An alternative would be to focus on “communities” instead of meetups.
This is the basic idea; a consideration to keep in mind is that there’s both passive new users (“hey, I just moved to Austin, are there any meetups nearby?”) and exciting events (“hey, we’re hosting a HPMOR wrap party!”), and you want to handle both cases well.
Now, maybe the thing to do here is have something like findable communities (basically, what’s on LW is a geolocation and a link to Facebook/whatever else you use) and then location-based pings (either based on IP or them letting us have their location), which the community owners can create. But I don’t really want LW to be prompting users to allow us access to their location all the time.
We should get cell-tower accurate positioning, which is usually good enough to determine the city and neighborhood you’re in (i.e. we should be able to distinguish between Oakland and Berkeley, but probably not central Berkeley and North Berkeley).
Rough googling suggests about 95% accuracy on city-level detection.
This is the basic idea; a consideration to keep in mind is that there’s both passive new users (“hey, I just moved to Austin, are there any meetups nearby?”) and exciting events (“hey, we’re hosting a HPMOR wrap party!”), and you want to handle both cases well.
Now, maybe the thing to do here is have something like findable communities (basically, what’s on LW is a geolocation and a link to Facebook/whatever else you use) and then location-based pings (either based on IP or them letting us have their location), which the community owners can create. But I don’t really want LW to be prompting users to allow us access to their location all the time.
Well, we have location by IP, which is rough but accurate enough for meetups. Only more detailed location requires permission.
Does that work on mobile?
We should get cell-tower accurate positioning, which is usually good enough to determine the city and neighborhood you’re in (i.e. we should be able to distinguish between Oakland and Berkeley, but probably not central Berkeley and North Berkeley).
Rough googling suggests about 95% accuracy on city-level detection.