Ask HN: What should I do with meet.hn?
We are now about 1700 hackers willing to meet each other in almost 700 locations worldwide.
Since then, some requested features and bug fixes have been implemented:
- locations are now searchable and not restricted to a simplistic city-country pair
- locations work with diacritics and diverse languages
- new socials: personal website, email, Mastodon, Discord, GitLab, Google Scholar, YouTube, etc.
- upon user request, I can now showcase your local meetups on your location listing, as it's done for Old Toronto: [1]
About actual meetings, I'm aware of around a dozen so far, but I think many more occurred.
Why am I writing this post?
About 80% of the ~1700 signups happened in the first 36 hours after launch. As expected, signups dropped pretty quickly, and now it gains about one new user every other day.
I think a ton of global value (and local joy) can emerge from HN users meeting each other. That's why I'm writing this post. To answer the question: how can we meet more? and how can meet.hn help?
What I thought about:
1. Implementing RSS for each location: helpful for RSS users only, and not that useful if there are no new registrations.
2. Email notification system: wide audience, but requires users to give their emails.
3. Turning meet.hn into some sort of an atproto [3] project, or at least leveraging it somehow. Might be more Bluesky centric (if we use labels, for example), but maybe not?
4. A bookmarklet which, once clicked when on a HN post, would insert a meet.hn logo next to all user names of users commenting there and registered on meet.hn
5. An HN "proxy website" which would copy HN in every way, but would add the meet.hn logo just like the bookmarklet described point 4 would do, but everywhere and automatically.
6. Create Telegram (or equivalent) channels for each location
But all of these ideas are unideal fixes. The lowest common denominator between everyone on HN... is HN. Hence, meeting right from HN would be best. An MVP for this could be to have a "willing to meet" attribute with a boolean value (like the "showdead" or "noprocrast" attributes). When enabled, an icon would be shown next to the user name in threads.
I talked to dang, and even if the idea of implementing something on HN is not out of the question, it is not on the roadmap yet.
Let's discuss all of this in the comments. Looking forward to hearing what you think.
[1] https://meet.hn/city/43.6534817,-79.3839347/Old-Toronto
185 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadAlso, it would probably require cross posting on Bluesky/Mastodon as from my experience with meet.hn user base, a significant % is not on X anymore (?).
Sounds pretty good! If that's not what you meant, please correct me.
hnmeet@present_time@location@duration.
One thing I found strange about SF is that I never found a group that would do the weekly hang. The weekly hang is a socially porous experience, it has a fixed location and fixed start time but everything else is improvised. Different people could dip in and out, people felt free to bring new friends, people they just started dating, friends from out of town etc. Some people came once and never again, others become regulars. The hallmark of a great weekly hang is that the entire initial cohort gets replaced but the weekly hang still persists.
It's a commitment in time that "busy professionals" ostensibly had no time for which is why I think it was so unpopular in SF but it really killed a big part of the vibe of the city for me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35608965
Or never was on X :)
Edit: funny enough, the only HN user that registered for my city has X as a social profile. Guess I'll never know more.
Edit 2: tbh why would it be compulsory to have a profile on some social networking thing?
It's not! In fact you have several other options if you prefer.
The problem is I think everyone is willing to meet if they see mutual value, and unwilling to meet if they do not see mutual value.
Then, if readers feel you are interesting to them, they would check your HN profile and contact you using the info in your profile (if any).
But imho (large) group meetups are the least interesting/valuable. Ideally I would like to boost small or even 1-1 meetups first. If larger meetups emerge later, great!
Personally, I like meeting interesting new people for the sake of it.
1. Extroverted(likes meeting new people for the sake of it)
2. Is willing to devote time to this format.
I assume small, but it's there.
You have 2 options:
1. Accept those constraints, find a few more of those type of people, and really focus on exactly what sort of product they want.
2. Try to loosen those constraints. For example, reduce the anxiety of a meet up somehow. Or pick mechanics that make it easier to arrange a meetup (maybe you reduce the scheduling overhead by building an immediate-match Omegle-style product)
Good luck! Would love to see this succeed!
The thing is, people generally don't want to be responsible for organizing meetups. Many will happily attend but not host.
My guess is you need to find community leaders who can handle and own the responsibilities involved with hosting meets in their areas.
