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Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay
317 points by prune998 on Sept 1, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 119 comments
We moved away from meetup.com thinking our meetups would be destroyed at some point. When we stopped paying, meetup.com actually "offered" our meetups, including subscriber's list with full name and email, to anyone willing to pay to keep them alive.

We are now out of control with no way to get the userlist cleared. meetup.com support is not responding to support requests.

Thinking of any action that we can take against meetup.com ?




There is actually a way to delete Meetup groups, versus just leaving/stepping down from them.

The Meetup docs are quite clear about the default behavior if you leave/step down: https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002865332-Closi...

The answer you needed was just a quick Google search away: https://www.google.com/search?q=delete+meetup+group, e.g. https://support.google.com/developergroups/answer/7378020?hl... and many other results.

Could Meetup offer up this distinction more clearly in their user docs? Sure. But like I said, the Meetup docs are pretty clear what happens when you follow their instructions.

It's hard not to read OP as "we took an action without doing due diligence to fully understand the consequences of doing so." The point at which you make an assumption like this is the point at which you bear equal responsibility for unfavorable outcomes.

Edit—the UI is actually very clear about this, and has been for at least the last couple of years: "Your members will be given the chance to become the organizer and keep the group running without you."


Yeah, it felt that way to me as well.

Also, why not just pay, do the clean up you failed to do initially, and then go away like you planned? Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on their part


You're reading my mind. Totally. I used to work in CX and "Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on their part" was like a mantra, internally. We were still very compassionate to customers who found themselves in such situations, but as a support person it helps one keep oneself from getting sucked into the emergency mindset.


> It's hard not to read OP as "we took an action without doing due diligence to fully understand the consequences of doing so." The point at which you make an assumption like this is the point at which you bear equal responsibility for unfavorable outcomes.

At least the last time I used the site, the UI is actually not very clear about this, to the point where it seems almost intentional. (After all, it's to Meetup's advantage to have the group continue and collect money from someone else for it, rather than have it deleted by default).

There are actually a lot of problems with how Meetup handles organizers stepping down and/or billing. I've lost track of the number of groups I've been in that experienced a "hostile" takeover because (for example) the primary organizer's credit card expired, which created an opening for any member to become the primary organizer just by providing their credit card, even though the other organizers were still present.


> At least the last time I used the site, the UI is actually not very clear about this

That's BS—in September 2020 (the oldest archive date for the Help Center on Wayback Machine), the messaging was: "Your members will be given the chance to become the organizer and keep the group running without you" and that remains identical to the copy on the current "step down" user flow.

If that's not clear, perhaps I don't understand the meaning of the word.

Meetup's intentions or incentives are totally beside the point. The UI is clear, the docs are clear, and have been all along.

> There are actually a lot of problems with how Meetup handles organizers stepping down and/or billing. I've lost track of the number of groups I've been in that experienced a "hostile" takeover because (for example) the primary organizer's credit card expired, which created an opening for any member to become the primary organizer just by providing their credit card, even though the other organizers were still present.

None of this has to do with the situation at hand, is there a reason you're bringing it up? Meetup has a ton of shitty practices and dark patterns, but none of that has anything to do with the fact that in this case, the situation is quite clear.

Is Meetup shitty? Yeah. But in a world full of adversarial entities, the responsible thing is to be defensive and act accordingly.


> After all, it's to Meetup's advantage to have the group continue and collect money from someone else for it, rather than have it deleted by default

Isn't it also to the group's advantage to continue under new leadership if the original organizers lose interest? This sounds like it's good for everyone, except for those who feel like they have a right to kill a group because they started it.


This has been an issue with Meetup for as long as I remember. The problem is there are two distinct scenarios.

One is that the organizer has lost interest or is stepping down for some reason. Allowing the community to continue on Meetup in that case makes sense, by having someone step up to continue paying Meetup.

The other is that the community as a whole has decided to move to a new platform. In this case keeping the now defunct community around and making it seem viable is bad. The current active members will know where to go, but new potential members or former members that want to re-engage are going to get confused.

I got burned by this a couple of times, finding a group on meetup only to discover that it’s a ghost group, to the point where I’m now suspicious of any meetup group I find that hasn’t had an active event in the last couple of months.

This is where I think Meetup is shooting themselves in the foot by not having a way to dissolve a group if the group as a whole decides to move.


If someone wants to pay for it then at that point they could ask participants if they want to remain part of the group and give the new sponsor access to their PII.


I think the "new sponsor" has to be a member of the group, and will thus have access to your PII (ie. whatever name / nick you registered with) anyway.


> the community as a whole has decided to move to a new platform. In this case keeping the now defunct community around and making it seem viable is bad

If the community keeps responding on Meetup to the new organiser, the community didn’t move. One organiser tried to get it to move and Meetup fomented a popular rebellion.


What is the platform where these events have moved? Please tell me it's not just Facebook.


Eventbrite is a common one I've seen.


What’s wrong with Facebook? It probably works better for lots of groups - at least you don’t have to pay Facebook £80, and they won’t sell your group to someone else if you don’t pay.


I have a Facebook account, and I use it for attending events.

I often am not notified about new events, because they are not "boosted" with a payment.

When there are updates on the event page, I do not see them.

When someone sends me a message, I'm not always notified about it in the interface, even if it is not sent to the "Other Messages" alternative inbox.

Once the event is done, it's difficult to find its page again to look for photos from the event or have a follow-up discussion. And even if I find it myself, other people aren't notified about my posts.

Then there is the general site-wide auto-moderation system that often flags my comments as spam and hides them from everyone. I am not a spammer, nor do I post anything political, critical of anyone, or in any way offensive, in my opinion.

Also, the interface for discussion feels like wearing a Harrison Bergeron ringing bell thought disruptor hat, with no threading, tiny textboxes for replies, having to expand each reply, only seeing a handful of comments at a time before having to click "more", not being able to keep track of what I've read and not read, etc.

All of this is very sad, because I remember when Facebook was just AMAZING for events and social things, with a great combination of events, event photos, groups, photo tags, and an easy commenting system.


Website + mailing list, in one recent case.


Discord is a popular one


Does Discord have event management?

edit: I checked and it is very limited. It doesn't seem like it supports recurring events for example, which is a major shortcoming for most Meetup groups.


They have a Scheduled Events feature, I think rolled out in the past year. Not very many features compared to MeetUp though: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409494125719-...


> including subscriber's list with full name and email

That is the issue here. Someone taking over and creating events that others get notified about, okay. But the first paying person coming along gets all that personal data? That is not acceptable in any way and probably against GDPR and whatever that California thing is called.


I'm very doubtful that part's true. If you have your full name on your profile then sure, the new organizer will have access to it (as they did when they weren't the organizer). Meetup wants you to message people through their app, so I very much doubt they give away a bunch of email addresses willingly. I think perhaps what's meant is that the new organizer gets the ability to send group messages, which get emailed to people.

Edit / possible U-turn: There's a post from Symbiote below that suggests maybe they do let organizers pay to get more data.


> Edit / possible U-turn: There's a post from Symbiote below that suggests maybe they do let organizers pay to get more data.

But still not email or full name, just stuff like attendance record.


> I do see a box "Get to know your members — With the Pro registration form, you can get key attendee details like email address and job title"

Is what I was referring to. Not exactly clear what it means, but it starts to sound potentially sketchier than I initially thought.


That sounds more reasonable.


I am a multiple meetup organizer and owner on meetup.com and I find it actually great that the meetup can stay alive if the organizer stop to pay. Your communities are not owned by you. Also, they don't give subscribers infos but just "an access" to send them email communication to the list, not the "list" with email list etc...


Maybe they're moving their community to a new platform.

Christ, controlling a meetup group is not where running a community ends.


In that case it’s a moot point, but on the other hand we have had so many past examples of community “owners” shutting down their community out of spite. The community needs to be able to control their own destiny with or without the founder.


I've never been an admin of any meetup group, but I have been an attendee of many. As an attendee, I'm almost never caring who the group owner is, and it certainly doesn't play a role in whether I decide to join the group or not.

As you suggest, I think the community belongs to the community.


I think there needs to be some sort of a middle ground. Maybe the organizer can call a vote, and if a certain quorum is met the community can be dissolved.


Intentionally dissolving a community seems pointless. If a community wants to be dissolved people just… stop.


