free.
1. cete - https://cete.io/
2. emamo - https://emamo.com
3. kommunity - https://kommunity.com
4. eventy - https://eventy.io/
5. "FreeCodeCamp is currently building an Open Source alternative to Meetup.com. They are looking for contributors, head to this Discord channel to get involved!" (In my opinion this article was made to feature this paragraph tbh)
Anyhow
I'm using meetup for a while
Been extremely useful (especially when i lived abroad. It's a great way to meet some new friends with similar hobbies.
Weird, a lot of meetups that I see have fees set up and say that you get into the meetup free if instead you register on Meet More You www.meetmoreyou.com
So they are trying to get people on the platform by putting up a paywall on meetup so that nobody that is tech literate would actually sign up on meetup.
I am surprised that this site hasn't been mentioned once. It seems pretty decent.
Considering the value I get from Meetup, I think that paying a $2 attendee fee is reasonable. I appreciate the services that meetup provides. This seems like a very fair deal.
Cannot relate to the people here who are screaming bloody murder over this. You have to give to get.
A decentralized approach that doesn't depend on one corporate service remaining profitable (or one nonprofit remaining viable) would be great.
The Zot protocol https://zotlabs.org/page/zotlabs/home can do distributed event invitations but the leading implementation Hubzilla has horrendous UX and an unpalatable (PHP + JQuery) tech stack. I'd love to have time to reimplement it in a more developer and user friendly way - focusing on events only to start with could make this a reasonable task.
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, individual web pages, AXS, Spotify Concerts, email newsletters, etc.
Building another event organization platform isn't the solution - getting people, venues, and organizers onto it would be an expensive uphill battle, and would further fracture discovery. But a thought of a decentralized open-source aggregation of a bunch of feeds has been popping up in my mind lately. These could be sourced from all of the above mentioned sources and somewhat standardized into a format with name, description, price, location, time. From there, it should be a simple matter to add filtering, subscriptions, and even a recommendations engine.
Has anything like this been attempted? Might it work? I haven't found anything yet.
I do like the fact that they have an event-publishing tool and the option to self-host.
> Framasoft wants to create Mobilizon: free/libre software that will allow communities to create their own spaces to publish events, in order to better emancipate themselves from tech giants. We want to develop a digital common, that everyone can make their own, which respects privacy and activism by design.
https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
I'm building it because it is a problem I've faced among my friends and well.. the "millennial" generation to begin with. I'm building it first to be used among myself and friends.
I don't want to say too much because to me the solution seems so obvious and I'd like to have something out there and tried on a small scale first, but... the key is not to focus on events directly, but people.
If anyone would like to know more, my twitter is on my profile, DM me there!
Right now it is just me. I'm also currently torn on focusing on the consumer social space (not social network) or the business space. Both seem pretty promising targets but vastly different approaches to marketing.
But with some different use-cases probably.
Nico at Sapico dot me
I have a marketing plan ready which is dublicateable for every city.
Belgium and Netherlands is reserved for me ;)
Thawd focuses on getting groups of people out to events, not just one at a time. The idea is you tell the app what you want to do, and Thawd will find other people interested in the same thing and use personality matching to create groups of people who can hang out and have a good time together.
Hoping to get submitted to app stores by EOW.
(and yes, turns out getting users is easy, getting events is the hard part!)
* If it was effective users would probably stop using it and switch directly to something like whatsapp
* Judging by meetup, a few people actually create events and greater percentage attend. This seems common across many platforms - 5-10% of users are actually producers, but a much larger are "passive" consumers. My site focussed on adhoc events and I wasn't sure enough users would create them
* The real issue was needing to promote it hyperlocally, meaning each new location needed marketing. A site focussed around groups can build a history of events for each group which aids discoverability/SEO. But a site that's all about adhoc events doesn't have that benefit in the same way if members are more amorphous (my site was all about creating e.g. an event to play tennis that afternoon, so depended on locality).
I couldn't solve these issues and abandoned it. Good luck though.
I had the same issues and I think it's all ( yes, all ) solved ;) - our way of thinking is very similar with the related problems!
Ps. Please add your quote, so I know/remember what your problems were.
