What do you all think of these meetup groups ?

[MillennialUrbanist]

Originally Posted by Aquarius37

When you join a "group" only to realize they are way weirder than you are it's time to jump ship lol. It's good to mingle with people when you have no one, but it's not good to mingle with total weridos with ulterior motives.

I've run into duds like that, when it came to Meetup groups. Now, just so you know, many of my groups consist of "social misfits" in a way, which makes for good group cohesion and makes it easy to plan events. This summer, however, I've run into a group that slightly tempered my high opinion of Meetup. It was a "social gaming group", and board games was their thing. (I'm already in another board game group, but the new group was geographically closer to me.)

The lead organizer was a sociable guy who tried to make me feel welcome; most members, not so much. Some of the board games they played made Dungeons and Dragons look like Super Bowl Sunday. Even though I work in IT and wasn't Mr. Popularity in high school, those games were too much even for me. Plus, other players came off as a bit snooty, and clashed with the non-geeky interests I cultivated over the years (hiking, salsa dancing, and such). Despite my attempts to find common ground, I couldn't get into the games. I ended up leaving the group after just 3 events.

[Whyrallnamestaken]

I belong to one meetup group in particular that has over 3,000 members. I don't go to that many of the events. But, there are a certain number of people who usually go to most of the events this group posts.

One thing is this group has a limit for the number of people that can sign up for the events. Of course everybody cannot go to the exact same event. As such, I don't have a problem with a large number of people who are members and don't go to that many events.

I have found that groups with a smaller membership don't have that many events posted and when they do, only a few people go. Sometimes the small group can be intimidating if they all know each other and I don't know any of them because they might not be friendly to a newcomer. For this reason, I tend to only join meetup groups that have a large number of members.