I'm not sure even that necessarily works. Say the majority of the group wants to move to a new platform. Someone else--perhaps in the minority--wants to keep the group going on meetup.


I don’t know about you, but I feel a little weird about the fact that some random person can just buy all the contacts/access to the profiles of our old podcast producer meetup group without my input or opting in.

Imagine if folks could buy abandoned Facebook profiles and be instantly connected to all their friends and groups/pages. I think most people would be against that.

At the very least I would hope to see a prompt or notification of some kind appear that says “hey, this community is under new management” and then I have to opt to stay in.


Having not been a meetup admin, what access do you have for user's information? Is it just their meetup profiles, or do you actively have their email addresses?

Also, you said two things interesting: "profiles of our old podcast producer meetup group", and then "without my input or opting in".

You used both "our" and "my". Do you see it as your group, or a group of people who have come together and could keep it going without you?


I'm an admin/owner for a Meetup group.

I think the only thing I can see that other members can't is:

  1 Number of RSVPs
  2 List of meetups attended
  3 No-shows
  4 Last visit to the Meetup page
  5 Whether they are blocked from the group
Except for 3 and 5, the information is all available on pages visible to members anyway, though you'd need to page through all the past events to aggregate it.

I do see a box "Get to know your members — With the Pro registration form, you can get key attendee details like email address and job title". I wonder where job title comes from, I certainly haven't provided that to Meetup. I'd also like there to be a way to hide my email address from Pro group owners, but I can't see one. Possibly I don't see the setting as I'm not a member of any Pro groups.


Ah, now that's interesting. I looks like they have a product that seems to be more focused on businesses organizing things: https://www.meetup.com/lp/meetup-pro

I wonder what all the differences there are. That would be more concerning if that allowed transfer.


There is one piece of not so obvious data that is public in Meetup profiles: zip code. The city is listed, but hovering over the link that has the city as link text shows the zip code that member registered with, possibly long ago. This can be handy for deciding meeting locations, etc.


I actually didn’t create the original meetup group, my colleague did. I agreed to join his group that he runs. If someone else takes the reins that we don’t know I would like the option to drop out before they access anything.


Well, in the scenario outlined by OP, their former community is now _owned_ by a third party uninterested in the community's purpose and spamming the members to their own ends.


Well, can't those people just leave the group if they don't want to hear from the third party anymore?


Tbh that practice seems to be on par with any social network standard out there. You get stuff, even for free, but the real product is still your data. If you don't want anyone to access that, you can't use these things.


Meetup is not free. Meetup is expensive as hell.


Members of groups don't pay. And it's their data that is valuable, since it comes in bulks. Noone would care if it was just the data of the paying group organisers.


There is a value in being able to spam via an already verified list.

If that value is more than a dump and run on the Meetup expense, there is an obvious arbitrage opportunity. Capitalism all but guarantees others will be able to leverage this along with the less obvious opportunities.


Yep. I had a 1200 person geeky event meetup (board game events, geek movies, role playing, escape rooms, renaissance faires, conventions, zombie walks, a bunch of random geeky stuff) that I eventually wanted to stop paying $180/year for when the pandemic hit, since I wasn't willing to host any in-person events anymore.

I stepped down and someone who wasn't even a member of the group swooped in to pay for it and has only used it to post speed dating events since (so the past two years).

Technically I inherited the group myself, but I was an active member already and the original creator chose to hand it over to me after she moved away from the area, since I said I was willing to pay for it of the people on the leadership team (I was a moderator and posted events already).

It's one of the things I hate most about Meetup. There can be good things about it, if someone else is willing to carry on the torch like I was, and wants to keep the group going, but letting whoever wants to swoop in and snipe it just to harvest the user list is pretty crappy.

It should be something the admin (or at least a moderator, since maybe an admin could just ghost at some point) can choose to hand over, not just be an automatic process up for grabs for anyone.


I was part of an urban exploring meetup. (We went to an abandoned Christian theme park). But the meetup organizer stopped, and speed dating site took it over.

If I remember correctly the members were notified the organizer stepped down and asked someone to step up.


I razed my group to the ground over that. Their best offer was half off for the next 6 months. No one wants to socialize over zoom unless it's their close friends. I had 7k members.