Looking at my mail, the topic seems to be way hotter than expected :)
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]
Part of censuring Big Tech should be forcing them to adopt open standards, XMPP, RSS, Microformats, etc.
http://microformats.org/wiki/RSS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat
Of course I guess that's no different than crawling the web. Just saying that even with the data itself you need some serious spam detection to make it useful.
It's only tech events in the US but a fairly exhaustive list.
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.
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.
It has been tried, and early attempts failed. Jon Udell was one of the drivers behind the Elm City Project, which merged many RSS feeds of calendar information into a uniform resource. [0] Maybe its time has come again.
[0] https://blog.jonudell.net/elmcity-project-faq/
Obviously this kind of thing only works for events likely to get general attention.
I've played with a recommendation engine but haven't fully baked it into the systems yet.
I organize a number of technical meetups, such as HelsinkiJS which is the biggest developer meetup in Finland, and have found Meetup.com lacking. To scratch our own itch, we built Meetabit which includes some additional features such as the ability to accept talk proposals and sponsorship offers, have speaker profiles, archive of talks and related materials, export data etc.
It does what we need and we haven't been actively developing or promoting it recently, but it has still grown organically to around 10K users and multiple meetups organized each month. We are likely to put more resources into it given the recent changes at Meetup.com. Worth adding that the service is free both to organizers and attendees; our long term plan is to have the same business model as Stack Overflow by promoting relevant jobs to members.
I'll draft a blog post explaining things in more detail, but in the meantime feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Also, if you'd like to take the service for a spin and your city isn't listed, shoot me an email at oleg@toughbyte.com and I'll add it.
PS. Nicolas has added us to the linked post since I made this comment, many thanks for super quick responses!
Location of Ft Gordon Army Base which is Cybersecurity Central
If you meant something else, please do provide more info.
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?
it's a laid back for activities
https://github.com/upcoming/upcoming-www
Events features under development. (Feature request topic, with more details: https://www.talkyard.io/-267/add-a-way-to-create-events-with...)
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.
Probably people/companies will just depend on word of mouth and other channels to promote events and not depend on discovery through a specific service.
I fucking hate WeWork (i was really worried when Meetup.com was acquired, and it appears that I was correct to be).
the only thing that virality helps with is event anouncements. finding all events in the same place, that is what makes meetup.com useful. the actual registration, and what not can be done anywhere else without causing to much friction.
of course having two sites is more complex than having it all-in-one. that was the whole benefit of meetup.com, but that benefit is now going away.
one reaction is to reduce the dependency on meetup.com for groups. we need meetup.com to help get the word out, but we can use other tools for the actual group management.
Edit: After reading a bit more about it, the cost is to the users, not organizers, which makes even less sense. Why would anyone ever RSVP instead of just showing up?
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.
Meetup is a resource for me. My guess that this change would complete end every single meetup I know of except for a few tech meetups - and these probably have alternatives and so wouldn't want it either.
It seems like this also illustrates a complete misunderstanding by the meetup company of how the meetup app is used by their users/customers. Among other things, it's standard for people to find group, sign-up maybe once and then not sign-up further but continue to attend regularly - the group I run and the group I've previously run were like that. Meetup was/is about discovery. Expecting potential attendees to pay is absurd, regular attendees wouldn't feel obligated to register and so wouldn't pay. The confusion is complete.
Next up: movie theaters that charge $2 to anyone who doesn't talk during a movie, gyms that charge $2 if you put dumbbells back on the rack instead leaving them strewn around the floor, traffic cops giving tickets for properly using your turn signal, ...
But in that situation, attendees paying meetup is absurd but in just about any situation, attendees paying meetup is absurd. Meetup already has an option to have attendees to pay the organizer for attending. They might consider that for the events where this option isn't used, it is realistically because this could not work, you can't get money from people for that stuff.
For a regular meetup, it's not nearly as important to RSVP. Maybe even overly formal. I go to a weekly thing that's organized through Meetup, and I still RSVP every time, though, for a few reasons. One is it puts it on my calendar automatically. Two is it helps newbies feel comfortable that somebody is going and they won't be the only one there if they show up.
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 non-human. You get lured into a business' office with free food and drinks or stickers but then you have sign up forms, recruitment pitches and vendors giving talks about some technology but it's all focused on using their service around that tech.
