It's extra work
This is why DC doesn't do detailed meetup reports.
We do keep brief logs after every meetup, though. We agreed not to mention who attended a meetup (the person posting the log has to bite the bullet, but only them) for privacy reasons, and just post one or two sentences about what happened.
I was guessing that's the main reason. Thanks for sharing that log. It really gave be a better idea of the kinds of things that go on at LW meetups.
How often would you say something happens at one of your meetups that would be WORTH a discussion-level post, even if nobody is willing to do it? (By that I mean valuable insights worth sharing or open questions raised that would generate good discussion)
Looking at the discussion section recently, it seems like over half of the posts are meetups. I think it's really great that so many LessWrongers are able to get together and do interesting stuff. Looking at a lot of the topics, I often find myself thinking "I wonder what they ended up talking about." I looked at the meetups page and it looks like many give a description of the topic, but there is rarely any public followup. I also did a search which turned up surprisingly few post-meetup posts.
For example, this Los Angeles meetup from a few days ago about resolutions looked really interesting to me and I'm curious to hear what kinds of strategies were proposed and if there were any insights or anecdotes that came up that would be useful to share with those of us that couldn't attend.
I remember reading a meetup report back in November that told the story of the exercises they went through and it seemed to spark some good discussion. It even forced me to make a note to try some things on my own. This one was atypical in that it was very detailed and was a crosspost from a personal blog, but I feel like even short reports would give a chance for the rest of the community to chime in and give praise, suggestions, and feedback.
When I tried to think of reasons not to share what happened in meetups, I came up with a few potential factors: