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Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

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

#41

Post by uladzislau »

PanMan wrote: post #5

Meetup is quite a bad service, but I don't know any better alternatives. I was one of the organizers of one of the larger meetups, with over 4K members. Some issues: * The tools are nowhere near adequate to handle this amount of people, and more geared towards small groups * However, there is NO way to switch: Your data is locked in with Meetup: There is no export or even access to the data of 'your' members. * You c…

The problem with Meetup is that there's nowhere to switch! Meetup is enjoying its monopoly position on the market. There's no alternative with the comparable features. I'm not even talking about userbase and discoverability. I'd be happy to use any alternatives and I hope someone from HN can come up with a better solution.

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

#42

Post by [deleted] »

PanMan wrote: post #5

Meetup is quite a bad service, but I don't know any better alternatives. I was one of the organizers of one of the larger meetups, with over 4K members. Some issues: * The tools are nowhere near adequate to handle this amount of people, and more geared towards small groups * However, there is NO way to switch: Your data is locked in with Meetup: There is no export or even access to the data of 'your' members. * You c…

[deleted]

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

#43

Post by city41 »

Hovertruck wrote: post #40
dbpatterson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an explanation for all these examples then (they seem to contradict your statement)? Or have you just worked with really bad customer service teams?

Well regarding this incident specifically, it seems pretty clear (at least to me) that a group was created specifically to host a conference, which is not allowed. A Meetup Group is supposed to be a community, not just an event. Things like this are really what services like EventBrite are for.

I totally agree with that, however just pulling the plug with no warning is really unprofessional. They could have given them a heads up and some time to figure out a plan. They weren't maliciously using meetup, just using it slightly incorrectly.

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

#44

Post by ig1 »

PanMan wrote: post #5

Meetup is quite a bad service, but I don't know any better alternatives. I was one of the organizers of one of the larger meetups, with over 4K members. Some issues: * The tools are nowhere near adequate to handle this amount of people, and more geared towards small groups * However, there is NO way to switch: Your data is locked in with Meetup: There is no export or even access to the data of 'your' members. * You c…

You can use the meetup api to get the data out for the members who have set their details to public.

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

#45

Post by donretag »

analog wrote: post #22

So they've organised a conference using Meetup? It doesn't seem to me like that's what Meetup is intended for "Meetup's mission is to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize." [1] If meetup.com don't want to be used for promoting conferences then they've got every right to shut this down. [1] http://www.meetup.com/about/

What is the difference between the conference that got shut down and this conference: http://nescala.org/?

The difference is that the latter is organized by Meetup employees. A different set of rules if you work there I guess.

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

#46

Post by adamkiss »

MichaelGG wrote: post #38
Maxious wrote: post #2

See also "Meetup.com kills Vim London without warning" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4698541 particularly http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4698718 > This was a mistake on our part. We're reaching out and rectifying things now. Sorry guys. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, hello Eventbrite!

Not saying that Meetup is great, and Eventbrite might be vastly better. But a simple 2-strike rule is worthless. You need to look at the actual error rate (in this case, essentially a spam false positive) to determine if Meetup is truly a poor service. Otherwise, any smaller service will look better because they will have less complaints in absolute terms.

> But a simple 2-strike rule is worthless.

If paid service unrestorably deletes data without first getting in touch with client, it is worthless, as you should have moved away first time it happened.

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

#47

Post by tgeek »

wildmXranat wrote: post #29

I've joined Meetup just recently as I moved to a new area and wanted to peruse the local tech scene. As soon as I joined, I was spammed by an invite to join pitchbox.com,- meetup.com was the only service that knew about my new consultant firm address. First sentence cordially read: "Hey friend, welcome to pitchbox... " So while I like their service, color me not impressed and please stop spamming us guys.

People can't reach out to you unless you are part of a group or via a direct "friend" relationship. Sounds like you joined a group that has someone spamming the rest of the members. Meetup themselves won't spam you like that unless you ask to be told when new groups are formed around certain topics (at least it used to be this way )

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

#50

Post by torrenegra »

It seems that Meetup.com has a major UX issue, as it may not be easy for new users to figure that their service is meant to be used by groups that meet recurrently, and not by groups that may meet just once.

Having said that, I've been using Meetup.com for over four years now and I can only say but great things about the service. I used it to create the two largest meetups in Bogota: BogoTech http://www.meetup.com/bogotech/ and BogoDev http://www.bogodev.org/

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