The Alternative to Meetup.com
Meetup is a sad story…

Since 2002, when Meetup.com was founded, the world has changed, and continues to change at a rapid pace. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when people were searching for a sense of community in New York City, Scott Heiferman wanted to create a tool for real-world communities to connect and coordinate online. He took inspiration from everywhere, from local book clubs, to hiking groups and developer communities. When a number of local election candidates started using the platform to organise their grassroots, Meetup.com started getting a lot of free publicity, and quickly spread across the US and Canada.
Today Meetup comes across a little quaint, a relic of web 2.0, representing what could have been. This was an alternative vision of the social web, which brought us together physically, not digitally. It has never been easier to connect and share, but with all of the political and cultural acrimony on Twitter and Facebook it is hard to see how the dominant social platforms really bring people together.
Meetup literally brought people together… in physical spaces. It is a lot harder to be a troll or a bully with a real flesh and blood human being sitting in front of you in all of their vulnerability — and yours too.
What happened to the dream of bringing like-minded people together with shared activities and interests?
Ahem, “user engagement” happened. User engagement, which is newspeak for screen addiction, comes from the morally bankrupt idea that you should first have to addict people to your apps and monetise them later. How many Tinder copycat apps are there attempting to connect us with “people like us”, only to measure their success by the amount of time we spend on their app. Surely they realise that, like Tinder, the more you use their app the less likely you are to have found a relationship or “people like you”. If these apps had given us the fulfillment they pretend to they would have been made redundant by their own success. What modern social apps do is pitch you a dream and sell you a behavioural addiction. They hack the brains of lonely people like a slot machine hacks a person down on their luck and desperate for a break. What they don’t do is provide tools for real people to coordinate socially around shared interests.
Meetup was different. Meetup was about real human contact. Meetup was about dancing and playing board games. It was about politics and meditation groups. It was about learning from others, and finding the best in ourselves, challenging our beliefs and sharing our vulnerabilities, overcoming our fears, transforming ourselves, so we could transform the world, one meetup at a time. And how far did we get?
Not far, but far enough to know what works, and what doesn’t.
Let’s be frank. Meetup has hit the rocks. Worse than that, it’s been aimless and drifting for quite a while. It hasn’t collapsed all of a sudden, it’s been in decline for a decade. The recent uproar from the Meetup community about a set of price increases is just the flashpoint for a steady build-up of frustration amongst paying organisers over many years. The lack of innovation and the tone-deafness of the company itself are the seeds of their downfall.
There are heated debates online about the real cause of the downfall of Meetup. I don’t need to weigh in on the detail here.
But what is certain is that these issues are old, really old.
The no-show problem is an example of kinks in the experience of organisers and participants that should have been worked out over a decade ago. If I go to an event with 30 RSVPs I may not expect 30 people there, but I expect at least 3!
Of course, there are solutions, but none were tried with any level of precision or determination. Problems are routinely handwaved away as the organiser’s responsibility, often with automated responses to paying customers, even as they remove those tools while increasing prices. This has all made community organisers very unhappy with Meetup.
There was a glimmer of hope in 2018, when CEO Scott Heiferman moved into the chairman role to “reinvent [the company] to help a billion people create real community in the 2020’s.”
But nothing changed… He continued to be as tone deaf as ever:
You’re right Scott, that does sound terrible!
Meetup is now completely directionless. The WeWork saga will damage their brand but its not the underlying cause of their woes.
Their meaningless new logo was not commissioned by WeWork.
Meetups reputation amongst ordinary users is in the toilet
… Not the fault of WeWork.
The management got serious once, but never really followed through. If they had we’d have seen it in the product. Was that WeWork’s fault as well?
Is there an alternative today?
There are… particularly in terms of publishing your event online. But none of them will actually help you create a community. None of the alternatives will grow your events, they will only reduce your admin.
Are people working on new alternatives?
They are starting to… Facebook has, for many years, sucked the oxygen out of the social web. Genuinely innovative alternatives with alternate models to Facebook are only now getting a second look.
What are the key differences between Meetup and Tuvens?
Goodbye Groups, Hello Communities
In Tuvens we don’t have the concept of a group. Groups are binary. You’re in, or you’re out. But thats not how real communities work. In real communities there are people at the centre, the workhorses, teachers, artists and super-connectors, that keep us all together. And then there are people on the periphery, dabblers, people who like to drift and sample multiple communities. You might call them “free birds”. And most of us reside somewhere in the middle.
