When you are events focused, you are competing with many things—family, friends, hobbies, Netflix, cinema, etc. If your focus is more on helping people doing good, it’s no longer about having people turn up to an event, it’s about keeping people up to date with relevant info that is helpful for them. When there is a relevant opportunity for them to do something in person, they might be more inclined to do so.
I really like this point, and the related Kelsey Piper quote. EA, like any social movement, is likely to grow and succeed largely based on how helpful it is for its members. Having a “what can I do for you?” mindset has been really useful to me in my time running a couple of different EA groups (and working at CEA).
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When you say that Meetup.com “gave a worse impression of effective altruism”, do you mean that it actually seemed to have negative value, or just that it was worse than Facebook because it didn’t give you an easy way to contact people soon after they’d joined? If the former, can you talk about any specific negative effects you noticed? (One of the groups I’m affiliated with is still using Meetup, so I’m quite curious about this.)
For Meetup, it seemed to have negative value in the way it is used by default.
I think people mainly join meetup because they are looking for new hobbies and/or friends rather than deciding they want to do good or have impact in their careers. This can be useful for increasing attendance but I think it’s using the wrong digital tool for the goals most groups have.
Potentially with a closed meetup group with questions that have to be answered before joining it could work well, similar to Facebook. Although Meetup still has the issue of their users being a subset of Facebook that don’t necessarily have a good overlap with the kind of people that EA can help the most.
I really like this point, and the related Kelsey Piper quote. EA, like any social movement, is likely to grow and succeed largely based on how helpful it is for its members. Having a “what can I do for you?” mindset has been really useful to me in my time running a couple of different EA groups (and working at CEA).
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When you say that Meetup.com “gave a worse impression of effective altruism”, do you mean that it actually seemed to have negative value, or just that it was worse than Facebook because it didn’t give you an easy way to contact people soon after they’d joined? If the former, can you talk about any specific negative effects you noticed? (One of the groups I’m affiliated with is still using Meetup, so I’m quite curious about this.)
For Meetup, it seemed to have negative value in the way it is used by default.
I think people mainly join meetup because they are looking for new hobbies and/or friends rather than deciding they want to do good or have impact in their careers. This can be useful for increasing attendance but I think it’s using the wrong digital tool for the goals most groups have.
Potentially with a closed meetup group with questions that have to be answered before joining it could work well, similar to Facebook. Although Meetup still has the issue of their users being a subset of Facebook that don’t necessarily have a good overlap with the kind of people that EA can help the most.