[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What should I do with meet.hn?
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Ask HN: What should I do with meet.hn?
Hey HN! A few weeks ago, meet.hn was released: (Show HN: Meet.hn -
Meet the Hacker News community in your city -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41539125) We are now about
1700 hackers willing to meet each other in almost 700 locations
worldwide. Since then, some requested features and bug fixes have
been implemented: - locations are now searchable and not
restricted to a simplistic city-country pair - locations work with
diacritics and diverse languages - new socials: personal website,
email, Mastodon, Discord, GitLab, Google Scholar, YouTube, etc. -
upon user request, I can now showcase your local meetups on your
location listing, as it's done for Old Toronto: [1] About actual
meetings, I'm aware of around a dozen so far, but I think many more
occurred. Why am I writing this post? About 80% of the ~1700
signups happened in the first 36 hours after launch. As expected,
signups dropped pretty quickly, and now it gains about one new user
every other day. I think a ton of global value (and local joy) can
emerge from HN users meeting each other. That's why I'm writing
this post. To answer the question: how can we meet more? and how
can meet.hn help? What I thought about: 1. Implementing RSS for
each location: helpful for RSS users only, and not that useful if
there are no new registrations. 2. Email notification system: wide
audience, but requires users to give their emails. 3. Turning
meet.hn into some sort of an atproto [3] project, or at least
leveraging it somehow. Might be more Bluesky centric (if we use
labels, for example), but maybe not? 4. A bookmarklet which, once
clicked when on a HN post, would insert a meet.hn logo next to all
user names of users commenting there and registered on meet.hn 5.
An HN "proxy website" which would copy HN in every way, but would
add the meet.hn logo just like the bookmarklet described point 4
would do, but everywhere and automatically. 6. Create Telegram (or
equivalent) channels for each location But all of these ideas are
unideal fixes. The lowest common denominator between everyone on
HN... is HN. Hence, meeting right from HN would be best. An MVP for
this could be to have a "willing to meet" attribute with a boolean
value (like the "showdead" or "noprocrast" attributes). When
enabled, an icon would be shown next to the user name in threads.
I talked to dang, and even if the idea of implementing something on
HN is not out of the question, it is not on the roadmap yet. Let's
discuss all of this in the comments. Looking forward to hearing
what you think. [1]
https://meet.hn/city/43.6534817,-79.3839347/Old-Toronto [2]
https://meet.hn/city/43.6044622,1.4442469/Toulouse [3]
https://atproto.com/
Author : sirobg
Score : 116 points
Date : 2024-12-13 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
| sfmz wrote:
| Something along the lines of a tweet 'will be programming
| @starbucks for next 4 hours' ... then if people are in the mood
| they can spontanously join up. I think this would help bootstrap
| the more scheduled meetups.
| sirobg wrote:
| If I understand your suggestion correctly, it would require
| people to already be following the account that's tweeting
| this.
|
| Also, it would probably require cross posting on
| Bluesky/Mastodon as from my experience with meet.hn user base,
| a significant % is not on X anymore (?).
| sfmz wrote:
| If its geotagged, it would not require a priori following of
| the account, just some kind of location search/notification
| feed.
| sirobg wrote:
| Oh so you mean that users would post anywhere (Bluesky, X,
| Mastodon, ...) and I would track these posts and then
| display them in the appropriate location on meet.hn?
|
| Sounds pretty good! If that's not what you meant, please
| correct me.
| sfmz wrote:
| That's more or less the idea, the actual mechanism is an
| implementation detail. You could host the messages
| yourself, or instruct people to update their hn_bio or
| RSS feed which will sometimes have messages like this :
|
| hnmeet@present_time@location@duration.
| nottorp wrote:
| > 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?
| sirobg wrote:
| > why would it be compulsory to have a profile on some
| social networking thing?
|
| It's not! In fact you have several other options if you
| prefer.
| sirobg wrote:
| Reference to the first meet.hn thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41539125
| dang wrote:
| I added that to the text at the top. Thanks!
| dheera wrote:
| > "willing to meet" attribute
|
| The problem is I think everyone is willing to meet if they see
| mutual value, and unwilling to meet if they do not see mutual
| value.
| sirobg wrote:
| The attribute wouldn't force you to accept a meeting in any
| way. It would just be used to display some kind of marker next
| to your posts on HN.
|
| Then, if readers feel you are interesting to them, they would
| check your HN profile and contact you using the info in your
| profile (if any).
| pmg101 wrote:
| Every Austen novel condensed into a single sentence.
| klntsky wrote:
| Try to pre-organize meetups in large cities. Email potential
| participants.
| sirobg wrote:
| That's one kind of meetup indeed.
|
| But imho (large) group meetups are the least
| interesting/valuable. Ideally I would like to boost small or
| even 1-1 meetups first. If larger meetups emerge later, great!
| klntsky wrote:
| Meeting 1-1 is way harder to organize. You need a specific
| reason to go.
| sirobg wrote:
| What do you mean by "a specific reason"?
|
| Personally, I like meeting interesting new people for the
| sake of it.
| spike021 wrote:
| I run a club for a certain car.
|
| The thing is, people generally don't want to be responsible for
| organizing meetups. Many will happily attend but not host.
|
| My guess is you need to find community leaders who can handle and
| own the responsibilities involved with hosting meets in their
| areas.
|
| At the end of the day I don't think a website is going to help
| convince people to take on that kind of role. It's more of a
| personality thing.
|
| With my club, we use Facebook events and generally just
| screenshot the details and further disperse them that way to
| discord, slack, instagram, etc. But none of that is enough alone
| for someone to host. Even when it's as simple as picking a meet
| location and time and sending out invites.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Internations, a social platform for the expats & locals,
| actively encourages people to become event organizers. It makes
| sense to recruit people willing to host.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| also, many will signup to attend and bail last minute
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| I get about ~40-50% attendance rate from meetup, but we've
| been going for years so the regulars are pretty consistent.
| calpaterson wrote:
| Higher indeed. 40% no shows for a meetup I run (60-100
| slots, meeting monthly)
| sneak wrote:
| This is solved by charging $19 or so.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Well yes, but 100% attendance of zero people is still zero
| people.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Great way to _guarantee_ I won 't attend your meetup
| sirobg wrote:
| Thanks for the perspective!
|
| I think I have a communication problem with meet.hn.
|
| People seem to assume it has been created to setup these kinds
| of large meetups.
|
| In fact, I created it for small or even 1-1 meetups in the
| first place. Meeting a single person or a small group of people
| seems much more interesting, easy and valuable to me.
|
| Of course I'm not assuming everyone thinks the same way, but
| don't you think there is an audience for that in the HN
| community?
| spike021 wrote:
| 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_.
| aftbit wrote:
| 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.
| sirobg wrote:
| How would you know this person is located in your area or
| in the area you might visit some time?
|
| I guess you would have to dig, right?
|
| Well, with meet.hn:
|
| 1. You don't have to dig
|
| 2. People are more willing to meet on average than a random
| person on the internet
|
| 3. You can also check other locations and other people
| super fast
| ipaddr wrote:
| For in person with unknown people I think large
| gatherings can break down the fear wall as people can
| assess before commiting.
|
| For most hn users offering something virtual would be
| more more inline with expectations and removes those
| local barriers.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| I'd join Signal groups for my cities, but not Telegram ones.
| jensenbox wrote:
| It might be something to target businesses that are interested in
| advertising themselves or perhaps as a means to circulate that
| they are hiring.
|
| Cheap compared to marketing costs really.
| kurisufag wrote:
| Is there some allowance for listing multiple locations?
| Specifically to address students listing both their home and
| university campus.
|
| re: federation, I'd prefer ActivityPub to AT, just ecosystem-
| wise.
| sirobg wrote:
| > multiple locations
|
| Not yet! Might be wrong but it does not seem to bother people
| much as you are the first to suggest it iirc.
|
| I like the idea though! It's just that I'm still at the stage
| of trying to push people to add one location first. So several
| locations per user is not on the menu yet.
