The problem with Meetup
Meetup.com is a Web 2.0 company from the same era as Google, Myspace, and Napster, that was founded on the wake of 9/11. Founder Scott Heiferman lived just a few miles away from the bombings, and met his neighbors for the first time as the tragedy brought them together on the rooftop of their building. A year later, he founded Meetup with with the mission of empowering people to connect with and grow communities.
The product was once so ubiquitous with its namesake that presidential hopeful Barack Obama promised to attend any Meetup organized by supporters that reached 100 or more people. I graduated and moved to Los Angeles in 2016. As a fresh transplant who was hoping not to get stuck in my work social bubble, I sought online avenues to connect with people who shared my interests.
My search led me to Meetup. After an initially disorienting encounter with its user interface (Meetup overhauled their look later that year to better appeal to Millennials — which is good, because its old landing page was like the ugly love child of Craigslist and Myspace), I found my way to a poker meetup downtown.
In my first foray on the site, I noticed a few glaring oddities:
- Meetups that were thinly veiled attempts to sell me things.
- Groups with thousands of members, but no one RSVPed on the upcoming Meetups.
- Meetups trying to take off the site to sign-up somewhere else (see above).
After some perusing, I found a Poker meetup nearby with a reasonable of RSVPs, and signed up. That Saturday, my Uber dropped me off at the community center, and I walked in eagerly hoping to make some friends and win some money.
A woman who looked to be in her sixties — with a cigarette in one hand and another one tucked behind her ear — greeted me and led me over to a table in the corner. Many of the other players were seated there, ranging from middle aged to upper seventies.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not ageist, and I do enjoy hanging out with my grandpa. But this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I went in with the intention of finding people to fill out my social circle. So that afternoon I played a few hands aggressively, struck out quickly, and left.
For better or worse, it’s well documented that people tend to enjoy hanging out with those similar to themselves. People look for those in a similar age range, educational background, even political views and socioeconomic status.
I talked to a friend in San Francisco who had gone on a few Meetups. Was it always like this?
The answer was: no, not always — but the variance is high. He recounted a Dungeons and Dragons Meetup he attended, where the only thing he had in common with the other players was a shared interest in the table top game. “There wasn’t anyone I’d hang out with again.”
Another friend recounted a bar Meetup he attended. It was a recurring event, with “Newcomers welcome!” written in the description. When he arrived, he found it was a close knit group of friends who had been attending the Meetups for a while. The mechanic of creating a group is naturally tied to the formation of an ingroup of people that know each other, that is reinforced over time by repeated Meetups. Old members have little incentive to welcome new members, and new members can find it hard to break through and make friends in an already established group.
Circling back a bit, it’s obvious why people would try to sell things on Meetup — same reason people try to sell things everywhere else on the internet. Though the behavior is understandable, it’s not really in the spirit of a meetup that’s supposed to bring together a community of people, and you’d expect it to be weeded out.
Then there’s the question of the ghost towns — Groups with thousands of members, but no RSVPs to the upcoming Meetups. It was a mystery to me at first, but their cause became clear as I joined a few of these groups and scrolled through the old posts.
“Join us on Facebook! [Link to FB group page]”
It’s simple: Meetup charges people to organize events, Facebook does not. Once a sizable group is established, there’s no incentive to stay on the platform. While this is obviously bad for Meetup’s retention, it also degrades the new user experience — when checking out the first few Meetups you find interesting, you find that no one is going. You get the impression that most of the big groups are ghost towns.
In summary:
- There is either no moderation, or the moderation is not heavy enough to filter out sales, ads, and “paid workshops” that don’t fill the underlying promise of the platform.
- There are incentives that actively push the organizers off the platform once they have garnered enough members for their group.
- There’s no matchmaking, curation, or anything systemic way of ensuring the people (in addition to the topic/activity) of the meetup are interesting to you
- The platform’s Groups and Recurring Meetups reinforce natural human Ingroup Behavior. In the event of a rare, successful Meetup group, that group often becomes closed off to newcomers, either by literally going Private or becoming a tight knit group that is difficult for a newcomer to enter.
In case it wasn’t clear: I don’t like Meetup, and I think it’s a huge missed opportunity. The mission and underlying promise is very compelling, but the execution is mediocre.
About 5.4 million adult Americans — and somewhere around 30–40 million adults worldwide — move to a new area every year. I was in that group in 2016, and so were nearly all of my graduating friends. Speaking on behalf of myself and a majority of those friends: a convenient, technology driven solution to help us join a local community in our area of people who shared our passions would have solved a very real problem for us in that time. Unfortunately, Meetup.com was not it, nor was anything else available.
