Part of me wants to try an bring it back, but I'm not sure I have the engergy or enthusiasm for it, and I'm just not sure there is the demand any more.
It feels like there are a couple of factors at play:
1) Working from home has become the norm for many, there are fewer people working in offices in town that would be able to just pop in after work. Suddenly you have to "commute" for the event when you've been at home all day. It's much more of a special effort.
2) It feels like the enthusiasm and excitement has gone out of tech. This may be UK specific, or perhaps it's just me, but being part of the tech industry doesn't feel so shiny as it once did. There doesn't seem to be that excitement about it. There is so much more scepticism/cynisism within the industry.
3) Covid in general just seemed to really change people's habits. It's taken real effort to get back into the habit of seeing old friends in person. I feel like a couple of years of restrictions and lockdowns kind of broke a whole generation of adults and it's taking us a lot longer to rebuild those habits than I ever thought it would.
#3 is hard, and I can relate. It took a lot of activation energy to start hosting and attending dinner parties with friends again, specially after just having Zoom meetups for a long time.
Just conjecture here (from a fellow British person), but I think it might be something to do with tech employment that's changed. Listicles and blogs about Google's workplace culture were being churned out week on week in the mid 2010s, and working at a startup was portrayed as a futuristic, modern type of employment where you published a crowdfunding campaign, arrived at a makerspace to draw sketches of gadgets and GUI mockups with a team of enthusiastic colleagues, then, I don't know, did a TED talk before going out for a drink. The results for searching stock image sites with the term 'startup culture' bears witness to that stereotype!
I was never part of that, so I can't tell how accurate that portrayal was. However, since then, the press has now moved to reporting scandal after scandal: fraud in high places with companies like Theranos, well-meaning but naive founders falling victim to hostile takeovers, all punctuated by the routine whack-a-mole of cryptocurrency scams.
So perhaps it is not that technologists have become less enthusiastic as a whole, but the enthusiastic ones don't join many startups and FAANG-adjuncts any longer. Without the blank cheque of such an employer, financing a £££+ trip across the country for a meetup isn't so viable. I would certainly go to more conferences and hackathons if money weren't something to consider.
And on a personal note; your comment history suggests that we're not so very far away geographically, so make sure to post on HN if you do decide to restart your event :)
It still love Tech as much as before, but I also saw the "vibe" change over the past years. I was wondering if it really was a thing, or mostly me growing older :). It seems it might be a combination of both.
There was a real feeling that we were part of the future. Now we just seem to be part of turbocharging the worst aspects of ultra-capitalism.
Combined with the endlessly frustrating hype-cycles, it really doesn't surprise me that it's all lost its shine. I was reading some comment last week by someone bemoaning the cynicism around LLMs/GPT etc, and I couldn't really agree with it. Being in my mid-forties, I have been around for at least half a dozen major hype-cycles (including the previous couple of AI based ones), all of which have, at best taken a lot longer to come to fruition, and at worst have had sod all impact on the world. I can understand why people are sceptical that "this time it's different".
Used to have ~25% no shows, and no it's the other way around across all my Meetups. People subscribe but just won't show up. Venues are harder to find. Many organizers burnt out, .... Where we used to see 90+ people, we know are happy with 35.
It's kinda gloomy. Can't blame it on anyone either to be honest. Working hybrid means that any day of the week about half of the audience is working from home, many folks moved to the suburbs, and many others got burned by layoffs and simply don't have the same vibe about nerding away in the evenings after work.
Similarly, did anyone see a hackathon organized anywhere lately?
I'm really curious to see if they'll come back full force or will simply take another form in the future. where do people hang out together those days? Online?