I miss the good old days of 2600 meetups in the late 1990s. Everyone meets in a public place. There's no set schedule other than where to go and when it starts. Then you actually meet up with people and talk about things that you have in common. You can leave in 30 seconds or stay all night. There's no commitment, agenda or sales pitches.
I run a "meetup" that is not on Meetup, in part because of the cost (I'm fortunate that in a technical niche community in NYC, word of mouth spreads fast).
I would say that fee keeps things a little more professional than otherwise.
- have one company as the sponsor, providing venue, food and one technical talk - this ensures that the organizers don't need to deal with money which is a big admin headache - have around 3 talks total, but keep them short, to around 20 minutes + 5 minutes for Q&A - start the event 15-30 mins late to allow for people to show up late and giving those that turned up early the chance to talk to each other - make sure you end quite early, leaving time for people to mingle afterwards
We also built our own Meetup.com alternative called Meetabit (https://meetabit.com, see my other comment to this post) and to promote it wrote a few blog posts which go into more detail, which you can find here: https://blog.toughbyte.com/tagged/meetup
But for Tokyo, these are the results:
> Events
> No events in your city
> Communities
> No communities in your city
> Sponsors
> No sponsors in your city
Or do you mean that now we can create events, communities and sponsors?
I do front-end, and didn't realize of this until now that I was on the receiving end.
Especially if you are coming to a new city it's a great place to find out what's going on and find your group. It's nice to have a centralized place for that and makes it very easy to connect with people. (At least in my experience here in Berlin)
2. How is that meetup's fault? It's like saying HN is bad because of bad comments.
Maybe these people think the same about meetup.
Another huge problem are co-organisers. You bring them onboard because they're happy to take turns organising events and it takes the load off.
I never start meetups with the intention of getting a job or business opportunities, but that's often why co-organisers join. You think, sure, everyone's a volunteer so it's fine if they get something out of it.
Then years pass and those co-orgs are deeply involved to the point where their livelihoods depend on the subject matter (Ethereum in this case). And they want to keep the sales pitch lecture model, since they almost always slot themselves in as speaker when it's their turn to organise.
You suggest changing the meetup name to be less tribalistic and to change the format to drop speakers and sponsors. HUGE drama. You put it to a vote, 5-3 agree to the change. The other 3 decide to clone the meetup under the same old name, email all members telling them to join, steal the Facebook and Twitter accounts, harass me everyday for a week over Telegram until I snap, then screenshot my response and spread it through the community.
Communities man.
But you're right. Not every meetup organization is the same.
And 2) about 15% of attendees went to a bar afterward to talk shop.
I’ve really started contemplating adding #2 on my own to meet-ups if the organizers don’t.
Running a monthly meeting is a lot of hard work and many people get it wrong, or can’t keep the wheels on.
But I could see how some of the meetups that I am a 'member' of but don't attend regularly could be vendor driven.
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.
The 90s bbs meetings were more fun and usually less tech focused.
So much has changed in ~20 years around tech in general. I wonder what a current day 2600 meetup is like. I may go check one out.
Most tech meetups in my area are just friendly get-together.
Hopefully the new charge that meetup is foisting on attendees will kill the platform and we'll see some of these alternatives take off.
Remember, you can't make friends unless you pay your corporate masters!
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 "build it and they will come"? Same applies to events. "Set a date and they will come" - doesn't work that way unless you have an existing audience.
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...
Also, charging $2/person means about $0.25 goes to Visa/Mastercard/PayPal/whoever does the payment processing, which is about 12.5% of your revenue skimmed off the top immediately. Charging the organizer more, and everyone else nothing, works better from that point of view even if the attendees chip in a few bucks each to compensate the organizer.
Of all the business models one could imagine for this site, this seems like one of the less well thought out.
It fundamentally changes the relationship between me and my attendees. Suddenly they are paying to attend. The fact that I get non of that money is irrelevant to the person paying. That's a big psychological shift for free events like mine.
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.
I'd prefer having pay $2/attendee as organizer myself to the system of making attendees pay. Because they.simply.will.not.pay and will not attend. That is how the Internet has worked since forever.
