I bought a year of a subscription on a product that turned out to be the wrong shape for what I want, and the mistake was not the money. It was that I did not know there were shapes. I thought these were all the same thing in different colours. They are not. One is a queue, one is a village and one is a noticeboard, and I had paid for a queue when what I needed was a noticeboard.
Thirty three, west London, switch, four years in. That subscription is the entire reason I now read about a platform before joining it, which I accept is an unusual hobby.
What I have found since is that the noticeboard kind is slower, uglier and a great deal more honest. You have to write something down. In exchange, nobody is arranging you into a stack for somebody else's evening.
I lead about two thirds of the time and I want an arrangement rather than a series of nights. Structure, a fixed evening, a review.
Not looking for anyone who needs me to be one direction permanently. Not looking for anybody in their first month, unless they say so, in which case I will be kind about it. And genuinely happy to be told I have the whole platform question wrong, provided you can say why.