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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

#101

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

> 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

If the community keeps responding on Meetup to the new organiser, the community didn’t move. One organiser tried to get it to move and Meetup fomented a popular rebellion.

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

#102

Post by clmay »

chimeracoder wrote: post #91
clmay wrote: post #85

There 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.…

> 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. At least the last time I used the site, the UI is actually not very clear about this, to the point where it seems almost intentional. (After all, it's to Meetup's…

> At least the last time I used the site, the UI is actually not very clear about this

That's BS—in September 2020 (the oldest archive date for the Help Center on Wayback Machine), the messaging was: "Your members will be given the chance to become the organizer and keep the group running without you" and that remains identical to the copy on the current "step down" user flow.

If that's not clear, perhaps I don't understand the meaning of the word.

Meetup's intentions or incentives are totally beside the point. The UI is clear, the docs are clear, and have been all along.

> There are actually a lot of problems with how Meetup handles organizers stepping down and/or billing. I've lost track of the number of groups I've been in that experienced a "hostile" takeover because (for example) the primary organizer's credit card expired, which created an opening for any member to become the primary organizer just by providing their credit card, even though the other organizers were still present.

None of this has to do with the situation at hand, is there a reason you're bringing it up? Meetup has a ton of shitty practices and dark patterns, but none of that has anything to do with the fact that in this case, the situation is quite clear.

Is Meetup shitty? Yeah. But in a world full of adversarial entities, the responsible thing is to be defensive and act accordingly.

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

#103

Post by Closi »

protonbob wrote: post #70
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…

What is the platform where these events have moved? Please tell me it's not just Facebook.

What’s wrong with Facebook? It probably works better for lots of groups - at least you don’t have to pay Facebook £80, and they won’t sell your group to someone else if you don’t pay.

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

#104

Post by pontifier »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #84
revlolz wrote: post #54

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…

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 neve…

This! I ran a small makerspace, and people would add the group but never show up at the space,and never contributed to anything. I felt like I had to keep paying because when I stopped they basically ransomed the group. I had a bunch of people panicking thinking the physical space was shutting down and that I was quiting.

Actually it ended up being a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. I won't have anything to do with meetup.com anymore after seeing it from the other side.

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

#105

Post by jonas21 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #91
clmay wrote: post #85

There 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.…

> 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. At least the last time I used the site, the UI is actually not very clear about this, to the point where it seems almost intentional. (After all, it's to Meetup's…

> After all, it's to Meetup's advantage to have the group continue and collect money from someone else for it, rather than have it deleted by default

Isn't it also to the group's advantage to continue under new leadership if the original organizers lose interest? This sounds like it's good for everyone, except for those who feel like they have a right to kill a group because they started it.

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

#106

Post by cookiengineer »

Some company took over my meetup because I missed a payment. Once, aka for a single month. For a meetup that I ran since around 2013.

Now they use the meetup to make advertisements for their own consultation services, and they have the identical talk under a different name for now the 20th+ time, with the same speaker for years.

Everybody from the old scene left the meetup and realized that it's gone to shit, but they somehow manage to catfish still a lot of people with this strategy.

No idea why they keep doing this, and I stopped caring. They do this with all sorts of programming language related meetups, and it's always the same talk in one form or the other, and they do this all over Germany. It's ridiculous.

If you want to google them: "thinktecture meetup" and you'll find yourself in groundhog day.

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

#107

Post by pbreit »

WeWork had purchased and then sold Meetup.com to "AlleyCorp" (whatever that is). Is AlleyCorp still the owner?

I was thinking my alma mater, Eventbrite, should have acquired Meetup.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/30/wework-sells-off-social-ne...

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

#108

Post by poof_he_is_gone »

I have used this ability to pick up defunct meetups as a business opportunity. We used it to expand the footprint of our group to a much larger user base in some parallel communities. We now cross post our events across multiple groups.

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

#109

Post by poof_he_is_gone »

joe_91 wrote: post #100

Meetup really could be a 10x better platform. As someone who's run a group on it having to pay to then put in the work to run a group on top of that is just crazy. They could have monetised the platform in so many other different ways which could have helped the community instead of just going for the easy pickings of charging the event organisers. Why not charge a percentage on top of any payments take? Create/integ…

Meetup was partnering with WeWork a few years ago on spaces.

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

#110

Post by jaredsohn »

This behavior of letting anyone take over the meetup makes historical sense to me based on how I remember the earlier days of Meetup. Back in 2004, I think most meetups I attended ended up being ~5 people getting together at a coffeeshop and we'd just try to come up with things to talk about on the spot. There weren't official leaders (remember that being added later) so I imagine at that time some member probably would informally lead but if they just stopped attending, someone else would take that role.
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