This is really bad for me because meetup actually has been extremely useful for me and, as you say, there's a good change they are simply going to loose that audience completely with nothing replacing it, at least for a while (or Facebook replacing it and that kind of sucking).
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?
Meetup was making money before they took VC funds and eventually sold to Wework. Their old model of charging $15+ to organizers seemed to work. I paid it for years because of the extra traffic and not wanting my events to be hijacked. They never let you own your own audience though.
Most people seem happy shelling out $100-200 per year for a membership. $2 per attendee per event is simply exorbitant, noone will be able to afford that.
It's so bizarrely extreme, I can only assume it's a psychological "anchoring" tactic - a patently ludicrous number that makes the "real" offer (2-3x fee hike) more "reasonable".
A competitor can take no money, and they can re-use much of Meetup’s product-market-fit research. The economics are totally different.
From a technical standpoint there’s no reason you couldn’t run a “meetup-lite” for a couple hundred bucks a month. It’s just web forms.
Without VCs to impress you could get by with a lot less razzle-dazzle.
From what I've seen, no one is complaining about paying for Meetup's services. It's the unfairness of the charge that is the problem.
Why is it unfair? For one, meetup attrition is often in excess of 50%. So, 100 people RSVP, you pay $200 for that one event (more than the previous annual fee), and maybe 50 people show up. It's also out of scale with what similar services charge. Another problem is that it makes running a free/community meet-up unpredictable financially. I'm happy to stump up $180 a year if it means Meetup.com makes it easier to grow the audience for a group I run as a hobby. I'm not happy for that to become, potentially, 12 times that.
People are demonstrably willing to pay for Meetup.com. They're not willing to open themselves to unpredictable and, frankly, wildly higher fees just because Meetup's parent company is going through a hard time.
If they increased it another $50 on me, I'd probably just kill it and move as much of the group over to Facebook events (doesn't help the group has been in a lull lately either since I've had a year of planning for my wedding taking up all my time).
So I think they figured this change would let them get more money in the long run without having a bunch of Organizers drop their Meetup groups with a big price hike, but they're going to lose groups this way too and I suspect it's going to make things worse in the long run.
I mean it's not like going to an event in real life is free in the first place. You have to pay for transportation and so on. You spend your precious time. If it's important to you, why be stingy over 2 bucks.
Sadly I agree with others that people will just moved to Facebook events :(
I suppose it's still economical if you plan on eating more than two slices but I doubt it'll work out for them.
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 effect is interesting nonetheless.
We've been cranking away at a better group event/planning platform on https://guestboard.co for a while now (basically Slack meets Evite), but with this news, we're switching up our product roadmap to include recurring events much sooner. Would love the input from any/all. Possibly considering an interim solution of simply cloning an existing event and carrying over the guest list from previous?
We'll also be prioritizing a "discovery" search tool to be able to find public events without needing to encounter an invite link from an organizer.
And before you jump down my throat(!) a common feedback point has been improving the RSVP function to allow attendees to join without a full registration, and this new invite/onboarding flow will be releasing in a week or so :)
For public events, discovery is supreme - totally agree. We started as a planning tool for groups to cut down on massive email chains and group texts (hence the festival/Sasquatch use case :) We've got more cooking, especially with this change of events (ha).
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.
I mainly use meetup for board game nights, hikes, hack nights, game jams, movies, dinners, crafting, karaoke, and exploring new hobbies (there's a photography one I just joined recently).
None of those are usually in crowded places, stuffy air, have any sponsors or presentations, and have plenty of interaction.
For recurring events, we have some features in private beta, like pre-set guest lists and a forum. Email me at andrew@mixily.com if you want to try it out!
For hosting small dinners and learning events, I'm looking mostly for the former, and one tool that's quite new but looks very promising is Mixily: https://www.mixily.com
It's a nice streamlined tool, prioritizes privacy, and has a number of solid features like messaging and event reminders, date polling (like doodle), comments wall, variety of privacy settings. Also some other very cool things in beta, like contact lists, and ticketed / donation-based events.
https://github.com/calagator/calagator
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 meetup.com? An honest question. I attend all kinds of events and I almost never come across meetup.com.
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 small groups.
Meetup has a search engine that allows you to find events by date, location, or subject matter. So I could
- look up events near me for this coming week.