At the end of the day I don't think a website is going to help convince people to take on that kind of role. It's more of a personality thing.
With my club, we use Facebook events and generally just screenshot the details and further disperse them that way to discord, slack, instagram, etc. But none of that is enough alone for someone to host. Even when it's as simple as picking a meet location and time and sending out invites.
There might be a sweet spot around $3-5 for that model.
Even better: charge $5 to book; attendants will be refunded the fee; any leftovers will be used for refreshments at future events.
I've RSVPed myself with this intent plenty of times. I'd use a "maybe, please remind me" button if it existed.
Contrast Doodle.com, which offers a "yellow maybe" option intermediate between "green yes" and "red no."
I think I have a communication problem with meet.hn.
People seem to assume it has been created to setup these kinds of large meetups.
In fact, I created it for small or even 1-1 meetups in the first place. Meeting a single person or a small group of people seems much more interesting, easy and valuable to me.
Of course I'm not assuming everyone thinks the same way, but don't you think there is an audience for that in the HN community?
Again, IME it's not the size of the meetup but the responsibility.
Even in my example, the average attendance is maybe 10-20 people. Sometimes as low as five people.
And some areas only have 5 or fewer regularly.
I guess you would have to dig, right?
Well, with meet.hn:
1. You don't have to dig
2. People are more willing to meet on average than a random person on the internet
3. You can also check other locations and other people super fast
For most hn users offering something virtual would be more more inline with expectations and removes those local barriers.
Of course, there’s the moderation issue.
I think you’re drawing premature conclusions from the dropoff in signups.
All users are probably in the “now what?” Stage. And if more people knew your site was a way to connect with nearby HNers (ie the value prop was higher and better known), you’d have a lot of interest. So classic chicken egg problem I believe. But there are many successful sites that have broken through this phase. In my opinion you should keep it up.
1) Add functionality to auto-setup digital meetups and invite people within 200mi or something. 2) Let people meet in groups digitally, and maybe that spurs them to meet in person.
Ideally, users need an actual reason to meet.
In my case, they really just set the location and time, in addition to making sure nobody is causing trouble, littering, etc.
Other than that, it's a free-for-all.
For example, there is a chess club I wanted to participate in, but the organizer always picks some loud bar, which just isnt my idea of a chess club.
Automate place and tine selection: under eight in the community? Beer hall with 4+ stars that don’t need reservations. 1:1? Coffee shop. Etc. send over some date time location tuples, hold a vote, maybe do a runoff, whatever.
I know that if I got a flash meetup invite to a coffee shop along with instructions on how to meet people (to the left of the door at 10am sharp) I might actually make time. Worst case I drink coffee, which I was planning on doing anyway.
Basically: take the initiative?
At my events for that club, I don't lead anything at the event. I basically make sure people aren't causing any trouble or littering (none of this ever happens but it's just my assumed responsibility).
But I'll notice people asking around to know who set things up. Usually they find me and thank me because they enjoyed meeting other people and learning from each other.
Again, very human kind of thing I think.
I've been involved in organizing well over a thousand geek meetings, either as the primary organizer or on the "steering committee". You're probably right, most people don't want to be responsible for organizing it. But, at the end of the day, someone has to find a place and pick a date and let people know. You don't even have to go crazy with any of those, you could pick a coffee shop or restaurant, unless you get real popular.
This is exactly what people don't want to do. Even when the meeting location or time haven't changed in two years.
Believe me, I've had people ask about when the next meeting will be. I tell them I'm unavailable to set things up. I tell them they can feel free to go through the motions, just create the event in the calendar and really just make sure nobody makes a mess or anything during the event.
It sounds simple but again, unless someone has the right personality and drive to be responsible for this...
Cheap compared to marketing costs really.
re: federation, I'd prefer ActivityPub to AT, just ecosystem-wise.
Not yet! Might be wrong but it does not seem to bother people much as you are the first to suggest it iirc.
I like the idea though! It's just that I'm still at the stage of trying to push people to add one location first. So several locations per user is not on the menu yet.
Plus, with multiple identities the map would likely look busier, removing the sad "sigh, it's just me" moment in less tech-centric areas.
