Comment by margalabargala

4 days ago

Meetup sucks.

The reason for the decline in social activity is not that it was insufficiently commercialized. Meetup should be a nonprofit.

I re-started using meetup just a couple of weeks ago after feeling the same way. And, honestly, my interactions were great. Meetup was scheduled, people showed up, we had a good time. I live in a smaller city and found two to go to in one night(ping pong and board games)

Agreed. I'm working on a non-commercial open source Meetup alternative.

  • I would be incredibly interested in learning more once you've got something working.

    EDIT: Would it happen to be Meetable? I just stumbled across that serendipitously an hour or so after commenting.

Meetup was fine 10+ years ago, but it's my go-to example of enshittification today. It feels like they're actively trying to kill it with every new change to the app / web experience. But despite that there are some good groups.

  • It's also worth noting that sometimes, groups are on Meetup because it is one of the least bad options.

    I still host board game events on Meetup, although I'm hoping to switch to my open source alternative soon. I think the other commercial options such as Discord and Facebook are worse, and people have gotten used to Meetup.

  • Meetups existed before meetup.com just fine. The site was there to provide a place for meetups to coordinate. Meetups aren't an artifact of the site.