I’m not sure total participants is a good metric to use in making that determination. It depends on people’s level of participation and engagment, I think.
There do seem to be more meetups globally, but I’d say the SF Bay Area meetup scene—where MIRI is based and many prominent contributors live or have lived—is well off its peaks. This is perhaps an unreasonable time to be saying so, since the South Bay and East Bay meetups have just gone through major shakeups and haven’t yet stabilized; but even ignoring that we’re well down from two or three years ago in terms of engagement with high-karma users, in terms of number of local meetup groups, and probably in terms of people as well.
I’m not sure total participants is a good metric to use in making that determination. It depends on people’s level of participation and engagment, I think.
When it comes to engagement we do have a bunch of in person meetups that we didn’t have a few years ago.
There do seem to be more meetups globally, but I’d say the SF Bay Area meetup scene—where MIRI is based and many prominent contributors live or have lived—is well off its peaks. This is perhaps an unreasonable time to be saying so, since the South Bay and East Bay meetups have just gone through major shakeups and haven’t yet stabilized; but even ignoring that we’re well down from two or three years ago in terms of engagement with high-karma users, in terms of number of local meetup groups, and probably in terms of people as well.