Ask HN: Are Tech Meetups Dead?

20 points by mlinhares 3 days ago | 18 comments

I work with a bunch of people that just left college and we were discussing how to avoid deskilling and I said "well, you could go to local meetups". They're in NYC (I'm in Florida right now) and said there isn't much going on and I couldn't believe it. Asked some more experienced friends that have been living there for longer and they said that it all died during COVID and never came back.

I ran or helped organize meetups in multiple places, back in Brazil where I'm from, Boston and then Philadelphia. We used to joke you could have pizza and coke for dinner every night in PHL during the week for the number of meetups we had. You'd meet cool people, see people sharing their experiences, build your network and make friends all at the same time. During COVID we moved to Florida and got kids so I kinda got out of the loop with meetups, but I had no idea it was this bad.

How are these kids going to meet other practitioners, build their network and even put themselves out there by presenting?

happymellon 3 days ago |

I led a successful AWS meetup for many years, however as implied COVID was a turning point.

We pivoted to online during the year of restrictions, but I didn't want to do that. Presenting into a void doesn't hold any interest for me, people mute themselves and you aren't sure if there is anyone really there.

When I could get it back in person, I did. The problems I found were that

1. Companies weren't interested in hosting anymore. They all complain about wanting folks to come in to the office, but then don't do anything that would entice them.

2. Folks didn't want to leave their house and begged for live stream links. I'm not interested in becoming a YouTuber, I want to meet people with cool stories we can share, who might have skills that I might want to hire, perhaps help them with problems they've encountered.

I'm not going to get that from a muted black box that disconnects after the presentation.

I've walked away now but that's not because us leaders were uninterested or don't have capacity. People didn't seem interested, and then complain that there isn't any way to meet people.

Hopefully this attitude is changing, and I can revisit some of my code club projects.

codegeek 3 days ago |

In my experience, any meetup > 10 people becomes useless because you cannot really make meaningful connections and large meetups usually have a fixed agenda where everyone is out there selling their own stuff.

I now will not attend a meetup unless it is extremely small group (<10 people). Those are hard to sustain though.

adrianwaj 3 days ago | |

Speed meetups could work where you'd go to a series of meetups in a row. Venues could allocate space for this, say 5 separate rooms and every few months you'd go to a bunch of meetups all on the same day. Small gatherings with a larger space where people could keep talking once the set period is over if need be.

Even a local park on a sunny day would work and you could "kick on" into the night if things were going well - no obligations or pressure.

relativeadv 2 hours ago | |

this. the meetups i was a part of devolved into product pitches and people looking for jobs

georgel 1 hour ago | | |

The coworking space I was at back in 2013 held regular weekly meetups in the common space. Sometimes cool tech was shown off, but a ton of promo talks was common. I won't say no to free pizza though.

bittumenEntity 3 days ago |

Seems hard to give an answer to this that isn't just anecdotal. Certainly some died during COVID, but some came back to life!

Perhaps the lesson from seeing a group die is that often the old organisers don't have the capacity for it anymore, but are happy and supportive to see it live on if you approach them with motivation.

Every Meetup happens because a few people decide to make it happen

evanwolf 2 hours ago |

Some of the better surviving meetups focus less on a common tool than on a shared problem (like regulatory capture) or a colaborative activity (let's update our neighborhood's Wikipedia related pages).

thornewolf 23 minutes ago |

not dead, they are on "luma". quality is higher in some ways, lower in some ways when compared to "old school" meetups

lucamark 3 days ago |

I don’t think meetups are dead, but generic meetups feel much weaker than before. I think the hard part for young people is discover, so if you're not already connected, you don't even know where to show up.

gardenhedge 3 days ago |

The worst thing about these meetups were people that were practising their presentation skills. I know people have to start somewhere but I really don't want to waste my time with that.

kypro 1 day ago |

Maybe I'm old but I feel like actual tech meetups died well over a decade ago...