| anonu wrote:
| I noticed some people are on the map with no socials. Whats the
| point? Add a way to contact you...
| sirobg wrote:
| It's true that some people don't add any socials and don't have
| any info in their HN description.
|
| But sometimes they modified the string they pasted from meet.hn
| and it broke the parsing, causing their socials not to be
| displayed on meet.hn.
|
| That's why I would suggest to check their profile by clicking
| on their username.
|
| Note: I'm not parsing socials across the entire HN user
| description because some people want to keep some data outside
| of meet.hn. By having a clear start/stop of meet.hn data, it
| allows me to parse only socials users actually want to display
| on meet.hn.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| I suspect some people don't want to publicly link their real
| identity (via socials) with their HN profile. For contact an
| email _could_ work better.
| Dowwie wrote:
| We do meet each other all the time, except at industry events. If
| perhaps we wore special HN buttons, maybe we could signal to each
| other our involvement with the community?
| klik99 wrote:
| We need some Masonic style secret handshakes, make it seem like
| some kind of cult. Though honestly ranting about something that
| was front page the day before is probably enough to out you
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The Narwhal oranges at half-past-three?
| doruk101 wrote:
| For me the biggest issue is to connect with people. Having a some
| form of opt-in automatic email chain or private chat for people
| located in the same city to discuss and connect would be great.
| sirobg wrote:
| > For me the biggest issue is to connect with people
|
| Could you elaborate? what is painful to you?
|
| > automatic email chain or private chat
|
| Any more ideas about that? I think it's similar to the
| suggestion I made in the post about creating Telegram channels
| for each location, but I'm not sure.
|
| Also, someone already said they wouldn't join a Telegram
| channel and would prefer Signal. That really illustrates the
| kind of challenges I'm facing in trying to bring the HN
| community together.
| doruk101 wrote:
| > 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.
| sirobg wrote:
| A lot of good points here, thanks a lot!
|
| > Email-chain would be the easiest.
|
| It would require users to share their emails to meet.hn, am
| I right?
|
| > creating a some form of very simple forum board
|
| Might be a good idea as well. It would require more work
| and maintenance but could be valuable.
| glenneroo wrote:
| Possibly unpopular here but how about a Discord server
| with a channel for every city? When you join Discord, a
| bot could ask which cities you want to join (allowing
| people who travel to join multiple cities, but maybe
| limit it to some sane number to prevent bots from
| trawling everything).
| morkalork wrote:
| 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.
| shreddit wrote:
| I made hn-pm.me exactly for that. You can sign up with your hn
| username only, no email required. You have to put a random key
| into your profile during signup, but you can remove it later.
| shreddit wrote:
| Meet.hn inspired me to write hn-pm.me, a direct messenger
| exclusively for hn users. You could only sign up with your hn
| username by putting a random key into your public hn profile
| during the sign up flow.
|
| It had exactly one sign-up which I unfortunately lost with a
| database migration.
|
| Did I mention the word sign-up too often? Maybe you should sign
| up...
|
| And yes, this is a shameless plug
| impish9208 wrote:
| > It had exactly one sign-up which I unfortunately lost with a
| database migration.
|
| I find this really funny for some reason.
| hakunin wrote:
| And here I thought "Yay, I can find more people in my area."
| Nope, it's just me, like I suspected.
| sirobg wrote:
| Yeah that's the case for some locations indeed.
|
| But next time you go on a trip, have a look at the map! You
| might be able to meet someone interesting there.
| sirobg wrote:
| Btw, your socials are not displayed on meet.hn because you
| modified the text you had to paste in your HN description.
|
| Just reporting, in case it wasn't expected.
|
| More info in the note here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42411640
| dang wrote:
| You may be the only one who signed up for this, but I bet there
| are lots of HN users in your area, for some value of 'lots'.
|
| The question is how to connect people with each other.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Has HN ever published traffic stats by country? Just curious.
| MourYother wrote:
| Grab meat.hn before someone beats (you) to it
| endofreach wrote:
| Random thought(s): A monthly "Meet HN" post- for each area (per
| city might be too small?) decide a public location & time and
| list it.
