The somewhat cynical take is that open attendance events (meetup.com and LW) are like group projects where organizers are competing for attendees. This makes organizing events a servant role rather than a leadership role, meaning that if you expend the resources to put on an interesting talk and offer free pizza people will think they’ve done their bit by showing up and adding entropy. Like the way people balk at paying for software now that Google et all have figured out that it’s more efficient to take it out of your back pocket via advertising, people treat meetups the same way because organizers have zero leverage when attendees can go to some other meetup with free pizza because it’s a recruitment funnel for a tech company.
Fixing this will require more than words alone. Informing attendees that the meetup is a “take it seriously” meetup does not cause them to take it seriously because there’s no way at present to give those words credibility.
(Unrelated: I stumbled on this post by happenstance only to see a comment I made form a key part of it. This seems exactly like the sort of thing that should go in a user’s notifications)
The somewhat cynical take is that open attendance events (meetup.com and LW) are like group projects where organizers are competing for attendees. This makes organizing events a servant role rather than a leadership role, meaning that if you expend the resources to put on an interesting talk and offer free pizza people will think they’ve done their bit by showing up and adding entropy. Like the way people balk at paying for software now that Google et all have figured out that it’s more efficient to take it out of your back pocket via advertising, people treat meetups the same way because organizers have zero leverage when attendees can go to some other meetup with free pizza because it’s a recruitment funnel for a tech company.
Fixing this will require more than words alone. Informing attendees that the meetup is a “take it seriously” meetup does not cause them to take it seriously because there’s no way at present to give those words credibility.
(Unrelated: I stumbled on this post by happenstance only to see a comment I made form a key part of it. This seems exactly like the sort of thing that should go in a user’s notifications)