Re:WeWork is going to acquire Meetup
by avenoir on Monday November 27, 2017 @11:30PM
(#15794424)
As a frequent user of meetup.com, I feel like it succeeded at making people one-time acquaintances and failed miserably at making lasting connections. I'm a member of several groups and most of these groups do not see any single individual more than once. I won't even mention terrible attendance for just about any groups I've ever been a part of. I think there could've been a lot of improvements made here but meetup really hasn't done anything with the concept for years, which is a shame. I still think this space is ripe for innovation.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
The key is don't go to meetups to meet people. Go because you want to participate in the shared activity every week/month.
I'm also a frequent user of meetup.com. I've found that the likelihood of forming lasting connections varies wildly based on how the events are run and on what types of people are targeted. I've made quite a few of my closest friends through the site, and I've noticed that the more successful groups from a friendship perspective tend to be the ones that recur frequently (weekly) or the ones where there is some kind of strong and relatively rare commonality between the participants outside of career, age group, relationship status, etc.
Either way, meetup.com is just a platform for hosting and discovering these events. There's not much that makes meetup groups inherently different from other types of clubs/organizations. It's up to the organizers and the attendees to actually make the events worthwhile.