Is there an open source selfhosted alternative to meetup.com?
Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay
81–90 of 129 posts
Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay
#82Good way to market I guess take over old groups and send messages, or host events at your own restaurant/brewery, or whatever else.
Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the platform where these events have moved? Please tell me it's not just Facebook.
Discord is a popular one
Does Discord have event management?
edit: I checked and it is very limited. It doesn't seem like it supports recurring events for example, which is a major shortcoming for most Meetup groups.
Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay
#84Meetup 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…
I had a Meetup.com account, and set up a small group. It was a local tech interest meetup.
I was in at the lower level. I think it was $50 (long time ago), and there was a limit to the number of users.
After a couple of legit users joined, there was a sudden explosion of "mystery users," that I couldn't tell if they were real or not.
I strongly suspect they were not, as they never responded to any questions, and never showed up, as well as their other groups were ... weird ... no connection to the local tech scene.
They crowded the group, so new members would only be admitted if I went up to the next (quite expensive) tier.
The whole thing fizzled, and I abandoned the group. As I believe that there were no more than about five "real" members of the group, I don't think anyone was in danger. No one took it over, and the group died (as did my desire to have anything to do with Meetup.com).
I am not going to speculate in any legally-vulnerable manner, but I was certainly not one to benefit from a bunch of inactive spam accounts...
Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay
#85There is actually a way to delete Meetup groups, versus just leaving/stepping down from them.
The Meetup docs are quite clear about the default behavior if you leave/step down: https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002865332-Closi...
The answer you needed was just a quick Google search away: https://www.google.com/search?q=delete+meetup+group, e.g. https://support.google.com/developergroups/answer/7378020?hl... and many other results.
Could Meetup offer up this distinction more clearly in their user docs? Sure. But like I said, the Meetup docs are pretty clear what happens when you follow their instructions.
It's hard not to read OP as "we took an action without doing due diligence to fully understand the consequences of doing so." The point at which you make an assumption like this is the point at which you bear equal responsibility for unfavorable outcomes.
Edit—the UI is actually very clear about this, and has been for at least the last couple of years: "Your members will be given the chance to become the organizer and keep the group running without you."
Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discord is a popular one
Does Discord have event management? edit: I checked and it is very limited. It doesn't seem like it supports recurring events for example, which is a major shortcoming for most Meetup groups.
They have a Scheduled Events feature, I think rolled out in the past year. Not very many features compared to MeetUp though: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409494125719-...
Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay
#87I 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...
Well, in the scenario outlined by OP, their former community is now _owned_ by a third party uninterested in the community's purpose and spamming the members to their own ends.
Well, can't those people just leave the group if they don't want to hear from the third party anymore?
Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay
#88Meetup 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 addi…
Meetup can't even get basic things correct. I updated my profile photo, and now the new one is shown on some pages while the old one is shown in others. I look totally different in the photos too, and since I'm the organizer it confuses the hell out of people!
Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There is a value in being able to spam via an already verified list.
If that value is more than a dump and run on the Meetup expense, there is an obvious arbitrage opportunity. Capitalism all but guarantees others will be able to leverage this along with the less obvious opportunities.
Re: Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay
#90There is actually a way to delete Meetup groups, versus just leaving/stepping down from them. The Meetup docs are quite clear about the default behavior if you leave/step down: https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002865332-Closi... The answer you needed was just a quick Google search away: https://www.google.com/search?q=delete+meetup+group , e.g. https://support.google.com/developergroups/answer/7378020?hl.…
Yeah, it felt that way to me as well.
Also, why not just pay, do the clean up you failed to do initially, and then go away like you planned? Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on their part