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If you're (say) the Cleveland Kiwanis Club, and Meetup tries to keep using that name after you've moved on, then Meetup is probably on the wrong end of a legal and PR situation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think there needs to be some sort of a middle ground. Maybe the organizer can call a vote, and if a certain quorum is met the community can be dissolved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think there needs to be some sort of a middle ground. Maybe the organizer can call a vote, and if a certain quorum is met the community can be dissolved.
Yep. I had a 1200 person geeky event meetup (board game events, geek movies, role playing, escape rooms, renaissance faires, conventions, zombie walks, a bunch of random geeky stuff) that I eventually wanted to stop paying $180/year for when the pandemic hit, since I wasn't willing to host any in-person events anymore. I stepped down and someone who wasn't even a member of the group swooped in to pay for it and has o…
Meetup burned the bridge very badly for me. They got super greedy with their monetization and then moved their model to charge based on the number of members yet their site created or tolerated hundreds/thousands of fake accounts impossible to curate without detrimental to the group enforcement.when raising the issue their responses were basically "good luck" or "sorry, but were just going to be shit to everyone equa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm very doubtful that part's true. If you have your full name on your profile then sure, the new organizer will have access to it (as they did when they weren't the organizer). Meetup wants you to message people through their app, so I very much doubt they give away a bunch of email addresses willingly. I think perhaps what's meant is that the new organizer gets the ability to send group messages, which get emailed…
> Edit / possible U-turn: There's a post from Symbiote below that suggests maybe they do let organizers pay to get more data. But still not email or full name, just stuff like attendance record.
Is what I was referring to. Not exactly clear what it means, but it starts to sound potentially sketchier than I initially thought.
Curious:
- Do you know if the party that took over the group was an member or assistant organizer?
- Anyone able to link to a group that’s currently in detail for payment? (Think I saw something like this before, but I was a member of the group.)
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Edit-001: Yep, here’s the related FAQ for failure to pay and group take overs:
https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002883171-What-...
However... stuff like this is quite normal a few steps up the big-fish, little-fish food web. Even very restrictive regimes allow data to sell with a company. Since company structure is malleable, a lot of acquisitions can be structured that way.
The proverbial meetup organizer organizes her meetups as a company, then sells that company. Such structuring can often be done on the fly, between offer and closing. In non-proverbial land, Meetup.com itself is likely to be the legal owner of the customer relationship. It is meeting organizers' access to data that is questionable, assuming restrictions exist.
The most restrictive examples are usually regulated markets. Casino regulators, for example, mostly issue licenses. The "licensed entity" is not so malleable, because the regulator gets to approve/relicense sales. In practice though, having a regulator involved doesn't change that much. Online casinos, big and small, get sold and the data follows one way or another.
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…