|
| Or: Maybe one (random) person of that area gets to decide a
| meeting time & location.
|
| Or: each person can put a location in their profile and a bot
| will pick the location (randomly or by "count")
| sirobg wrote:
| > A monthly "Meet HN" post- for each area (per city might be
| too small?)
|
| Per city would definitely be spam! There are 720 cities as we
| speak.
|
| Or it could not be, but it would require locating them under a
| specific route like news.ycombinator.com/meet or something.
| endofreach wrote:
| 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.
| jaymzcampbell wrote:
| Did something change with how the locations are managed? I tried
| to add myself and used the lookup for London, which then gave a
| lat/long as part of the address, like your examples. But then I
| noticed that I was all alone and the "rest" of london in a 30+
| group have their location without lat/lng.
|
| This is what it gave me when entering London, UK:
|
| meet.hn/city/51.5074456,-0.1277653/London
|
| But compare with, e.g,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jones58 - meet.hn/city/gb-
| London.
|
| It looks like that's affecting other cities like Paris too - a
| large "original" group, and then a solitary one with lat/lng.
| sirobg wrote:
| Yes, I had to make a change about urls in order to support
| locations from all around the world. lat/long ended up being
| the only unique thing in common.
|
| To do so, I implemented a search using OpenStreetMap. The thing
| is, OpenStreetMap can give several results for a given location
| (and rightfully so). Example with Paris:
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Paris%2C%20France.
|
| When I updated the way meet.hn handles location, I migrated all
| city ids like the one you mention "gb-London" to a new one
| using lat/long.
|
| The problem is: when users select a location, they can end up
| at another (close) location suggested by OpenStreetMap. To
| mitigate this pb, if locations have the same full name or
| OpenStreetMap id, I don't display them in the location
| selector.
|
| Also, I put locations of type "city" first to nudge users into
| selecting cities more and hopefully end up with less problems
| of this kind.
|
| Code about this is here:
| https://github.com/borisghidaglia/meet-hn/blob/808143d36841b...
|
| There is something to be done, but I only had overly
| complicated ideas to fix this.
|
| Very open to suggestions. Don't hesitate to open an issue/PR
| for this on GitHub.
| salamo wrote:
| I live in the South Bay and would be willing to "host". But
| there's no way to announce a meetup or even reach out to some
| people.
| sirobg wrote:
| If you want, I can display something similar to this at your
| location: https://meet.hn/city/43.6534817,-79.3839347/Old-
| Toronto
|
| Hit me up if interested :)
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| I would choose (3) -- i.e., an ATProto project. The idea would be
| to have public but "local" discussions that could lead to in-
| person interactions when people feel comfortable.
|
| P.S: I just signed up. I am in the Chicago area. Would love to
| grab coffee.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I used to run a 2600 meeting, and attended and helped organize
| LUGs and PUGs. Here's my experience:
|
| - At first, when a new meeting starts, very few people will show
| up, for at least a few months. If people like it they will keep
| coming, and slowly ranks will increase. After a while word of
| mouth will bring more people.
|
| - You need to advertise it a lot of places, not just one website.
| Wherever your audience might go (out in the world, or online), go
| advertise there. This doesn't have to cost much money. I
| literally printed out flyers and posted them up everywhere near
| where my meetings would be. This brought in people. A local
| meeting is about connecting with local people, in person, so go
| places where people go in person. But also some people rarely
| leave the couch...
|
| - It's very important to show continuous evidence that stuff is
| still happening, people are attending. Post a weekly/monthly
| update on a website, with some idea of what went on. Post
| pictures if you have them. If you really want to post on tiktok,
| IG, youtube, etc, you can, but it's not necessary; literally any
| place (that is accessible to everyone - i.e. a simple blog) that
| shows things are happening is enough.
|
| - Let go of the idea of using some whizbang tech to keep people
| apprised of what's going on. Local meetings are about one thing:
| showing up and talking. Forget the mailing lists, rss feeds,
| bookmarklets, etc. Just post a status update on a free blog
| somewhere. Show up every week/month/whatever. That's enough to
| encourage people to attend.
