
Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts - yoavfr
https://gist.github.com/4568377
======
Maxious
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!

~~~
MichaelGG
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.

~~~
adamkiss
> 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.

~~~
freshhawk
So far both cases were for events promoting a specific product. They were in
the grey area for sure (this one less so) but they were both in the same grey
area.

So yes, now I will definitely not use them for anything related to me trying
to sell something, but I wouldn't have anyway, and continue using them for
actual meetups based on common interests.

~~~
adamkiss
I am not questioning whether OP did something wrong; If he did, as a paying
customer (and first offender), I would anticipate some kind of notification
email, or something at least.

Sure, for repeat offenders: repeat notifications, then close account, refund
adequate part of payment and that's it. You should never irreversibly delete
someone's data. Moreover when he's paying you.

------
PanMan
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 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.

~~~
polynomial
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.

~~~
apgwoz
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,
though, they do in fact make it hard to get email addresses to avoid spam.

But, you could easily write a simple OAuth app which authenticated a user,
pulled their details and asked for an email address to migrate away.

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

~~~
apgwoz
I can name no website that makes migrating away from itself easy. The fact
that you can more or less get everything you need to migrate off of Meetup
with a couple of scripts is pretty good in comparison.

If it's too much trouble as an "average" user, it's not too hard to find
someone who can help.

------
j2labs
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 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.

~~~
city41
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.

~~~
Hovertruck
As a former employee, I'd actually say that the customer service team is one
of the best I've ever worked with and they take everything very seriously.

~~~
dbpatterson
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?

~~~
Hovertruck
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.

~~~
city41
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.

~~~
tgeek
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.

~~~
redcircle
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.

~~~
tgeek
Given that TOS's are often written by Lawyers it seems that their reading like
a legal document has a high probability.

------
ghurlman
Not listed: the offending description, on which the whole thing seems to
hinge.

Meetup.com seems like an awful choice for conference registration, or any one-
off kind of event. I've been running not-for-profit tech conferences for a few
years, and the mix of Eventbrite for registration (especially if it's a free-
to-attend event, as mine are), and Lanyrd for schedule, speaker, session
listings, and social interaction have turned out to be the perfect mix for me.

The only thing I'm missing out of those two is a system for accepting and
voting/choosing speakers and sessions, but hey, I'm a developer, there are
ways. :)

~~~
thehodge
I think Lanyrd can do CfP and selecting these days?

~~~
ghurlman
You can list the calls for $x, but there's no process for selection behind it.

------
sighup
I work at Meetup.

Meetup does review every new group and we discourage using the service for one
off events. That said its not our policy to reject them out of hand and there
should have been contact from a person on our community team prior to the
decision to remove the group. In this case 'remove' most certainly doesn't
mean delete. There's plenty of developers at Meetup that understand the value
of not deleting data. The Meetup Group has been flipped back to approved and
is accesible on site.

We are sorry when this happens, still, review of new groups is important to us
-- there's a lot of new Meetups proposed every day that we really don't want
to host on our platform. We have technology in place to help us with automatic
classification, but while improving, its imperfect and in this case our
safeguard of manual review was too quick to reject the group.

------
tgeek
Fmr Meetup employee, for about 2.5 years, several years ago now. On the tech
side, but the company is/was small enough that everyone got some voice about
how things worked, which was fantastic.(note i say a voice, but not
necessarily a vote)

This post reads a lot like "I violated TOS, and got shutdown for it, and now
I'm going to complain because that isn't "fair"." WAAAAA.

The person who wrote this post used Meetup in the way Meetup doesn't want it's
service to be used. What this person was looking for, was EventBrite, which is
a fantastic site also, but geared to the idea of singular events that happen,
and then go away. If the poster was trying to create a group of regularly
meeting/communicating folks, to foster a true community, then Meetup would
have most likely not shut them down. This is a lot different than the Vim
London story, which it seems Meetup rectified after gathering better
understanding ( seems like someone from community support responded to
internal tooling flagging what looked like a violation and didn't understand
what Vim was. Honestly, does your company's support people know what Vim
is??). Meetup has a right to defend the use of their platform as they see fit,
and when they do things like this its not for the one organizer who did the
wrong thing, its for the X number of members who are part of groups who Meetup
protects like a guard dog.

Meetup's support org is top notch, and they spend day and night watching an
ever growing online community. When I was there we dealt with everything from
Kiddie Porn Groups, Hate groups, illegal prescription sellers, pushy
marketers, SPAMmers from around the world, and people who just generally
wanted to abuse the trust that the platform tried to foster. The poster here
hasn't posted the contents of what his Meetup group was defined as, nor has he
posted the wording of the event. Note event in the singular sense, as opposed
to events, or community, which is Meetup's purpose.

How about if you want to fling shit at a great company that serves a large
user base with respect and honesty, you do the same before flinging out a
"poor me/evil company" post without any basis for proof of your case. I would
imagine a "12 year veteran" would get how this should work.

------
djb_hackernews
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 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.

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

~~~
PommeDeTerre
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.

~~~
talkingquickly
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.

------
wildmXranat
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.

~~~
tgeek
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 )

------
natch
Not to defend everything Meetup does, but conference registration is not
really what the site is intended for.

Your usage pattern unfortunately just happened to look quite a bit like that
something that they may think poisons the dynamic (recurring meetups of people
with shared interests, not mainly driven by an organizer's self-interest) they
are trying to create with the site.

I'm not saying your event was exactly pure self interest or bad in any way, it
just isn't something that to them looks healthy for their site. And it doesn't
fit the intent of meetup.

The fact that you had a poor description is the final problem here that leaves
me feeling little sympathy. Every project, conference, etc. should have a
clear description provided by the creator, at least if they want it to be well
received. Maybe that's a lesson learned.

------
iuguy
When 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>

[2] - <http://www.eventbrite.com>

------
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/>

~~~
TillE
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.

------
thomaslutz
Event seems to be up again: <http://www.meetup.com/reversim-summit/>

------
ilaksh
Not very cool to just delete the data and blow up their event like that, but I
think the issues are: it would be confusing if a lot of people started using
meetup.com for individual events instead of groups, and probably screw up
their scaling as well as their business model.

------
netaustin
I interviewed with them a few years back, and they asked about deletion
strategies. The interviewer, one of their lead developers, agreed with my "set
a deletion flag and garbage collect to an archive database" response. Maybe
things have changed there since 2008.

------
donretag
You can try Google Plus events: <http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/events/>

Far more customizable, better discoverability than EventBrite, but customer
service as bad as Meetup's. :)

------
nickpinkston
There is an export feature, which I just did as a backup for my groups:

Add: 'members/?op=csv' to your group root, and you should get a CSV dump of
your members (most of what's worth backing up):

meetup.com/YourCoolMeetup/members/?op=csv

------
idan
More legible: <http://gist.io/4568377>

------
eurodance
Why is this hosted on GitHub?

~~~
sschueller
Since when is Github a personal blog hosting service?

------
analog
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/>

~~~
donretag
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.

------
jQueryIsAwesome
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 every 1 million deleted meetups, in Internet that false-positive is
likely to bring a lot of undeserved negative attention.

~~~
talkingquickly
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.

------
analog
The meetup is back up with it's 200 users, so doesn't seem to have been
'deleted permanently'.