- look up events within a certain radius from a location.
- look up events based on my interests.
> if I'm looking for an event I Google.
That's the fallback. I think what Meetup provided was a single site that people visit to find local events that fit their interests, which also allowed community-building.
"I do not want to be tracked" + "$15/mo is too expensive for many small groups".
Big Mac in Philadelphia is $3.99. 15/mo is 4 Big Macs. That's expensive for a small group in the US?!
Imagine you want to have some small hyper local group such as Memorial Park Dog Owners. Obviously, members will not pay for such a group, but the organizer is on the hook for almost $200 a year. Hard to create community with such prices.
Active groups of over 250 members? The pricing starts getting better.
It is 4 big macs a month. It is 3 Starbucks coffees a months. It is 3 cans of soda bought as singe units in a super market a month.
If a group cannot afford it, then maybe stop pretending that the group needs RSVPs or other services. Use a paper and a pen and pin an announcement on the bulletin board of a park.
The group does not pay for the meetup, the organizer does. Most social meetups are created by the kindness of the organizer, who want nothing in return. $15 a month is a lot of kindness.
My fictitious group was an example. I do not like dogs. :) But your solution goes back to my original comment. The article lists functional alternatives, but there is no way for someone to find the group, unless they explicitly searched for it. Most end up searching on Meetup and Facebook.
The article lists other solutions that will either:
1. Start monetizing via data mining and ads. This is a very dubious proposition for sites targeting small communities unless those sites convert every single inch of space on screen into ads or unless community management part of it is a just another place to stick ads like it is for Google and Facebook
2. Charge the money from either attendees or organizers to support a going concern, causing the same kind of freak out meetup is currently experiencing.
3. Shutdown
The "those who pay the least whine the most" is showing to be true here as well.
There are free solutions, Meetup can turn over and die.
That's the type of argument akin to "If you do not have a funded retirement you should not have a latte": if someone thinks that saving a money on a latte is going to make a difference in his or her retirement, then they have a structural problem that not having a latte won't solve.
> There are free solutions, Meetup can turn over and die.
Yes. They are called email lists or pen and paper.
https://schema.org/Recipe
We need a community run service, not a for profit company.
>It would be nice if Meetup could give you the contact information of all your members
Meetup has a spam problem, as greggman2 has pointed out.[0] Your proposal would make that worse.
>This allows someone else to step in and take over. Taking all the hard work you did to create the meetup and giving it to someone else.
Believe it or not, some people think this is a feature. I know of groups where the original organizer(s) had to leave the locality for various reasons, but designated successor(s) to keep the group going.
>allow you to close a group without allowing anyone else to step in.
Yes, that'd be good to have.
>They hold your meetup group hostage if you're an organizer.
Yes, all these contributed to lock-in, but some of these were features that some people wanted in the past, or at least that's my impression from using the site for many years.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21266422
My team is working on a virtual event spaces app called Morphus, https://www.morphus.ai. We aim to create a 2.0 Meetup that helps anyone to spin up a virtual space and allow mobile, desktop, and VR users to join events.
As an organizer myself I'll be focusing on helping communities better manage their members and also create a more interactive and fun environment for everyone.
Any feedback appreciated :)
https://www.morphus.ai
We've been working on it for the past 2 years and are now finally fundraising. If you can connect us with interested parties to create futuristic next generation event platform do let me know, very curious. (I know it's self promotion but I'm sick of meetup at this point)
I've since been working on an alternative: https://blinkmeet.com, but that didn't really account for much for various reasons.
I really do think that it's only a matter of time before Meetup.com goes down, this way or another.
I belong to 2 large-ish meetups that in the past few months have been migrating to a Facebook page.
I have run meetups of all kinds, from tech to social; and I am now running 3 meetups and IMO this is not only a disaster for meetup.com but offers an incredible opportunity to take the cherry for:
* Facebook * EventBrite * a new startup taking over this space
Unless meetup.com rever its course, this is going to go down as the worst decision ever. I am sorry if We spend a lot of money on it, stil.... 2 wrong don't make one right.
