11–20 of 129 posts
I am a multiple meetup organizer and owner on meetup.com and I find it actually great that the meetup can stay alive if the organizer stop to pay. Your communities are not owned by you. Also, they don't give subscribers infos but just "an access" to send them email communication to the list, not the "list" with email list etc...
Christ, controlling a meetup group is not where running a community ends.
I am a multiple meetup organizer and owner on meetup.com and I find it actually great that the meetup can stay alive if the organizer stop to pay. Your communities are not owned by you. Also, they don't give subscribers infos but just "an access" to send them email communication to the list, not the "list" with email list etc...
> meetup.com thinking our meetups would be destroyed at some point That seems naive, you created a meetup on a free platform that is built to bring users together. You are just the initiator, you don't own the community.
The actions you can take can be based on owning the trademark or copyright on the logo of the meetup.
This seems like a feature to me. It allows members of the group to keep going if the original admin/owner goes away for whatever reason. But I don’t think you get a list of emails, unless that was like one of your screening questions?
> meetup.com thinking our meetups would be destroyed at some point That seems naive, you created a meetup on a free platform that is built to bring users together. You are just the initiator, you don't own the community.
That seems harsh if OP is paying Meetup to create and support the meetup. I think there's an expectation that if you pay for the community, then you actually do own it, at least in some sense.
If they do this, then arguably the members are the owners rather than the organizer.
But not all organizers do ask for donations. Some run meetups more like a business where they charge to attend events and may even make some profit. Some run meetups as a marketing tool for their business. It's less clear that the members are the owners of those meetups.
One is that the organizer has lost interest or is stepping down for some reason. Allowing the community to continue on Meetup in that case makes sense, by having someone step up to continue paying Meetup.
The other is that the community as a whole has decided to move to a new platform. In this case keeping the now defunct community around and making it seem viable is bad. The current active members will know where to go, but new potential members or former members that want to re-engage are going to get confused.
I got burned by this a couple of times, finding a group on meetup only to discover that it’s a ghost group, to the point where I’m now suspicious of any meetup group I find that hasn’t had an active event in the last couple of months.
This is where I think Meetup is shooting themselves in the foot by not having a way to dissolve a group if the group as a whole decides to move.