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Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

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Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#11

Post by PommeDeTerre »

whichdan wrote: post #4
djb_hackernews wrote: post #3

That is a pretty dramatic response to Meetup deleting a group. I've never created a group, but it seems the event WAS outside of the intended use of Meetup. It looks like poster was trying to use it to host a single event where Meetup wants you to create groups that meet and communicate regularly. To me, it looks like the poster was indeed using Meetup as a listing service. I think the telling piece of information th…

It's still surprising that the data was deleted instead of internally flagged.

How do you know that the data have actually been deleted?

The excerpt from the (apparently edited) Meetup response merely says, "Once a Meetup Group has been removed from the site, it's final."

That doesn't say anything at all about the state of the data. It may just be that they don't want to have to deal with appeals when groups are removed, so their policy is to make all removals final, even if the data are left untouched.

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#15

Post by whichdan »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #11
whichdan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still surprising that the data was deleted instead of internally flagged.

How do you know that the data have actually been deleted? The excerpt from the (apparently edited) Meetup response merely says, "Once a Meetup Group has been removed from the site, it's final." That doesn't say anything at all about the state of the data. It may just be that they don't want to have to deal with appeals when groups are removed, so their policy is to make all removals final, even if the data are left u…

That's a good point; on Meetup's scale, they probably deal with a large amount of similar disputes. It's still a shame that they don't make exceptions for cases like this.

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#16

Post by hazz »

[deleted] wrote: post #12

[deleted]

In this case, it seems the service was being paid for:

"We chose to use meetup.com. The status quo was that this is the best platform for event registration and we were happy to pay money (or as a matter of fact, use Ori's alrady paid account) to open up the event's registration using meetup's platform."

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#18

Post by talkingquickly »

jQueryIsAwesome wrote: post #6

Just like everything in this world someone point out his bad experience and then his opinion become famous and everyone generalizes because it gets a lot of attention. And worst, the comment section attracts all the people that had a similar experience making it even more biased; so it gets a lot of more bad press than it deserves. So despite there could being just one false-positive-not-fixed-after-human-contact eve…

I definitely agree that one in a million failures do tend to generate an unreasonable amount of negative press, I guess because they're easy to relate to on a personal level.

In this case however I think a valid point is being highlighted. False positives do happen but it's concerning that Meetup doesn't seem to have any way of rectifying them e.g. they deleted an event rather than disabling it.

Personally a big fan of Meetup but if this story is accurate and in the event of a false positive, there really is no way of rectifying it, I'd be concerned about using them to organise an event.

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#19

Post by talkingquickly »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #11
whichdan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still surprising that the data was deleted instead of internally flagged.

How do you know that the data have actually been deleted? The excerpt from the (apparently edited) Meetup response merely says, "Once a Meetup Group has been removed from the site, it's final." That doesn't say anything at all about the state of the data. It may just be that they don't want to have to deal with appeals when groups are removed, so their policy is to make all removals final, even if the data are left u…

That makes a lot of sense, I hadn't considered that it might be a decision based on the high support costs of ever entering into negotiations rather than a technical limitation or process issue.

Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

#20

Post by city41 »

j2labs wrote: post #8

I run three meetups and know a bunch of the folks that work there. They are extremely fair minded people. Fairer than I am myself. Given what I know of the people, the service, and my experience hosting three meetups, this story doesn't feel right. Meetup has done a lot to bolster the tech community in NYC. I have met almost all of my tech friends in NYC via meetups. Meetup employees even come to some of my meetups.…

I just went to the meetup facebook page and the most recent post is:

>Have been double charged for the group and now my group is shut down. I tried to contact the company 3 times and no response. What is going on? Is there customer service?

and not to mention this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4698541

Seems like meetup's customer service is not so hot.

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