I run the Explara Community Software, which powers smaller to the largest community like https://hub.tie.org/
Explara Community Software has super advantages to group owners who don't need Meetup network effect as such. More on https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara
There is group management, ticketing without fees, call for proposals management, mailings, invoicing, sponsorship management et more. We charge 49/199 USD on per-event basis (no monthly fee, no % off ticket sales) depending on the event size. Free events are free and non-profit are 50% off.
[1]: https://eventil.com/ [2]: https://polyconf.com/ [3]: http://13.rupy.eu/
One problem is there are people that post the same event multiple times. I documented one where they posted the same event 22 times. I'm not sure how they even do that. One way they do it is just to post the same event 5 minutes apart so looking at the list of things to do the same event appears over and over. All of these are the same event: https://i.imgur.com/o4fAxjA.png and there are plenty more of the same event further down the page. But it's not just different times. https://imgur.com/C1gMleC
I've seen one event which is clearly fake. It's always full at 101 attendees from the moment it is posted. I'm not even sure what the point is except maybe to harvest names from a waiting list? Like maybe the idea was if the meetup looks popular people will try to join? The event is clearly a marketing event (not about marketing itself, but an event designed to sell attendees on a service)
Another issue is just bars effectively listing that they're open. I don't know how to solve that. It's one thing if it's really a "meetup" like "model rocket talk at Bar ABC" but some listings just come across as "we're open"
The other big issue with Meetup.com is email spam. They have like 40 different things they can send you email for PER meetup and attending any meetup signs you up for all 40 things. I get that I might want to know about meetups I've been to before so maybe that's okay? But... They also end up signing you up to categories of similar meetups and so if you ever attended a new meetup you'll get added back to the category. Which I also get. And it might be fine except at literally 65% of the email I get daily is from meetup.com at this point. So it feels like something is clearly not working.
The finally issue I've seen is fraud? I've seen a meetup where the user kept posting things like 250 people have signed up! Hurry now! And then the next day 350 people have signed up for our party!!! The final count they claimed was 600 people but the venue only legally allowed 200 people. I brought it up the venue only held 200 people (listed on their website) and the guy just asked if I was attending his awesome event with 600 people.
There is already a industry standard in ical/ics - this should be your first feed. Another reason to add this one - regular attendees of a group who are keen can import this straight into their personal calendars and get details of all upcoming events.
After that, I'm less opinionated on what format you should use. https://schema.org/Event will help your SEO so that's a plus.
Do others have comments on what open data format to use?
As someone who has worked on an event aggregator for years, getting good information out of event organisers is very difficult. If they are taking the time to update your site with info, making it so it can be passed on is really helpful. (If they want of course, privacy controls, but in my experience almost all events want more publicity)
It will be gradually getting more features to support Meetup-like functionality.
Each community has very different needs, but a federated network would help making the multi-community reality we experience much easier.
https://framagit.org/framasoft/mobilizon/
You will love it. Map your domain, bring multiple groups under one network. Why switch from Meetup to Explara Community=> https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara
UPDATE: actually, let me add the means to add/edit events there today...
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.
I think discoverability can be had via Google events search, Facebook, Eventbrite, etc.
Yes, there will be fragmentation, but I know people have found out about Meetup events via Eventbrite, and people have mentioned these on HN as well. So fragmentation is status quo anyway.
>I've always liked how easy it is for a local developer to just stumble across my group.
You could do what some organizers have been doing: advertise your events on multiple channels.
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 coding:
https://meetingplace.io/
I'm in tech, sports, and social Meetup groups. I don't want to join 3 new sites to replace this one.
You do not need to have a single platform, though. All you would need is a single, in the best case open, index of meetup sites and descriptions. For that to work, you would need a simple protocol, e.g. myownmeetup.com/meetup.json, which the aggregators can crawl.
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!)
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.
Mobilizon supports federation.
https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
Create an API that allows any site to be a front-end for meetups, you just store the data. Not sure how willing other sites would be to use this though.
Perhaps Meet-ups for various niche interests is an option. But it’d be great to have some sites with better usability.
We made a pretty simple mobile app for social events called gathr (App Store and Play Store). Feel free to try it and see if it's what you're looking for. Ping me here: hojung@gathraround.com or request a Circle in app if you think it'll be useful.
www gathraround.com
Then I discovered that Facebook Groups and setting up events there worked just as well for us. RSVPs, reminders, notifications, etc all built in.
