It’s kind of a chicken and an egg scenario because wherever events are dead hangouts are booming, so it’s like did hangouts kill events, or did events spring up to fill the gap from declining events? 
It’s sad to hear you didn’t find any events in those places. I had a weekly one in Hiroshima for a year or so, you didn’t happen to stumble upon it, did you? (I always wondered how hard it was to find!)
@Emily, sorry, I would have loved it, but, as I said before, we were traveling quite fast. We were in Hiroshima only from 15-17 July and there were already tons of things to do, from the Peace Park to the Museum, the beautiful nearby Mijayimacho island, natural areas, monuments and temples.
I don’t even remember if we had the time to look for events. But we looked for existing hangouts, because we would have liked to go to those places with someone local, but we didn’t find nor proposed any.
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It makes sense because in smaller communities outside of the US or Europe we usually see an event like once every two weeks or once a month. If you’re not staying very long it can be hard to catch one 
I wonder if there’s any way we can set up a system that would allow people to express interest in attending a hypothetical event, and rather than sporadically having one twice a month you could create one based on interest.
Imagine you had expressed interest in attending events on the days you had planned out in the locations you would be, and local people could see that you were coming and maybe organize around your schedule and that of others. That would have helped me a lot as an event host. It would be kind of like public trips but somehow aggregated so you could see who would be where and when (more or less )
I guess you could call me an old school CSer who was quite active from about 2008(?) until cs became a corporation in about 2012 and imo destroyed the website (and thus the local communities) by removing key features. (I reckon this had something to do with CS being Airbnb’s biggest competitor at the time, and one of the investors into CS becoming a corporation, General Catalyst, was also a major investor in Airbnb… so you know… something fishy there)
But anyway that’s history. My point is that back before these changes the city groups were essentially local forums where people could post what they like, and naturally became the place to post events, looking for ppl to hang out with, organise activities, or ask questions or advice, worn others about dangerous hosts etc etc… ppl could post whatever (within the rules and moderation of course) and it was all in one centralised place for each local community (usually a city). That’s why there were like 50+ people turning up to events week on week, because most people traveling to a city would join that cities group/forum, and both locals and travelers would go to that central online ‘meeting place’ to find out whats happening in that local city cs community. I miss those simple days of hospex, and it would be great if was like that again, I would like to know if it would work these days… but a lot happens in 10 years!
I never used the more recent ‘Events’ or ‘Hangout’ features of cs, so I don’t know the merits of them, but the ‘new’ website felt opaque and disjointed, and the ‘voice’ of the community erased, and separating things like events and hangouts etc into their own separate sections made it feel disjointed, no community feel. That and like @fab mentioned, the rise of smartphones, facebook, airbnb, and dating apps has changed the way ppl travel in the last 10 years, and the environment that hospex sites live in has changed a lot too. So I’m sorry if this comment was a bit of a rant and off topic… I just think that while a hospex site is small it should avoid spreading itself too thin with too many events/hangouts options, and instead focus on creating a centralised ‘forum’ for lack of a better word, that is the hub for each local community.
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Totally agree. I miss the board where someone would post “who’s up for a beer tonight” and 30 would end up meeting.
It would be wonderful to have everything geolocated, I mean splitting the website by places, instead of in sections: you go to the city hub, see the info about the city, what the people are talking about in the forum, the events planned and (only if you are in the area) the hangouts available. But of course this may be a terrible idea from the developers end, I have no clue 
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I loved both of them equally. Hangout was the best option while traveling alone, to find a company during the day to explore the city together. Events are equally fun to meet locals ( some of them do not use hangout because of work or family) but they make sure to attend this weekly events. Sometimes an artistic event will turn out to be so much fun. Sometimes, after a cool hangoout meet, same people go and attend the event together. The more the merrier, right?
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That’s the plan 
The more interconnected events, hangouts and city pages are, the more they all be equally used.
I think the Emily idea will fix the “hangouts” with the review option.