Meetup: Social Events & Groups 12+

Ok, that sounds so dramatic, but it’s so true
It can be hard to find new friends but Meetup can help
Meetup is an easy to use app that allows you to join and search for activities or groups in your area. Whatever you like to do socially there is usually a group that has people who love similar activities
You can start a group in your area and put on events yourself
It is definitely worth downloading the app
So if you live in Bolton and like crocheting beanie hats or if you live in Sheffield and you like surfing standing up, again who knows?
Ok, it would be hard to surf in Sheffield as the river Don wouldn’t be ideal, but you could arrange for a long weekend in Cornwall
Meetup is not 100% perfect, very few apps are. They have recently changed the number of characters you can use when putting an event on, makes it hard to give a good descriptions, but people have found ways to make it work. There are charges for organisers, most people ask for donations from group members, there are always some who won’t contribute, but I feel it is still worth downloading it and the cost of my groups is small when shared by all.
Who knows, you could end up with a social life and make new friends. Stay safe 😀

Meetup groups are, in my opinion, expensive to host and I think group hosts have the right to expect a fully functioning ecosystem for their members, given the subscription they pay. But now, Meetup wants to charge users to see the profiles of some / many of the others attending a particular event. At £4.99/week which equates to an entirely ludicrous £250+/year when paid weekly. This also allows people to 'Get high priority in waitlists'. I consider the idea that people can simply pay their way to the top of a waitlist to be elitist, undemocratic and, quite frankly, obnoxious. For me, it goes against the communal attitude and spirit of equality that Meetup should be attempting to promote. Personally, I don't think trying to extract cash from casual users and group members will help Meetup gain more traction. In fact, I think not being able to see the profiles of some / many event attendees will reduce engagement with the site. It certainly has for me already. And the incessant, repeated pop-up asking me to pay for Meetup+ is already deeply, deeply annoying. Personally, I will never pay to join Meetup+. Never. Meetup is already a paid-for platform due to the substantial subscription fees paid by the various group hosts. And as a long term user of Meetup (10+ years) I am deeply disappointed and disillusioned with this new approach of trying to monetise what I consider the basic functionality of the app for attendees.

I’ve been having an issue where, whenever I try to message somebody from a group in order to connect, the message is not delivered to them. Our chat just shows up as a blank screen, with no option other than to press the exit arrow and back out after having sent the message.
Further, when I search up someone to chat with, enter the chat, and refresh before sending a message… the app crashes completely.
For these reasons, I can’t send DMs to specific people from groups.

Also, just a suggestion — it would be a great feature to be able to go back and request connections after events when the ‘continue’/‘skip’ button has already been pressed. There’s a person in particular I want to send a request to connect following an event I went to today, but I’ve already pressed ‘continue’, and like described earlier, I’m not able to message them directly.