Meh. Most likely, significantly less people would look at that section ("because hey, meetups in my area are rare"), so more people would miss meetup notices.
In effect, the current system forces people to see meetup announcements whether they want to or not, which is rude but good for meetup participation.
I would be more in favour of a place in the options where you could put select for which areas you want to show/hide meetups, with a default showing all of them (savvy users who know where to find the option would be less likely to be unaware of meetups they could attend).
Or, since we're working off the reddit codebase (though a fork from quite a few years ago), this could be implemented by having a subreddit per geographical region, and an option for only subscribing to some subreddits (which would default to "all").
(I'm not very fond of fragmenting the site though, and all these solutions seem pretty dev-intensive)
the current system forces people to see meetup announcements whether they want to or not, which is rude but good for meetup participation.
Except that my eyes automatically glide over anything that says Meetup: X, which is not an uncommon method of dealing with frequent distractions (also see: internet ads. Some people need to block them, others like me literally don't notice them most of the time)
Six out of the last 10 posts are about single meetups. And I care about none of them.
I will look into whipping together some kind of bot that periodically posts threads like the open thread or a meetup thread. Voice your opinion in the comments if you do not want me to do that.
That is all.