Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

Re:Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? by baron816 on Monday December 28, 2020 @07:58PM (#25565337)

I’ve been the lead organizer of a largish group with a couple hundred very active members. But getting to that point was quite a challenge that was made harder by Meetup. The group still ended up falling apart.

The Meetup platform is pretty terrible. It’s designed to get people to join many groups, most of which they never engage with and just get a lot of spam from. I’m sure >99.99% of pre-pandemic “social” Meetup groups were totally inactive. Most of the rest would have semi-regular events that <4 people would sign up for.

That said, I think there’s a lot room to build a better version of Meetup.com. The main problem with it is that the managers just don’t know what they’re doing, or are in too deep with tech debt and legacy code. If someone here actually wants to build a better version of Meetup, let me know.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? by crooked-v on Monday December 28, 2020 @08:15PM (#25565462)

I think one key to a better Meetup would be to solve the no-show problem. From what I understand this is the greatest issue that large-group organizing has on the platform, to the point that I've seen people regularly write sassy rants on event posts to guilt people into accurately updating whether they're showing up or not.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? by 2bitlobster on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @12:30AM (#25567041)

Having managed large groups, the no-show rate was large but extremely consistent (always within the range of 74-82%, pre-covid that is). Because it was so consistent, we could reliably plan both the space and refreshments.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? by DeafSquid on Monday December 28, 2020 @10:52PM (#25566535)

I think part of fixing the problem of no-shows would be to not let members see who/how many people have said that they're going. If 25 people say they're going to show up, then it's not a big deal if I don't, right? Until half the people have the same idea. There will be more perceived social pressure to keep that commitment if people don't think they're just going to get lost in a crowd.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more? by freehunter on Monday December 28, 2020 @10:58PM (#25566565)

Oh jeez my worst nightmare might just be going to a Meetup without knowing how many people I should expect and ending up being the only one who showed up. If Meetup didn’t tell me how many people RSVP’d I’d never go to any of them.

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