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Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay

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Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay

#41

Post by vorpalhex »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #12
mehdim wrote: post #4

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...

Tbh that practice seems to be on par with any social network standard out there. You get stuff, even for free, but the real product is still your data. If you don't want anyone to access that, you can't use these things.

Meetup is not free. Meetup is expensive as hell.

Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay

#42

Post by Joeboy »

robertlagrant wrote: post #34
cstejerean wrote: post #19

This has been an issue with Meetup for as long as I remember. The problem is there are two distinct scenarios. 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 t…

If someone wants to pay for it then at that point they could ask participants if they want to remain part of the group and give the new sponsor access to their PII.

I think the "new sponsor" has to be a member of the group, and will thus have access to your PII (ie. whatever name / nick you registered with) anyway.

Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay

#43

Post by alphakilo »

Meetup was a great platform but has totally lost it in the user experience. Out of all popular consumer apps, I would argue Meetup has the highest friction for both organizers and participants

My problems meeting cyclists in Toronto led me to make a Toronto cycling discord of almost 1000 users

I actually took the solution and have just launched an app for many more hobbies and anyplace! https://radar.ac

We'lr be adding events/plans by end end of Q4. Zero friction to create or join an event!

Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay

#44

Post by isatty »

Gys wrote: post #23

It used to be possible to delete a group: https://support.google.com/developergroups/answer/7378020?hl... I did it myself a few times. However, maybe that is not possible anymore?

Is meetup help on support.google.com? I’m confused.

Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay

#46

Post by Semaphor »

cstejerean wrote: post #19

This has been an issue with Meetup for as long as I remember. The problem is there are two distinct scenarios. 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 t…

> including subscriber's list with full name and email

That is the issue here. Someone taking over and creating events that others get notified about, okay. But the first paying person coming along gets all that personal data? That is not acceptable in any way and probably against GDPR and whatever that California thing is called.

Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay

#47

Post by vorpalhex »

dougmwne wrote: post #21

This sounds like mostly an issue of bad user communication and expectations setting. Most meetups are communities, not someone's personal fiefdom or mailing list. If the organizer disappears, the community should be empowered to keep the group running. But meetups could have been created for all kinds of reasons and it would be pretty horrifying to be able to purchase Dave's family BDSM group.

When my meetup was active, we would frequently have "promoters" show. Often times these were for corporate-y events. Needless to say their attempts to indice a bunch of drunk socializing nerds to attend some corpo BS went poorly.

I can't imagine those slimey promoters being allowed to spam that meetup group now.

Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay

#48

Post by lucb1e »

In April 2020, I emailed them with a question about the privacy policy. Never got a response, though reading it back I could have phrased it better I guess. Anyway, somehow this doesn't surprise me. They just don't care to operate within privacy ethics/laws.

---

[hello, your privacy policy says:]

> In order to provide you with more tailored recommendations, we may obtain information about you from publicly and commercially available sources and other third parties as permitted by law. For more information about the data that we obtain from these providers, please contact us at privacy@meetup.com.

I have two questions about this:

1. Could you send me the information referred to?

2. How is it legal to obtain that data without informing users what kind of data is obtained? Article 14 of the GDPR specifically requires the controller (Meetup) to provide the data subject (users) with "(d) the categories of personal data concerned".

[thank you in advance, kind regards, etc]

---

Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay

#49

Post by jfoster »

aardvarkr wrote: post #30
mod wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they're moving their community to a new platform. Christ, controlling a meetup group is not where running a community ends.

In that case it’s a moot point, but on the other hand we have had so many past examples of community “owners” shutting down their community out of spite. The community needs to be able to control their own destiny with or without the founder.

I've never been an admin of any meetup group, but I have been an attendee of many. As an attendee, I'm almost never caring who the group owner is, and it certainly doesn't play a role in whether I decide to join the group or not.

As you suggest, I think the community belongs to the community.

Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay

#50

Post by CubsFan1060 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #35
mehdim wrote: post #4

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...

I don’t know about you, but I feel a little weird about the fact that some random person can just buy all the contacts/access to the profiles of our old podcast producer meetup group without my input or opting in. Imagine if folks could buy abandoned Facebook profiles and be instantly connected to all their friends and groups/pages. I think most people would be against that. At the very least I would hope to see a pr…

Having not been a meetup admin, what access do you have for user's information? Is it just their meetup profiles, or do you actively have their email addresses?

Also, you said two things interesting: "profiles of our old podcast producer meetup group", and then "without my input or opting in".

You used both "our" and "my". Do you see it as your group, or a group of people who have come together and could keep it going without you?

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