
WeWork Buys Meetup; Here Is How Meetup.Com Will Change - skmurphy
https://www.gaintap.com/blog/wework-buys-meetup-heres-meetup-will-change/
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donretag
"None of those are direct sells to business users. These need to be updated to
highlight meetups that appeal to business users with call to actions like:

Meet local entrepreneurs Grow your business Improve your marketing Learn about
taxes Get more clients"

One my of biggest complaints of Meetup (which are many), is that many (social)
Meetups nowadays are basically advertisements. It is not about building a
community, it is about having a meetup to advertise their services. The huge
monthly fee is part of the reason. This article basically wants Meetup to move
more into that direction, which I would not be surprised if it did.

There is also an increase of tech meetups whose organizers is not a technical
person, but a sales person. These meetups also tend to use eventbrite instead
of the meetup RSVP interface so that they can harvest emails and sales leads.

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skmurphy
This is from Nov-28-2017 but I think think the analysis is still good. Meetup
made some significant changes to their interface recently that have let to a
lot of dissatisfaction and complaints from organizers complaining[1], I think
these date from a regime where the focus was on growing attendees. I agree
with this analysis that they will start to focus much more on organizer
satisfaction because it's the organizer who determines meetup locations and
WeWork wants to see these in WeWork facilities to introduce attendees to their
offering.

[1] [https://medium.com/meetup/web-redesign-
explained-5f5a4ae7e42...](https://medium.com/meetup/web-redesign-
explained-5f5a4ae7e420) see comments for more than 100 detailed complaints
from Meetup organizers about deleted functionality in new interface.

~~~
donretag
Nothing new when it comes to Meetup. They did another major redesign several
years ago, and organizers were furious. They encouraged organizers to file
tickets in their ticketing system and vote on the ones they want. The top five
tickets were all marked as "Will not do" by Meetup.

I gave up being an organizer. Facebook does not work for tech groups. LinkedIn
is supposedly bringing back Groups. Skeptical, but anything should be better
than Meetup.

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dawhizkid
I’m amazed there hasn’t been another startup trying to be a better meetup,
especially now when there’s so much attention on loneliness and lack of social
interaction.

~~~
f2n
I would love to see an open source meetup alternative, maybe one that I can
host myself for my meetup.

~~~
dawhizkid
you mean decentralized?

(i'm kidding, sort of)

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opensports
A serious number of Meetup organizers have been really upset by the changes to
the Meetup platform (sudden removal of features / zero customer support /
redesign / switch of focus) after spending, in some cases, almost a decade on
Meetup and paying thousands in monthly fees. We've been helping move sports
and fitness groups off Meetup since the fall and the amount of inbound Meetup
organizers just keeps increasing.

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anonytrary
Meetup: A community of people looking for a place to meetup.

WeWork: Nothing short of bachelor pads for people to meet up in.

This might be old news, but it's still interesting. It's a shame companies
like Josephine are shutting down, WeWork and Meetup could be a vector for that
kind of thing; or maybe even something like p2p classrooms. Everyone chips
into a fund for a speaker, if it reaches the goal, they book an appropriate
room within radius R of some agreed location. I don't know if people use
Meetup for teaching sessions, though. They probably do? Yoga, etc.

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83457
Slightly off-topic but Meetup's redesign over the last year really sucks. Not
sure what is going on there

~~~
carwyn
The biggest issue has been the half-broken hybrid nature of the redesign. It's
still not finished with significant inconsistencies between desktop and the
mobile app. For a paid for service the state it's been in is disappointing.

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rapnie
good article. what i liked from meetup is that it emphasized meeting face-to-
face.. something that is getting rarer all the time with our increasing tech
use, and may now be de-emphasized in favor of wework stuff

~~~
odonnellryan
I've been to some very quality meetups actually. I should go to more.

~~~
Kagerjay
I went to meetups in big tech cities and less tech-oriented cities, the ones
that I liked the most were the ones that had a permanent space in bigger
cities. The one I liked the most was in LA, called nullspace labs. You could
learn things like soldering, assembly language, gamedev,
webpenetration(Radare32), and lots of other interesting topics that you
wouldn't necessarily find good resources on youtube.

I think meetups with a clear goal in mind (e.g. Tennis-Only meetup,
Javascript-Only meetup, Python-Only meetup) and have much more engaging /
interesting conversation topics long term. Short term its nice to get to know
1 or 2 people at a large meetup ("Entreprenuers", "Young and Active"),or when
visiting a new city for the first time.

That and meetup.com is just a load of notification spam if you just randomly
join meetup groups. Some meetups IMO are very spammy in nature, especially
those related to B2B, "entreprenuership" or "business" or "strategy" since its
mostly consultants peddling their skillsets or startups. You'll find way more
engaging topics on reddit for these.

So I'm pretty excited to see Meetup and WeWork merge together, hopefully this
new change would be good. Possibly higher quality meetups overall

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crankylinuxuser
Meetup majorly pissed me off. I've never been back.

I was going to the monthly IoT meetup up to about 2 years ago. The current
maintainer was moving across the US, and wanted to transfer the group
(nonprofit) to me. Seemed simple enough.

We go through the steps and then I get hit with the gotcha: pay $15 a month!
Uhhh, $15 a month for what amounts to a email list and a webpage? I don't
think so. Perhaps I could export the list and use my own platform? Nope! But
they do offer _great_ suggestions, like charge dues.

In the end, I "let" the group die.

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paulgb
Isn't the fact that without meetup, the group died, proof that they provided
some value? It's not like you couldn't send an email to the group saying
"let's organize through this google groups mailing list instead", so I assume
you needed the marketing features of meetup.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
No, I wasn't able to do anything until I paid $15/month to use it.

I would have been happy in exporting the contact list and running it on my own
mailserver and webserver. A single list of 200 people isn't hard. But I
couldn't even get the data if I had paid.

~~~
ebbv
The group wasn’t worth paying $15 one time to save? You realize this story
makes you sound bad, not Meetup?

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crankylinuxuser
Read the last sentence, and please reconsider your comment.

"But I couldn't even get the data if I had paid."

~~~
ebbv
In case you’re wondering why you’re wrong; you could have passed the group to
someone else, you could have started a discussion of where to move the group,
you could have done any number of things rather than just killing the group
because you didn’t want to cough up $15/20.