In order to avoid abuse, I would set a limit of 3 or 4 locations max. This would also allow the travelling crowds to have a spare location to be used as "target city" while on the road, without constantly adding back their home one.
But sometimes they modified the string they pasted from meet.hn and it broke the parsing, causing their socials not to be displayed on meet.hn.
That's why I would suggest to check their profile by clicking on their username.
Note: I'm not parsing socials across the entire HN user description because some people want to keep some data outside of meet.hn. By having a clear start/stop of meet.hn data, it allows me to parse only socials users actually want to display on meet.hn.
No one: never seen a fellow HNer, blueskyer, mastoner, lemmyer
Could you elaborate? what is painful to you?
> automatic email chain or private chat
Any more ideas about that? I think it's similar to the suggestion I made in the post about creating Telegram channels for each location, but I'm not sure.
Also, someone already said they wouldn't join a Telegram channel and would prefer Signal. That really illustrates the kind of challenges I'm facing in trying to bring the HN community together.
People put one or many links to their accounts. Unless there is a email or an actual social media, it is very hard to pick one of these as a way of connecting people.
For example I saw a lot of accounts with just github (same goes with some of the social medias), I am not sure what to do outside of following it. I would assume there is also a understandable inertia to put your own social account or email directly here.
> Any more ideas about that?
Email-chain would be the easiest. I wouldn't rely on a third party service like Telegram or Signal directly as that would mean losing a lot of people because as you realised it is hard to convince everyone to agree on Apples to Oranges.
One thing that could also work is creating a some form of very simple forum board like interface on the website directly for people to post/comment their invitation/willingness to meet up or how they wish to be contacted about meeting up (maybe with a bit information about what they expect or what you can expect).
It could function like a Facebook Group in a way which served a similar purpose in past.
There could also be a Country/Nation board that will also share same posts as your city so more people can see them. If you would like to discuss in more detail, you can send me a email.
> Email-chain would be the easiest.
It would require users to share their emails to meet.hn, am I right?
> creating a some form of very simple forum board
Might be a good idea as well. It would require more work and maintenance but could be valuable.
It had exactly one sign-up which I unfortunately lost with a database migration.
Did I mention the word sign-up too often? Maybe you should sign up…
And yes, this is a shameless plug
I find this really funny for some reason.
But next time you go on a trip, have a look at the map! You might be able to meet someone interesting there.
Just reporting, in case it wasn't expected.
More info in the note here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42411640
The question is how to connect people with each other.
United Kingdom 6.17%
India 5.54%
Germany 3.53%
Canada 3.4%
Australia 3%
Others 24.6%
https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com/#geo...
Those numbers seem mostly in the ranges I posted back in 2018 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521). But the total views they report at https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com is way off. I think they report 11M monthly (I can't view the site anymore), but the actual number was 209M in November. There's a lot of bot traffic in there, though, so it's a bit hard to interpret.
Edit: on the other hand, 16% of those 209M hits were by logged-in users, who tend not to be bots, and the ratio of logged-out to logged-in users is always high (I would have said at least 10 to 1), so maybe 209M isn't so far off.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 (March 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16444556 (Feb 2018)
It's on my list to do this again!
Or: Maybe one (random) person of that area gets to decide a meeting time & location.
Or: each person can put a location in their profile and a bot will pick the location (randomly or by "count")
Per city would definitely be spam! There are 720 cities as we speak.
Or it could not be, but it would require locating them under a specific route like news.ycombinator.com/meet or something.
I mean a way to allow direct communication on city/country level. But if you do Telegram then you are part of a big noise - because every body, their dogs, and their dog's granny have a telegram channel now - many of them too active.
Or - let city/country host/admins make post on city/country portal on meet.hn make announcements, posts to which users can subscribe to if they want (you bypass all the implementation in this manner)
This is what it gave me when entering London, UK:
meet.hn/city/51.5074456,-0.1277653/London
But compare with, e.g, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jones58 - meet.hn/city/gb-London.
It looks like that's affecting other cities like Paris too - a large "original" group, and then a solitary one with lat/lng.
To do so, I implemented a search using OpenStreetMap. The thing is, OpenStreetMap can give several results for a given location (and rightfully so). Example with Paris: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Paris%2C%20France.