|
| - For organizers: Make it easy to find the event and the people.
| When people can't find it, and then post somewhere about how
| nobody was there, that can make it seem like the meeting is dead.
|
| - Reputation is important. If your site lets anyone organize a
| meeting, but the organizer fails to come through and keep it
| going, and people show up and find nobody there, word will get
| around that those meetings aren't serious, and new people won't
| try to attend. The way 2600 did it worked well: you organize your
| own meeting, show evidence that you're consistently with it, and
| after a while the magazine would list you as an official meetup.
|
| - The 2600 route was often literally just hanging out in a mall
| food court. The LUG route was usually a business/school/etc that
| would sponsor the group, giving them a place to hang out,
| sometimes even catering cold sandwiches and chips/soda. I'd let
| users figure it out themselves, but a guide on how to set up a
| meeting would help them.
|
| - Having a chatroom (we used IRC back in the day) is fine, but
| it's not a replacement for the local meeting, and often ends up
| being an entirely different "thing". It can scare some people
| away, and can create a weird atmosphere. I would be wary of
| officially tying them together.
|
| - You would do well to include explicit verbiage about how
| inappropriate behavior will not be tolerated, that all are
| welcome, have a zero tolerance policy about harassment and
| discrimination, etc. This helps the organizer, as it can be
| difficult to address inappropriate behavior without an explicit
| policy to point at. It also helps the maintainer of this list, as
| you can remove meetings if you hear complaints and the organizers
| don't nip it in the bud.
|
| Organizing is a lot of work, usually unappreciated. Good luck to
| those who want to take that on!
| ks2048 wrote:
| I think the problem is people are either (a) in tech-centric
| cities - where there are lots of other meetups and already know
| lots of HN types around. Or, (b) there are only one or two people
| in their city, so can't sustain a meetup. (Q: how many of your
| cities only have one "hacker" in them?)
|
| I could see it as a nice way to meet like-minded people while
| traveling: I used to use couchsurfing (which has kind of died
| out) like this: if traveling alone to foreign place, it's nice to
| meet some locals.
| sirobg wrote:
| > (b)
|
| I think dang's answer about this is on point:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42411843
|
| > I could see it as a nice way to meet like-minded people while
| traveling [...] it's nice to meet some locals.
|
| Exactly what I had in mind as well!
| ks2048 wrote:
| I think dang was responding to someone in a mid-sized US
| town, where there are probably more HN users. I think in
| other parts of the world, there really may be not many.
| nis0s wrote:
| I think setup an automated partiful with meetup invites for
| people who sign up, the location should be an easy going place
| that wouldn't mind if 1-2 people show up, or 5-10 do. Sounds
| interesting, I might give it a go.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Very helpful that it's open, as while I wouldn't share my info, I
| would absolutely pop in if I knew one was going on.
|
| there's an old thread about how to run an event that doesn't
| suck, but it may be for more structured events than meetups.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32876804
|
| even a lightning round with the t-shirt slogan of what you're
| either building, thinking about, or challenged by, some
| structured Q&A, and around a table instead of ted talk would do
| it. pretty much the startup school office hours format.
| hax3 wrote:
| Seven minutes in heaven with Rob.
| Qworg wrote:
| A few things:
|
| 1. The location resolution is too high for regions - ex: all of
| the Seattle area should lump together and only break apart into
| smaller locations (Bellevue, etc) when zoomed all the way in.
|
| 2. Email notification worked for kismet, but I don't know what
| the uptake is.
|
| 3. Having a way to participate in multiple locations would be
| useful.
|
| 4. Profiles are interesting, but per another poster, finding a
| way to capture interests and make connections would be even
| better. Maybe a combination of profile + scrape of
| comments/submissions/socials to generate profiles (that are only
| accessible to signed up users)?
| PebblesRox wrote:
| I would be up for signing up for email notifications for events
| in my area.
| TripleChecker wrote:
| You can try to force initial communication, like randomly connect
| 2 users in close proximity to one another.