I since retired that meetup due to moving out of the State for a short time, but if I were to start again I would probably still use Facebook.
Anyone know of a meetup for people interested in physics, meditation, and software entrepreneurship in the Bay Area? You’d think that would be easy to find given the areas demographics...
One could counter that these people are the ones who've spoilt the market for the rest of us.
And really, it's not attendees who're complaining, it's organizers who believe in keeping their events free for attendees.
I think for meetups where the hosting companies are getting value, ie: recruiting at tech meetups, it’s reasonable for hosts to absorb attendee costs. So just give the $2 back to each attendee in that case, solved.
>So just give the $2 back to each attendee in that case, solved.
Under the new model, organizers will be paying $2/mo for every attendee that RSVPs. For meetups attracting a large audience, this easily comes to >$200/mo, which is a 1000% increase.
>I think for meetups where the hosting companies are getting value, ie: recruiting at tech meetups, it’s reasonable for hosts to absorb attendee costs.
>Now, finding cost effective space for large groups was very hard.
Many large meetups are run by volunteers who have to seek out companies to sponsor the space, which you've already acknowledged is hard to do. $20/mo is affordable for them and can be done without seeking out additional sponsorship; $200++/mo isn't.
Ultimately, I think organizers will self-select: those who can afford Meetup.com's model, or who're already charging attendees, will stay; those who can't afford the new charges and don't believe in charging attendees will leave. This dissatisfaction isn't an overnight thing anyway, and the new pricing policy will be a push factor for some to do their own thing.
I believe Meetup is heading Ning way => https://www.zdnet.com/article/andreessen-founded-ning-cuts-s... Andreessen-founded Ning cuts staff, free service.
You should check https://info.explara.com/switch-from-meetup-to-explara
By effectively charging at the door our meet up becomes a product people buy not a community they take part in.
If we allow that to happen it won't survive another decade.
And once someone has attended a meetup, they're exchanged contact info with the organizer and so there's reason they'd have to pay meetup to attend the event.
Considering it's mostly organizers who've been the most vocal about it, this is a pretty strange question.
I guess with this announcement many other groups will follow.
>We are not, I repeat not, in the process of making a massive payment change for our existing customers. The confusion was triggered by a limited test to a few hundred groups in two U.S. states. The payment options shared on social media will only apply to organizers who are part of this test. We apologize that the language on the page caused alarm and confusion. We would never make such a change without giving our customers advance notice.
I figure a miss a lot just searching for my interests. I’d rather just see everything nearby.
However, for browsing I still use meetup.com
It's like if your local dry cleaner changed their pricing from $5/item to $1/square foot of fabric.
otherwise, I still see certain business model shall work for meetup, how about when meetup charges a fee for its members then it shares some percentage of that fee with meetup? otherwise it will be free.
and what about eventbrite.com
1. cete - https://cete.io/ 2. emamo - https://emamo.com 3. kommunity - https://kommunity.com 4. eventy - https://eventy.io/ 5. "FreeCodeCamp is currently building an Open Source alternative to Meetup.com. They are looking for contributors, head to this Discord channel to get involved!" (In my opinion this article was made to feature this paragraph tbh)
Anyhow
I'm using meetup for a while
Been extremely useful (especially when i lived abroad. It's a great way to meet some new friends with similar hobbies.
https://gettogether.community/
All the ones on the page look like more proprietary junk.
So they are trying to get people on the platform by putting up a paywall on meetup so that nobody that is tech literate would actually sign up on meetup.
I am surprised that this site hasn't been mentioned once. It seems pretty decent.
Cannot relate to the people here who are screaming bloody murder over this. You have to give to get.
Perhaps you can't relate because "the people here who are screaming bloody murder" are mostly not attendees: they're organizers.
And they've been doing a lot of giving ever since Meetup started charging organizers.
The Zot protocol https://zotlabs.org/page/zotlabs/home can do distributed event invitations but the leading implementation Hubzilla has horrendous UX and an unpalatable (PHP + JQuery) tech stack. I'd love to have time to reimplement it in a more developer and user friendly way - focusing on events only to start with could make this a reasonable task.