Meetup has been acquired by Bending Spoons

The old days were great for tech events. Amazing speakers in every major city. All tech cos and startups fighting to sponsor and host events in their offices. I remember getting some great meals and bridge views at Google in SF at the HTML5 group, hah. If you were a poor, bootstrapped hacker in the city those days, you could pretty much get fed for free and begged to quit your startup and take a job most days of the week.<p>I’ve just been given the reins myself to be the organizer for a large (defunct) tech group. I’m still figuring out exactly what will bring people back and kickstart things. From my discussions with organizers in other groups, they are having a difficult time finding companies willing to host. Concerns about liability even though the pandemic scare is over still persist, time demand on internal employees and lack of rapid hiring are big blockers. The environment has definitely changed.<p>I really hope the pendulum will swing back again.

Meetup has historically been a great resource for technology events in my area… but I&#x27;ve found they&#x27;ve become quite &quot;needy&quot; lately. They tried to gamify joining&#x2F;attending meetups, which leads to a lot of email noise. Maybe some people want to be in 100 meetup groups and attend a meetup every day of the week? But I doubt it&#x27;s most users. They&#x27;ve also started showing &quot;special offers&quot;. You often need to click through them to actually do what you came to the site to do.<p>I understand that Meetup was likely really hurt by the pandemic, but I hope this new leadership can find a way to make interacting with service fun again. It currently feels rather skeezy.<p>EDIT: As noted below, Bending Spoons also bought Evernote and that hasn&#x27;t gone well. So, this might be a great space if someone is looking to compete!

Meetup was vibrant in my area before the pandemic, but whenever I&#x27;ve checked in afterwards it&#x27;s a ghost town of groups that are still there but haven&#x27;t had a meeting in years. To some extent I think the pandemic has permanently altered the landscape of extracurriculars like those that Meetup was supporting, and I&#x27;m unsurprised that they&#x27;re struggling to adapt.

Several commenters mention tech meetups languishing post-pandemic, but in my experience Meetup is still an awesome way to engage with the non-tech community in various activities from hikes to board games to movies. I&#x27;ve met several good friends through meetup. No comment on the acquisition, but I hope the platform continues to thrive.

Why does meetup have so bad search when you have an account? It literally does not show events in a town with 30 events per week when you are logged in.<p>Seriously it feels like some product manager sabotaged the search, since you get better results when not logged in

It seems Bending Spoons is on a shopping spree, it would be interesting to know how they are leveraging the financials for this. In terms of technology prowess they do not seem to be lacking.

Meetup has overwhelmingly been a net-positive for me over the past couple of years unlike most technology platforms these days. I&#x27;ve met some great people locally and felt much more in tune with my IRL community than I would have otherwise.<p>That being said, I&#x27;ve also been sad that Meetup appeared to be languishing as a modern web property. It really needs a &quot;glow up&quot; and general attention to UX so that it feels in line with other major local-based platforms such as AirBnB. It feels like nothing much has been done to improve Meetup since before the WeWork acquisition way back in the day, and if anything it&#x27;s gotten cheesier with all the crappy ad popups.<p>Perhaps with a parent company that is squarely focused on software and design, Meetup can find its footing again and be that premier destination for all things local event communities. (Can we even talk them into adding ActivityPub support so Meetup&#x27;s part of the Fediverse? A man can dream!)

Congratulations on the acquisition!<p>I re-started using Meetup again last year for IRL events in Chicago and I discovered a thriving tech community in my local area. I&#x27;m hoping that community can continue into 2024, and that Meetup will be the platform that hosts it. Otherwise there will be some other forum website, I&#x27;m sure we can hack one up.<p>Yes, there are the common complaints such as &#x27;too many job seekers&#x27; and my personal favorite &#x27;no I&#x27;m not on LinkedIn!&#x27; but I just want to tell everyone here that contrary to many of the comments on this thread the &#x27;Rona, the AI bubble, and all of the news of tech layoffs did not kill the spirit of IRL meetup in Chicago.<p>I hope all of you will get out of the house this year and try going to a meetup. And meetup organizers, pro-tip: free pizza! Pizza keeps everyone coming back for more.

Meetup is so absurdly expensive for a glorified calendar and email list that they have driven away every group except for tech company sponsored ones.<p>$180&#x2F;year for the cheapest plan drove me away. Facebook groups let you do a similar thing for free.

Let&#x27;s hope it&#x27;s run better than when it was owned by WeWork. WeWork paid $156 million, I wonder what Bending Spoons paid.

Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22728947">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22728947</a> (Meetup spins off from WeWork after being bought by them for $200 million.)

Damn I remember the days when we had lanyrd for conferences in tech, and the old meetup for..meetups, feels like so many days ago.<p>The quality bar dropped sadly.

Nearly all these comments are about tech meetups. My first introduction to Meetup, though, was a long time ago for non-work groups: hiking, movies, dinners, cooking, dogs. I still go to my movie meetups sometimes. There still are hiking events. I thought of Meetup as something that ought to be a 501(c)(3).<p>I have to say that the tech meetups I belong to have about 10x the number of signups.

