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The Offline Club

(www.theoffline-club.com)
176 points esher | 4 comments | 25 Jun 25 19:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.528s | source
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apgwoz ◴[25 Jun 25 23:18 UTC] No.44382702[source]▶
This is [Meetup](https://www.meetup.com). Meetup has obviously not aged well, but this is mostly due to changes in ownership and leadership. It’s original mission of “a Meetup Everywhere about Most Everything” is pretty much exactly what The Offline Club seems to be seeking.

I think they’ll find a lot of the same challenges:

    1. Finding space to have events
    2. Ensuring that people who said “I’m going” actually end up going. 
    3. Bootstrapping groups such that when I stumble upon The Offline Club, I can signup for something relevant to me, happening a short time from now. 
    4. Keeping organizers willing to continue hosting events
    5. Keeping away organizers who see it as lead gen for their sales job
Basically, good luck!

Edit: On second look, this is different than Meetup in that it’s not centered around a specific topic … except for being “offline” together, which obviously could create other opportunities for hobbies, etc.

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1. TheAceOfHearts ◴[26 Jun 25 01:14 UTC] No.44383350[source]▶
There's a meetup dynamic which has previously been explained to me, it goes something like this: someone starts a meetup where a mix of cool people and weirdos show up, the events continue until the ratio gets really bad which causes the cool people to splinter off into their own private group. I wonder if this product is able to escape that pattern.
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2. allenu ◴[26 Jun 25 02:07 UTC] No.44383606[source]▶
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If something takes a bit of work to join, it'll naturally attract only people who are invested in improving the community. I imagine new communities that get popular need cool people to get it started and keep the fire going. Not many people will know about it and it may be small, so there's a nice natural filter where only dedicated members self-select into the community.

Once it grows and offers more value, it becomes more visible and it spreads in awareness, so more people know about it, but then it's just as likely to attract low-quality members who don't really care about maintaining it. It's much easier to take for granted because it's just there and doesn't take effort to keep going, at least to a new member.

I think this is one of the things that I dislike about meetup.com. It's too easy to sign up for something and then not show up. It's a third party service, so you don't ever need to interact with a human being. If someone invited you to an event, it's a bit harder to bail on it, but if you just clicked a button to say you were going to go, it doesn't feel so bad to never show up. I think communities need an effort to maintain and a "member" putting in the work makes them more attached to the community. Showing up regularly is a kind of ritual, and over time, you become a true member of the community.

3. SchemaLoad ◴[26 Jun 25 05:29 UTC] No.44384438[source]▶
I used to go to a Ruby meetup and it was pretty much just like this. There was a core group who went every time and then you'd get some real whackos showing up. Often who didn't even know what the group was about, just that there was something on tonight.

I'm not sure a product is even able to solve this. A product needs to maximise engagement, turn a profit, etc. But there isn't really any money to be made here. A local community isn't going to want to pay a fee to some 3rd party so they can arrange to meet up at the pub. The best solution here is just a IM group chat. Only problem is it isn't very discoverable to new members, but to some extent being hard to find is a feature itself.

4. Dilettante_ ◴[26 Jun 25 11:31 UTC] No.44386346[source]▶
"Geeks, MOPs and Psychopaths"¹ is a good article about this, most importantly because it gives a grippy name to the phenomenon.

¹https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths