[yusee]

I've had negative experiences with Meetup.com. I've attended multiple meetups around a technical subject with the hope of meeting peers who self-educate and work on side projects. Instead, I have been subjected to sales pitches for SaaS. I get it. Hosting a meetup is work, especially for introverted technical types. People only do work when they expect an ROI.

Maybe it's better in Silicon Valley.

[d2s]

Depends a lot on the type of event, besides of the location of an event. There are a lot of community-focused events where people truly want to learn new things together.

But on the other end of the spectrum, there are (way too many…) events where the main focus is on the sales engineering. As a Wikipedia article describes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_engineering

“… selling in these markets cannot depend on consumer-type sales methods alone, and instead it relies heavily on technical information and problem-solving to convince buyers that they should spend money on the seller's products or service”

For many event organisers, tech events are a way to increase their own visibility in the job market (or increase the amount of sales they do). Even in the situations where there are a lot of good people attending the events, too often the main focus is still on the presentations, instead of people collaborating and creating things together.