Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
gist.github.com
Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
1–10 of 81 posts
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#2See 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!
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#3That 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 that was left out is what the questions Meetup suggested asking yourself before creating a group.
But yea, this isn't as near big a deal as the poster is making it out to be.
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#4That 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.
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#5Meetup 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 can't just cancel a group: If you stop paying (which I did with a smaller group), it's offered to all members. All it takes is 1 spammer to pay, to spam all members. Basically, we are forced to keep paying for our group for years.
There is a big opportunity to build a better service here, but switching from meetup will be a pain.
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#6Just 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 every 1 million deleted meetups, in Internet that false-positive is likely to bring a lot of undeserved negative attention.
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#7When you run your business (or in this case event) on someone else's network/app/system you're subject to the whims of the owner. You're sharecropping.
FWIW 44Con[1] used Eventbrite[2] (which I'd say is better for one-off events) for the first two years. Eventbrite check-in is awesome, but it's not perfect. This year we're switching to a system we've developed internally and using Eventbrite only for check-in. It's not that Eventbrite isn't good enough, more to do with integration issues, multiple events with different needs and the fees involved to do it all in eventbrite.
I'd still recommend eventbrite for someone wanting to run a one-off event though.
[1] - http://44con.com
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#8I 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 know for a fact that they care about creating positive environments where attendees are not bombarded by commercial interests. They want you to go kayaking with other kayakers, talk about programming with programmers, or find out how to cook fantastic vegan food with other vegans.
False positives sometimes occur and it's a shame. Perhaps meetup could've been more proactive before shutting the group down. I personally feel confident that meetup looked at the group and made a fair decision that it was indeed violating the terms of service.
As I mentioned above, I host three meetups so perhaps I'm biased. Here are they: http://www.meetup.com/hack-and-tell/ - http://www.meetup.com/DUMBO-Tech-Breakfast/ - http://nyc.brubeck.io/
If folks would prefer to use eventbrite, obviously do so. Eventbrite has no community building tools. It is a website for tickets. Meetup, on the other hand, cares so much about building communities that their whole site is built for this purpose. You will lose that.
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#9Meetup 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.
Re: Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts
#10Meetup 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…
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.