Tuvens uses a vouching system to determine how people relate to their communities. If I vouch for you and you vouch for me on the tag “salsa” then we both get a “salsa point”. The more vouches you receive the more valuable a vouch from you is.
Put another way, people in the salsa community decide collectively who is in the community or not, with no central committee making the decision for everyone else.
More Diverse & Quality Events
Meetup only promotes a tiny selection of events.
Tuvens aggregates a lot of events, particularly the big headline ones from communities we are focused on, like festivals. Anyone can add an event, even events you’re not organising yourself.
To avoid spams, scams, duplicates or low quality events we restrict the use of popular tags. The system only allows people with enough vouches to use popular tags on their events. That means if you’re not in a community you cannot use their tag.
And it works the same for every community, whether it is #salsa, #surfing, #Reactjs or #buddhism.
No More RSVP No-Shows
A big issue for many people in the meetup community, of both organisers and participants, has been no-shows: people who RSVP and then don’t attend. In order to encourage people to attend, Meetup displays the number of people who have RSVP’d as “attending”. The problem with this is that during tests, many people who see the RSVP button believe it is the method for adding the event to their own calendar and/or expressing superficial support for the event. They don’t realise that this is for telling other people you’re genuinely going.
For many organisers — although notably not all — this is an enormous frustration, as it creates an uncertainty about the type of venue they need, amongst other logistical concerns.
For participants it creates false expectations, particularly for new members not used to Meetup as a platform.
But in recent years this issue has become much worse, as some unscrupulous organisers actively inflate the numbers of attendees with fake users, just to pull in unsuspecting travellers and demand fees not advertised on the page. Sometimes organisers will advertise 3 or 4 meetups on the same night and just smush them together when a tiny fraction of the attendees for each event show up.
Tuvens doesn’t show RSVP numbers. We display a community tab to indicate the number of people who have RSVP’d in the past, and indicate what communities they are from. We lower the visibility of members who have not been vouched for to avoid organisers inflating the size of their community with fake users.
Introducing Event Series
That leads nicely into the concept of event series. In Meetup, an event has a single page, as a singular entity. Of course you can create repeat events, duplicates of the original, linked by the group they are owned by, but these events are not connected as a series. By that I mean there is no way to comment on or review the series of events as a whole.
For example, when we talk about a music festival, like Glastenbury, we don’t think specifically of Glastenbury 2019. We think of Glastenbury as a unit, which occurs the same weekend every year for an indefinite number of years into the future. If I review Glastenbury I am reviewing it in that context. I might say “it used to be smaller and now it is really big” or “I liked it more in the 90s”, but ‘it’ still stands for the same event, as a series.
On Meetup, if I attend a weekly storytelling or comedy event and enjoy it, there is no page I can go to and review the event for future attendees. I can comment on the page of the specific event date I attended, but nobody will see that unless they crawl back through months of identical listings.
In Tuvens the same comments, reviews, images and videos for a series display in all of the events, whether it be a bands international tour, a yearly festival or a weekly table quiz. The details might be different for each event, but the community is the same, so you can see the whole event as it grows and changes.
No fees to promote events
Tuvens has a completely different revenue model to Meetup. Fees are an impediment to aggregating quality events. And besides, organisers are the pillars of our communities. Why would we tax them when they add so much value to our communities.
Tuvens model is based upon the sharing economy. Members choose whether to gift or sell what they have, whether that is tickets, accommodation or ridesharing. If they sell we take a transaction fee. They can even advertise their paid event using someone else’s ticketing system. Its up to us to provide a service to organisers worth paying for.
Streamlined Search and Discovery
The meetup navigation is confusing and convoluted. In the attempt to never give an empty result they often show completely irrelevant events in completely different areas. I personally used to live in a different city. I constantly get prompted about events in that city months after I moved and have tried to change my home location. The implementation of tags is poor, making it impossible for members themselves to curate events around shared tags.
Tuvens is modelled on a single search bar:
- what type of content are you looking for?
- related to what communities?
- where?

Prompts and tool-tips in the UI will indicate how it should be used and improve the organisation and curation of content. This process is called “collaborative filtering”, popularised by companies like Spotify, which allowed very active members to organise music content for others.
Ticketing and Administration Tools
Additionally, for more advanced organisers, we are providing a dedicated ticketing and event administration system to make your lives easier. This system provides all of the core administration tools of successful organisers. Check it out all of the features here, and contact us for early access.
And check out our website for more details about the platform!