They used to be full of geeks building cool stuff and people would genuinely be interested in what you were doing. I made a lot of friends back in the day from those tech meetups.

What you're describing here is exactly why I dislike and avoid meetups today.

There was a shift somewhere in the 2010s where it started to become harder and harder to find good tech meetups and instead they all seemed to morph in some combination of a networking event, people trying to pitch the startup they were working on, or people just trying to practice public speaking.

The tech scene today isn't really a place for people interested in tech. It's a scene for people who want to be the next tech billionaire or want to build a following as a public speaker for their career.

And that's fine. I just personally have no interest in networking with these types of people.

I'd also note that the utility of the networking benefits of meetups today is close to non-existent due to the types of people who attend them. You're better off building professional working relationships with people imo.

marssaxman 1 hour ago | |

I am definitely old, because I never noticed that "tech meetups" had become a thing in the first place!

onel 2 days ago |

Not really, no. I'm in Dublin and I help organize a couple of them. We have 3 for June alone from our org alone. In Dublin there's something happening every 2-3 days.

kevinsync 3 days ago |

I personally loathe meetups, and love them. It just depends on what they are and how they're run.

In the mid 90's, CompuServe sponsored a Boy Scouts Explorer Post at their headquarters -- they gave us free accounts and then once a month for an hour or 2, a couple dozen kids ranging from probably 12 to 18 would show up, the adults would be so fucking cool and gracious and welcoming, showing us around the building (server rooms! conference rooms! etc). Each meetup, there would be like an adult-driven presentation about some piece of technology, then one or more of the teens would get to take over the projector and talk about something they're into (writing music in FastTracker, coding, hacking, whatever). One time they gave us a whole computer-version-of-D.A.R.E. "be careful what you're doing online re:hacking/carding/etc" presentation because one of the older kids was getting in and out of trouble with the law (and they were trying to help keep him out of the slammer). Really non-judgmental, just cool older nerds mentoring the next generation. They also did stuff like set up this giant demonstration booth at the fair with a bunch of computers to demo the HOT NEW ONLINE EXPERIENCE WorldsAway [0] lol, and had all of us man the booth and walk the general public through it. The whole thing was just really cool, very 90's, very honest.

Fast forward to early-mid-2010's: every single meetup in adult-life tech world was a thinly-veiled advertisement for either the company sponsoring the space, or the company sponsoring the presentation. Nothing felt organic, everybody had an agenda (evidenced by "speakers" arriving 2 minutes before their scheduled time slot, giving a powerpoint presentation on either their employer's current product or their personal library / A List Apart article / whatever they're promoting for clout, then leaving immediately afterwards). Outside of the organizers doing it for personal visibility and gain, I never understood the point of attending. It wasn't a party. It wasn't a seminar. They focused on the stage and the individual, not the collective. It was never an environment to actually network, or actually learn something novel and exciting, or fish for a job, or (even in the most reductive implementation) an environment to just fuck around and goof off and connect with likeminded strangers through a shared experience LOL - each one was promoted as all of the above though!

Anyways, I personally quit bothering with any kind of meetup years before COVID. I'd prefer the "skate park" equivalent, where its a static, asynchronous place that people show up when they feel like it, do their thing, and let the universe sort out the rest, but there are so many ways to do that stuff online (it's the internet, after all), that it feels like it would be a pretty hard sell to get people to show up in person anymore without offering something truly organic and special.

[0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/424450/this-old-tech-remembe...

blowscum 3 days ago |

> How are these kids going to meet other practitioners, build their network and even put themselves out there by presenting?

If they have any amount of wealth in their family they will have plenty of opportunities for this.

Otherwise, unless they’re particularly intelligent, they’ll find that that are among the “overproduced” elites and will have to find something else to support themselves.

dapperdrake 3 days ago | |

Luckily, no oversupply of people who understand null-sets, Hausdorff-separable spaces, and databases.

songinz 3 days ago | |

Haha! Ok, um... together with your handle, here, this is a very interesting comment!.. context, implications. :)