Ask HN: What should I do with meet.hn?

>But, at the end of the day, someone has to find a place and pick a date and let people know. You don't even have to go crazy with any of those, you could pick a coffee shop or restaurant, unless you get real popular.

This is exactly what people don't want to do. Even when the meeting location or time haven't changed in two years.

Believe me, I've had people ask about when the next meeting will be. I tell them I'm unavailable to set things up. I tell them they can feel free to go through the motions, just create the event in the calendar and really just make sure nobody makes a mess or anything during the event.

It sounds simple but again, unless someone has the right personality and drive to be responsible for this...

I'd consider the demographics of people who regularly visit HN. Not to put a slight on anyone but I think a good chunk of people on here probably don't enjoy in-person meetups.

Again, IME it's not the size of the meetup but the responsibility.

Even in my example, the average attendance is maybe 10-20 people. Sometimes as low as five people.

And some areas only have 5 or fewer regularly.

In my opinion (as some who recently moved out of a big city) it would be very valuable to have an easy way to meet local HN’rs. Either for group sessions or 1-1 or something in between.

I think you’re drawing premature conclusions from the dropoff in signups.

All users are probably in the “now what?” Stage. And if more people knew your site was a way to connect with nearby HNers (ie the value prop was higher and better known), you’d have a lot of interest. So classic chicken egg problem I believe. But there are many successful sites that have broken through this phase. In my opinion you should keep it up.

Hmm if I wanted to meet up with one person from HN, I would just contact them using the details in their profile. If there were no contact details, I wouldn't meet with them. I don't quite see the value for 1:1 meetups I guess.

What might work better is an HN forum with regional or city subforums (structured based on HN member density). First get HNers living close to each other to communicate, then they will meet up by themselves.

Of course, there’s the moderation issue.

Kill two birds with one stone:

1) Add functionality to auto-setup digital meetups and invite people within 200mi or something. 2) Let people meet in groups digitally, and maybe that spurs them to meet in person.

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Very true. About Meetup.com specifically (a couple of years ago at least), attending rate was something like 15-20% of the people who RSVP'd.

True, but this is also an emergent behavior of the Meetup UI. It has no (clear) way to say "I'm interested, might attend, can't commit right now, please remind me day-of." So if you want that reminder — if you want it on your calendar — you have to RSVP as if you were really 100% coming. Meetup doesn't (clearly) offer any other option.

I've RSVPed myself with this intent plenty of times. I'd use a "maybe, please remind me" button if it existed.

Contrast Doodle.com, which offers a "yellow maybe" option intermediate between "green yes" and "red no."

This is solved by charging $19 or so.

You can but I think people like the human element that "someone" has put this whole thing together.

At my events for that club, I don't lead anything at the event. I basically make sure people aren't causing any trouble or littering (none of this ever happens but it's just my assumed responsibility).

But I'll notice people asking around to know who set things up. Usually they find me and thank me because they enjoyed meeting other people and learning from each other.

Again, very human kind of thing I think.

I don't know about calling them community leaders; someone has to find a place to have the meeting and let people know about it. That can be done without the entire meeting conforming to their personality. But at the end of the day, someone has to do some legwork or it just ain't gonna happen.

The community leaders in this scenario aren't leading the meeting. I guess it depends on the format of said meeting.

In my case, they really just set the location and time, in addition to making sure nobody is causing trouble, littering, etc.

Other than that, it's a free-for-all.

there was a pandemic not soon after that time, I believe.

i was thinking rather the meet HN would summarize for all cities, or in the comments or whatever. or just link to a overview site on meet.hn. but anyway, as i said: just random thoughts that were the first ones to go through my mind. might help coming up with better ideas.

Suggest users to add an email on meet.hn so that you/host can send email for meetups? They can add an anon throw away email if they want. You may want to verify the hn profile though (hn doesn't have oauth so may be some string in hn profile - okay, it became complicated now).

I mean a way to allow direct communication on city/country level. But if you do Telegram then you are part of a big noise - because every body, their dogs, and their dog's granny have a telegram channel now - many of them too active.

Or - let city/country host/admins make post on city/country portal on meet.hn make announcements, posts to which users can subscribe to if they want (you bypass all the implementation in this manner)

> is not on X anymore

Or never was on X :)

Edit: funny enough, the only HN user that registered for my city has X as a social profile. Guess I'll never know more.

Edit 2: tbh why would it be compulsory to have a profile on some social networking thing?

If its geotagged, it would not require a priori following of the account, just some kind of location search/notification feed.

Ok, I emailed you.

> Could you elaborate? what is painful to you?

People put one or many links to their accounts. Unless there is a email or an actual social media, it is very hard to pick one of these as a way of connecting people.

For example I saw a lot of accounts with just github (same goes with some of the social medias), I am not sure what to do outside of following it. I would assume there is also a understandable inertia to put your own social account or email directly here.

> Any more ideas about that?

Email-chain would be the easiest. I wouldn't rely on a third party service like Telegram or Signal directly as that would mean losing a lot of people because as you realised it is hard to convince everyone to agree on Apples to Oranges.

One thing that could also work is creating a some form of very simple forum board like interface on the website directly for people to post/comment their invitation/willingness to meet up or how they wish to be contacted about meeting up (maybe with a bit information about what they expect or what you can expect).

It could function like a Facebook Group in a way which served a similar purpose in past.

There could also be a Country/Nation board that will also share same posts as your city so more people can see them. If you would like to discuss in more detail, you can send me a email.

Haha and here I was going to suggest a discord channel for each location. I checked out the two cities I've worked in and was pleasantly surprised by the number of brave people who added their LinkedIn accounts, and doubly so when seeing some old colleagues as mutuals. Not sure I'd want to add meet.hn to my main, maybe make a "real me alt" specifically for that. I wonder if others have done the same since it's a lot of users with old accounts and no comment histories.