Prepandemic,Meetup in Bangkok had regular language exchanges which were excellent for both practice and networking. post-pandemic, it kind of died off. You need local organizers who are dedicated.

I run a local data science focused tech meetup group here in Washington DC, and it&#x27;s hard to beat the discoverability of meetup. We&#x27;ve tried diversifying over the years, and it&#x27;s hard to beat the discoverability of meetup. It&#x27;s the opt-in digital equivalent of putting up fliers.

Whoa. I missed this one.<p>I used Meetup for years to power the &quot;Tech Events Network&quot; with 50+ US city-based accounts like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ATXTechEvents" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ATXTechEvents</a><p>Over the ~5 years I ran it, it was up to 4M+ impressions&#x2F;month with a massive newsletter and pushing tons of traffic to tech groups, mostly hosted on Meetup. Then Meetup changed their API policy and said this was &quot;an inappropriate use of the API&quot; and poof, gone.<p>Frustrating as hell because group leaders loved it and most of the traffic was going to them anyway. Arg.

Now that companies are less inclined to have meetups, meetup needs a way to bring the ecosystem back without tanking sales. I&#x27;ve thought about having a tech meetup, and would like to leverage meetup&#x27;s marketing, but<p>1. I don&#x27;t know if this will be a recurring thing more than 2-3 times<p>2. Without company support, I have to put down my credit card as the organizer, even if the event fizzles out.<p>I would pay for meetup! But I would not pay more than a fair rate for 2-3 events, unless it truly takes off. Looking at the contents of meetup, I&#x27;m guessing smaller organizers are in a similar boat. No one wants to pay a monthly subscription for small things, so people who are unsure stay out, and smaller metros just don&#x27;t have anything but timeshare-y sales pitches that give the organizer an ROI.<p>Meetup should<p>1. Make the organizer interface free.<p>2. If you want your upcoming meetup to show up in the list, you pay a one-time per-event fee that is more than the per-month cost of a subscription.<p>This should hopefully bring their market back for tech meetups.

I feel like Meetup has always been a somewhat bad product. Stuck in the early 00&#x27;s. When they started charging crazy amounts to organize a meetup I got sick of them.<p>Recently we&#x27;ve been using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guild.host" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guild.host</a> to manage most of our Svelte Society meetups.

Wow they held out for decades. We used to go to a nontech vegan families meetup. One of their coders was in the group so we got the scoop that they did their own capital raise and really resisted selling out. I guess a mix of dramatic slowdown in their business and the founders and investors wanting an exit.

Apparently getting acquired by Bending Spoons is a guarantee for layoffs[1]:<p>- In September 2022, Bending Spoons acquired FiLMiC... In December 2023, the original FiLMiC team were laid off<p>- In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote... Evernote laid off all of its existing staff<p>- In January 2024, Bending Spoons acquired Mosaic Group, a mobile app developer. The acquisition also involved the layoff of all 330 existing staff<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bending_Spoons" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bending_Spoons</a>

For anyone looking for a non commercial option, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joinmobilizon.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joinmobilizon.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a> has made some great improvements lately.

Wasn&#x27;t there a self-hosted event management app put out by a French startup awhile ago? My memory is foggy on this. They had colorful branding and a mascot.

2019 I started a meetup group. My wife had died end 2018. The group was for widows &#x2F; widowers and it was explicitly for social purposes. No chatting up, no hookups, no &#x27;hunting&#x27;.<p>It was good and a few people made friendships, a few others - myself included - would meet regularly for coffee of an afternoon. Being able to talk, to listen, to understand with others who had lost their partners of multiple decades was helpful.<p>Covid happened.<p>Meetup then decided to start charging even more.<p>I was already paying purely for them to host and display some text. Their extra charge put me on the hook for whoever attended. More people = more money.<p>No, just NO.<p>End result was group deleted, we all lost out and meetup seen as hostile.<p>This news?<p>Fuck you.

Same owners as Evernote. Meetup has already led the market in enshittification, and they right next to another enshittified brand.<p>The usage will continue to plummet as long as they squeeze premiums out of organizers. It&#x27;s sad really, all the old groups are essentially being held for ransom.

Hopefully this improves the quantity and quality of meetups in my area, which seems to mostly be ESL, toastmasters, book clubs, various fringe nutters, barhoppers, and old people who want to go on short walks.

Bending Spoons also owns Evernote, which has been thoroughly enshitified. This doesn&#x27;t sound good for Meetup.

I&#x27;ve been using Supermomos recently for events, they enforce going to events you sign up for in a gamified way so it works well.

This is just the beginning of tech P&#x2F;E firms scooping up apps.

Meetup is great in North America, meh in Western Europe and a ghost town in Asia and Eastern Europe, outside of enclaves like the digital nomads in say Bali.<p>Not only that, half the &quot;meetups&quot; are online-only, with crypto bros trying to get you into their latest scheme.<p>And another quarter are legit, but they&#x27;re attended by crypto bros trying to get you into their latest scheme.