People go to "meetups" even if they are announced and booked on Eventbrite with absolutely no counterpart on meetup.com. It became a word to define an event format. From that point of view they've been pretty successful. How they fare financially, I don't know.

The platform is in the middle of a revamp, with parts accessible only through the old interface. The messages subsite always felt like it was engineered with the technological limitations of 10+ years ago and never improved. Not good signs.

I have no idea of the impact of the acquisition. WeWork doesn't operate in my country. Luckily I have found a zero cost location for my semi technical meetup. I'll be happy if nothing changes.

By the way, there are many technical meetups around me, but there are many more non technical ones (meeting people, yoga, hiking, foreign languages, politics, really anything). A friend on mine told me yesterday he estimated a 90/10 ratio. Not what you can fill coworking spaces with.

I think it's just fundamentally a hard product. Most people aren't motivated enough to organize events with enough regularity and quality for a community to form. In my experience most Meetup groups are pretty dead.

That leaves the people who have something to gain - "new in town" groups run by real estate agents, tech meetup groups run by recruiters, etc etc. These communities tend not to develop a long-term following because most people can smell the opportunism from a mile away.

The best Meetups tended to be run by professionals - non-profits, museums, etc, who have something to gain but tended to be aligned with the interests of the participants. Those are sadly few and fr between.

I liked Meetup for a lot of uses, but you really did have to sift through a lot of cruft. I think their problem isn't really any execution failure, and reflects simply the level of difficulty of community-building.

Sports- or activity-based meetups tend to be the best of the bunch, as do expat gatherings when you have just relocated to a new country.

I have been a part of a few meetups, and I think that Meetup the application is great when you have an existing community that you want to bring online. If an email list isn't enough (and sometimes it isn't) meetup can be a great way of extending an existing community online. However, if all you're doing is meeting once a month, Meetup is overkill.

It may work OK for generating new community and connections, but as the parent said, you need to have some staying power, and that is either going to be related to some kind of revenue (leads, etc) or some really dedicated hosts that will probably burn out in a few years.

Pretty spot on. As an organizer, you're worried about turnout and interest along with the logistics. My thing is now, just let others do the organizing and show up and leave early if I want to.

Your experience is not everyone's experience. Meetups are extremely popular in big cities, I attend a few each month with probably a total 300 attendees among them.

In fact, our local meetup has even had high-profile language contributors and members of the ISO speak.

Like anything, 90% of them are crap. What's important is to truly interested in a shared activity.

In my experience sports, board games and language exchanges work well.

Yeah, many local game stores operate a meetup as a way to allow gaming groups to form (it's great for D&D), or as a way to advertise, schedule, and organize events, both one offs and routine.

I stopped going to meetups because they felt like glorified networking groups where I never really found any value, solid connections, or a reason to go back. I tried both speaking and attending.

I still go to meetups.