The format of a regular post wherein people could post which city (or virtual space) they’re in and up to meet in x place at y time open to replies would seem to feel the most in HN spirit.
The regularity of a post and the lack of a formalized format would go a long way to make it casual and low effort. This is important as I think the more formal meetup with PowerPoint in company office looking to hire is not something I’d like to see repeated. This could be something different.
One thing we could do pretty easily is use IP geolocation to highlight "meetup in $place" posts for readers who are accessing HN from $place. I'm not sure if this would be extremely welcome or extremely off-putting.
I mean, I'm sure it would be both, for different users, but I'm not sure what the percentages would be.
It'll also be good if locations/cities couldn't be monopolised by a single large meetup. I attended a few HNLondon meetups back in 2012, but came away with nothing.
Smaller meetups might work better for actually getting to know people.
IP geolocation gives latitude/longitude. Maybe we could sort such posts by proximity. Whether they'd be comments or top-level posts would depend on the format I suppose.
The format of a regular post wherein people could post which city (or virtual space) they’re in and up to meet in x place at y time open to replies would seem to feel the most in HN spirit.
The regularity of a post and the lack of a formalized format would go a long way to make it casual and low effort. This is important as I think the more formal meetup with PowerPoint in company office looking to hire is not something I’d like to see repeated. This could be something different.