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 $2. That would be super shitty. This is a pretty big shakedown, and I don't see it ending well for Meetup.
Sadly I agree with others that people will just moved to Facebook events :(
I've never heard of them either. Meetup's demise will be a great opportunity for them, but I think a lot of them will be hobbled by having off-putting names.
Isn't Eventbrite also a valid alternative, that has the advantage of bing a mature, feature-rich offering? Free events are free, and their profits come from supporting paid events.
The FreeCodeCamp one is pitched as a self-hosted solution, which means it won't have a network of meetup groups like meetup.com does. If you have a big network of meetups yourself (like, say, FreeCodeCamp), then sure it works. If you're just a small meetup group, it'll be no better than just hoping people find your site on google as is.
I am wondering which of these alternatives has a similar audience like meetup.com. The audience is the real killer feature of meetup.com.
I know of no other place where it is so easy to gather people. Just post a new event and people will notice and sign up.
If you switch to a self-hosted solution you will have to find an audience through other channels. Which, for many Meetups, is quite the challenge. Remember "build it and they will come"? Same applies to events. "Set a date and they will come" - doesn't work that way unless you have an existing audience.
Personally I don't mind paying 2$ 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 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.
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 $0.25 goes to Visa/Mastercard/PayPal/whoever does the payment processing, which is about 12.5% of your revenue skimmed off the top immediately. Charging the organizer more, and everyone else nothing, works better from that point of view even if the attendees chip in a few bucks each to compensate the organizer.
Of all the business models one could imagine for this site, this seems like one of the less well thought out.
As an organiser, I'm genuinly stunned by how poorly thought out this model is.
It fundamentally changes the relationship between me and my attendees. Suddenly they are paying to attend. The fact that I get non of that money is irrelevant to the person paying. That's a big psychological shift for free events like mine.
> Personally I don't mind paying 2$ 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.
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?
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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'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.
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!
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'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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 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.
There are many other Meetup alternatives being started or in use, included some not listed in OP article. This is not good. There's too much fragmentation in this space and it'll be hard to have the self-sustaining critical mass, and cross-pollination across communities that made Meetup.com effective.
I'm in tech, sports, and social Meetup groups. I don't want to join 3 new sites to replace this one.
Yes, I worry about that too - any ideas about how to fix it?
One of the things I liked about meetup was that many (most?) groups were hosted on it, but I think what this has shown is that meetup had a kind of monopoly in that way (which wasn't good!)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
299 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadSadly I agree with others that people will just moved to Facebook events :(
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?
https://github.com/upcoming/upcoming-www
it's a laid back for activities
Events features under development. (Feature request topic, with more details: https://www.talkyard.io/-267/add-a-way-to-create-events-with...)
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 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?
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).
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.
https://schema.org/Recipe
I guess with this announcement many other groups will follow.
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.
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/
Obviously this kind of thing only works for events likely to get general attention.
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.
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 ;)
Looking at my mail, the topic seems to be way hotter than expected :)
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.
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/
I've played with a recommendation engine but haven't fully baked it into the systems yet.
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.
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.
Most tech meetups in my area are just friendly get-together.
But you're right. Not every meetup organization is the same.
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.
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.
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)
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!
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
I suppose it's still economical if you plan on eating more than two slices but I doubt it'll work out for them.
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.
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!)
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.
Mobilizon supports federation.
https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
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.
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.
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.
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.