When I updated the way meet.hn handles location, I migrated all city ids like the one you mention "gb-London" to a new one using lat/long.
The problem is: when users select a location, they can end up at another (close) location suggested by OpenStreetMap. To mitigate this pb, if locations have the same full name or OpenStreetMap id, I don't display them in the location selector.
Also, I put locations of type "city" first to nudge users into selecting cities more and hopefully end up with less problems of this kind.
Code about this is here: https://github.com/borisghidaglia/meet-hn/blob/808143d36841b...
There is something to be done, but I only had overly complicated ideas to fix this.
Very open to suggestions. Don't hesitate to open an issue/PR for this on GitHub.
All the links people have in their profiles basically doesn't work anymore. Maybe you could at least setup a redirect from the URL without the coordinates to the one with the coordinates, assuming when they set up the link, they used whatever first result you got back then. Basically run both versions (not literally), but redirect from the old one.
Good practice to keep URLs alive one way or another for as long as you can, as effectively all the links the initial group of users put no longer works as expected.
Hit me up if interested :)
P.S: I just signed up. I am in the Chicago area. Would love to grab coffee.
- At first, when a new meeting starts, very few people will show up, for at least a few months. If people like it they will keep coming, and slowly ranks will increase. After a while word of mouth will bring more people.
- You need to advertise it a lot of places, not just one website. Wherever your audience might go (out in the world, or online), go advertise there. This doesn't have to cost much money. I literally printed out flyers and posted them up everywhere near where my meetings would be. This brought in people. A local meeting is about connecting with local people, in person, so go places where people go in person. But also some people rarely leave the couch...
- It's very important to show continuous evidence that stuff is still happening, people are attending. Post a weekly/monthly update on a website, with some idea of what went on. Post pictures if you have them. If you really want to post on tiktok, IG, youtube, etc, you can, but it's not necessary; literally any place (that is accessible to everyone - i.e. a simple blog) that shows things are happening is enough.
- Let go of the idea of using some whizbang tech to keep people apprised of what's going on. Local meetings are about one thing: showing up and talking. Forget the mailing lists, rss feeds, bookmarklets, etc. Just post a status update on a free blog somewhere. Show up every week/month/whatever. That's enough to encourage people to attend.
- For organizers: Make it easy to find the event and the people. When people can't find it, and then post somewhere about how nobody was there, that can make it seem like the meeting is dead.
- Reputation is important. If your site lets anyone organize a meeting, but the organizer fails to come through and keep it going, and people show up and find nobody there, word will get around that those meetings aren't serious, and new people won't try to attend. The way 2600 did it worked well: you organize your own meeting, show evidence that you're consistently with it, and after a while the magazine would list you as an official meetup.
- The 2600 route was often literally just hanging out in a mall food court. The LUG route was usually a business/school/etc that would sponsor the group, giving them a place to hang out, sometimes even catering cold sandwiches and chips/soda. I'd let users figure it out themselves, but a guide on how to set up a meeting would help them.
- Having a chatroom (we used IRC back in the day) is fine, but it's not a replacement for the local meeting, and often ends up being an entirely different "thing". It can scare some people away, and can create a weird atmosphere. I would be wary of officially tying them together.
- You would do well to include explicit verbiage about how inappropriate behavior will not be tolerated, that all are welcome, have a zero tolerance policy about harassment and discrimination, etc. This helps the organizer, as it can be difficult to address inappropriate behavior without an explicit policy to point at. It also helps the maintainer of this list, as you can remove meetings if you hear complaints and the organizers don't nip it in the bud.
Organizing is a lot of work, usually unappreciated. Good luck to those who want to take that on!
I could see it as a nice way to meet like-minded people while traveling: I used to use couchsurfing (which has kind of died out) like this: if traveling alone to foreign place, it's nice to meet some locals.
I think dang's answer about this is on point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42411843
> I could see it as a nice way to meet like-minded people while traveling [...] it's nice to meet some locals.
Exactly what I had in mind as well!
there's an old thread about how to run an event that doesn't suck, but it may be for more structured events than meetups. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32876804
even a lightning round with the t-shirt slogan of what you're either building, thinking about, or challenged by, some structured Q&A, and around a table instead of ted talk would do it. pretty much the startup school office hours format.