| sirobg wrote:
| What do you mean by "connecting" them?
| ysavir wrote:
| Honestly, feels like a solution in search of a problem. But it's
| awesome that you've gotten 1700 sign ups!
|
| > I talked to dang, and even if the idea of implementing
| something on HN is not out of the question, it is not on the
| roadmap yet.
|
| Sounds like you talked to him with the idea of trying to
| incorporate meet.hn into HN directly. What if you got permission
| to do a monthly "Meet HN" thread where people can link to their
| meetups on meet.hn, similar to "Who's Hiring" and "Who's
| Looking". Seems like it would give you what you want with regards
| to getting eyes on meet.hn but without any need for technical
| implementations.
|
| But yeah, while it's a cool idea, forcing the HN aspect is
| probably going to be a permanent and severe bottleneck. There
| isn't any real solution to getting this in front of people on HN
| but not on meet.hn regularly (and speaking as someone who isn't
| interested, I'd be irate at any change that did do that). I'd
| encourage you to instead make this a broader meetup solution for
| people that fall into the HN niche of interests and advertising
| it more broadly.
| yousifa wrote:
| create whatsapp / signal group for each city and drop a user into
| it when they sign up
| cryptozeus wrote:
| This is great but i think Would people gather around hacker news
| as topi? Or within HN community you would need subtopics like I
| would totally go for meet up on AI + hn members
| replete wrote:
| Last night I went to a local tech event and met 4-5 other people
| who mentioned hacker news, none of which know about meethn or
| don't see the point because local events to your usual location
| are already organised by some benevolent person.
|
| If you list socials on meet.hn, I assume it means you are pro-
| social and open to meeting up. I see it as being more useful if
| travelling, an excuse to reach out and meet new people in a new
| place.
|
| 1. RSS waning
|
| 2. Probably wouldn't use email
|
| 3. (don't care)
|
| 4. would be more practical as a simple browser addon (meetHN /
| country flag) or userscript (maybe there's a userscript to addon
| tool given it's probably a few lines of JS)
|
| 5. This idea could be more interesting if it added some kind of
| meshed chat or something - the community you have made from my
| perspective appears to be HN people who are pro-social and open
| to connection (whats the point otherwise). http://news.meet.hn
| could become a new default if it added more value than just some
| visibility of meetHN users - without aa value add to make it
| sticky it will fade away and be forgotten, an aside micro
| community makes this more interesting... but moderation... hmm,
| warnings, blacklist .. could become unmaintainable so the value-
| add has to be enough to warrant it
|
| 6. Not sure this would be useful as people near each other
| already have tech events and communities with moderation and
| organization apparatus facilitated by tech group organizer people
| and the moderation aspect would be more distributed?
|
| The amount of signups suggests there's something here, I'm
| inclined to think more as a distributed group of people with a
| shared interest open to connection. Seems like a subcommunity
| type deal, and 5 makes the most sense to me, proxy site that adds
| enough value to warrant using it, layered subcommunity is a cool
| idea
| brudgers wrote:
| Doing nothing else is the simplest thing that might work.
|
| You have implemented the big idea and had success attracting
| users and are still attracting them.
|
| The hard problem is local community building. It is not adding
| generic features that are available from iOS, Android, and HTTP.
|
| Actual meetups is the meaningful metric. Achieving market
| liquidity (people who want to meetup can find a meetup, people
| who hold a meetup have people show up).
|
| Ultimately, communication should happen around the site person to
| person, not through it. It should be between people not
| bottlenecked.
|
| If there is a lesson from HN, it is the 90% of iceberg below the
| surface is what matters most. Good luck.
| dogboat wrote:
| 1. Do this ^^^ keep reminding us!
|
| I think a 3 monthly submission to HN saying "Ask HN: who is
| looking to meet up" where the comments are used to meet but it is
| a bit of an ad for your site."
|
| Get a nod from the mod before proceeding though!
| pkkkzip wrote:
| unpopular opinion but i definitely do not look forward to meeting
| HN irl so im not sure its not something you can monetize either
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