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Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

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

#51

Post by tgeek »

city41 wrote: post #43
Hovertruck wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fmr employee as well. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess you've never been involved in running/managing a huge online community(ies) with in person social interactions as the primary goal. I might be wrong, so apologies ahead of time if so.

Anywho -

It actually isn't unprofessional when the goal is to protect the members from some organizer who might be malicious in nature. There are a lot of rules and guidance around how organizers should do things, and Support's main goal is making sure the general members of Meetup aren't preyed upon. You're idea of giving a heads up, what are the parameters around before action is taken? 24 hours? 48 hours? A week? What if this post went "i was on vacation for a week so didn't read the email, and they deleted my group, how could they!!". It wouldn't matter. TOS are TOS.

If this person was malicious how much negative should the community accept? In that time how much spamming of a product the creator is trying to sell happening? How much misleading around the member base is there? You need to deal with these things as quick as possible, and the TOS exists to give people the framework of usage. A violation of a TOS(on any site) is just that, and it needs to be dealt with equally across violations. Support can and will make mistakes. That's human nature. THis isn't one of those. The poster in this case was even told they could re-create the group because at this point the old one is considered poisoned, and not to be trusted. Given Meetup has been doing this for over 10 years now, I'd like to think they have these policies pretty well grounded in reality and experience.

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

#52

Post by mcherm »

paganel wrote: post #25
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.…

False positives always suck, and for good reason. The thing is that it's not that easy to get it right, no matter how good the algorithms or the data-sets are. Just in the last two days I've had gmail decide to tag as spam two messages received from different people, with whom it is true I had not communicated before via email, but whose messages had nothing spammy about them and were of great interest to me. And now…

False positives are a problem, and it is impossible to have a 0% false positive rate.

So how does the company HANDLE false positives? Perhaps they send out a notice which includes contact information and requests specific information be provided for an "appeals" process of some sort (ideal). Perhaps they say "email us if you object" and then mostly maintain radio silence unless you happen to know somebody (Google). Perhaps they delete the data automatically so there is no possible way to recover (maybe Meetup?).

False positives are a problem and I'm not going to get overly upset with a company when a false positive is triggered. But if you pretend that your process is perfect and do not ALLOW for the possibility of false positives, then I have a problem working with you.

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

#53

Post by TillE »

torrenegra wrote: post #50

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/bo…

I certainly see nothing on any of their pages to suggest that they ban more formal conferences. All their language is very broad and vague. The fact that "Organizer" is an official class of user who have to pay is a pretty strong indicator that it's not exclusively some loose informal thing.

Even in their terms of service, there's nothing that comes close to banning conferences. The only thing remotely related is that they disallow advertising commercial services.

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

#54

Post by gmazzotti »

analog wrote: post #33
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 don't even think this is a false positive. They claim the conference is 'not for profit' which sounds all nice and fluffy, but it is sponsored by three orgs [1]. Even if they don't turn a profit on the first year they're still building the brand of the conference. The takeaway here is don't try to use Meetup to promote your conference. [1] http://summit2013.reversim.com/

'not for profit' don´t means don´t charing money, it means that money don´t goes to founders/owners

maybe the sponsored money goes to pay the rent, beers and food so the event can be free, and any money goes to founders/owners

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

#55

Post by timdorr »

danso wrote: post #34
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…

> There is no export or even access to the data of 'your' members. Er...doesn't this pose a privacy issue that Meetup has to be concerned about? When someone signs up for a Meetup group, do the TOS include the possibility that your information and associations could be exported somewhere else? Because I would be annoyed that if I had signed up for a Meetup group, where, IIRC, my email address is not explicitly known.…

His first bullet point talks about how that is not possible. While that does offer some protection from spammers, two wrong policies don't make a right business model.

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

#56

Post by redcircle »

tgeek wrote: post #51
city41 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fmr employee as well. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess you've never been involved in running/managing a huge online community(ies) with in person social interactions as the primary goal. I might be wrong, so apologies ahead of time if so. Anywho - It actually isn't unprofessional when the goal is to protect the members from some organizer who might be malicious in nature. There are a lot of rules and guidanc…

When is the last time that you have read a TOS? You are shifting blame to the user, and it should not rest there. This is bad UI, and laziness. Meetup's TOS reads like a boiler-plate legal document; no one will read it.

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

#57

Post by PanMan »

SeanDav wrote: post #9
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…

From the sounds of it - just change your group description to something not descriptive enough and hey, presto, one perma-deleted group.

We still have >4K members, and still have to keep paying to keep them from getting spammed.

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

#59

Post by gknoy »

tgeek wrote: post #51
city41 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fmr employee as well. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess you've never been involved in running/managing a huge online community(ies) with in person social interactions as the primary goal. I might be wrong, so apologies ahead of time if so. Anywho - It actually isn't unprofessional when the goal is to protect the members from some organizer who might be malicious in nature. There are a lot of rules and guidanc…

That is a great reason to say, "This one-time meet-up sounds like a better fit for $Competitor, as we are trying to foster recurring meetups", but NOT a great reason to irrevocably delete a group with no communication. TOS may be TOS, but few customers read them quite closely enough.

Is the recurring vs one-time distinction (and, more importantly, that one-time meetings are NOT welcome) made clearly? I realize that they say "Meetups are ...." on the help page, but it seems like this group really got screwed.

This meeting was for people who already followed a podcast, as part of a local software development community. There might have been later meet-ups. As long as it is clearly stated what the frequency is, does it matter if the meetups are once a month, once a year, or once a decade? You could still have a passionate community of people who want to use your system to help them organize in-person meetings.

On top of any policy / communication quirks, there should have been technical tools in place to ensure that the organizers' hard work was not lost.

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

#60

Post by dickbasedregex »

apgwoz wrote: post #27
polynomial wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was abundantly clear from the time Heiferman founded meetup 10 years ago they were pursuing a gatekeeper model with a lock in strategy. When that struggled to take off they had to relax the gatekeeping a bit, but they're never really changed their spots. Another example of a widely used service where users trade off a list of hidden & future downsides for a little immediate convenience.

Lock in strategy? The strategy is to foster local community--nothing else. If it would work to not charge money they would. In fact, pretty much the only reason Meetup charges is to ensure organizers have "skin in the game" and as a result take it more seriously. Meetup has a very well put together and well documented API. You can pretty much get all you need from that if you'd like to migrate away from Meetup, thoug…

Becuase the API is really a valid option for the average user...
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