passive_fist comments on Meetup: Somewhere you do not live even close to - Less Wrong
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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 problem of attention could easily be solved. No need to have a seperate 'Meetup' section. Use the discussion section, but just have a single thread and put all the meetup areas together in the title. So that instead of the current way, which is:
We'd just have:
Then the details of each individual meetup could be written down in the comments. This way would probably get even more attention, because of the reduced clutter.
Isn't that kind of what the OP is proposing?
Yes, with the inclusion of all the locations in the title itself so as to prevent potential attendees from missing out.
This also has the advantage of needing no new code.
It does need new code. For aggregate threads to work, meetup organizers have to coordinate with whoever is posting them. I don't think that will happen without automation.
If my suggestion were to be adopted, I hereby volunteer to coordinate the meetup threads; it's worth it if only to get the annoying and distracting meetup posts out of Discussion.
It doesn't need to change the site code, and that's dicier than just someone cooking up a bot.