I don't see why people even bother--take over a group and post garbage events and people are just going to leave.


Meetup burned the bridge very badly for me. They got super greedy with their monetization and then moved their model to charge based on the number of members yet their site created or tolerated hundreds/thousands of fake accounts impossible to curate without detrimental to the group enforcement.when raising the issue their responses were basically "good luck" or "sorry, but were just going to be shit to everyone equally. Also, we're increasing prices for the third time."


I had a Meetup.com account, and set up a small group. It was a local tech interest meetup.

I was in at the lower level. I think it was $50 (long time ago), and there was a limit to the number of users.

After a couple of legit users joined, there was a sudden explosion of "mystery users," that I couldn't tell if they were real or not.

I strongly suspect they were not, as they never responded to any questions, and never showed up, as well as their other groups were ... weird ... no connection to the local tech scene.

They crowded the group, so new members would only be admitted if I went up to the next (quite expensive) tier.

The whole thing fizzled, and I abandoned the group. As I believe that there were no more than about five "real" members of the group, I don't think anyone was in danger. No one took it over, and the group died (as did my desire to have anything to do with Meetup.com).

I am not going to speculate in any legally-vulnerable manner, but I was certainly not one to benefit from a bunch of inactive spam accounts...


This! I ran a small makerspace, and people would add the group but never show up at the space,and never contributed to anything. I felt like I had to keep paying because when I stopped they basically ransomed the group. I had a bunch of people panicking thinking the physical space was shutting down and that I was quiting.

Actually it ended up being a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. I won't have anything to do with meetup.com anymore after seeing it from the other side.


Oh, yes. One little ~30-member local club which I was in put themselves on Meetup - and soon attracted over 1,000 never-heard-of / never-show "members".


Meetup really could be a 10x better platform. As someone who's run a group on it having to pay to then put in the work to run a group on top of that is just crazy.

They could have monetised the platform in so many other different ways which could have helped the community instead of just going for the easy pickings of charging the event organisers.

Why not charge a percentage on top of any payments take? Create/integrate with a room booking system in cities to help organisers book? (and take a fee on this)

The only thing Meetup does well is discovery - the domain name is amazing for the type of site it is and it is easy enough to search for groups in your city and find what you want. Everything else is pretty terrible.

I don't know how you could justify having more than 3 dev's working on this site the way it is at the moment. It just screams lazy...


Meetup was partnering with WeWork a few years ago on spaces.


Meetup was a great platform but has totally lost it in the user experience. Out of all popular consumer apps, I would argue Meetup has the highest friction for both organizers and participants

My problems meeting cyclists in Toronto led me to make a Toronto cycling discord of almost 1000 users

I actually took the solution and have just launched an app for many more hobbies and anyplace! https://radar.ac

We'lr be adding events/plans by end end of Q4. Zero friction to create or join an event!


Meetup can't even get basic things correct. I updated my profile photo, and now the new one is shown on some pages while the old one is shown in others. I look totally different in the photos too, and since I'm the organizer it confuses the hell out of people!


It's been downhill ever since they switched to GraphQL; seems like their developers can't deliver on the basics.


Won’t accept non-US phone numbers?


This sounds like mostly an issue of bad user communication and expectations setting. Most meetups are communities, not someone's personal fiefdom or mailing list. If the organizer disappears, the community should be empowered to keep the group running. But meetups could have been created for all kinds of reasons and it would be pretty horrifying to be able to purchase Dave's family BDSM group.


It's not a miscommunication, it's a crass monetization.

At the very least, Meetup should require existing members to opt-in to the transfer.


When my meetup was active, we would frequently have "promoters" show. Often times these were for corporate-y events. Needless to say their attempts to indice a bunch of drunk socializing nerds to attend some corpo BS went poorly.

I can't imagine those slimey promoters being allowed to spam that meetup group now.


Some company took over my meetup because I missed a payment. Once, aka for a single month. For a meetup that I ran since around 2013.

Now they use the meetup to make advertisements for their own consultation services, and they have the identical talk under a different name for now the 20th+ time, with the same speaker for years.

Everybody from the old scene left the meetup and realized that it's gone to shit, but they somehow manage to catfish still a lot of people with this strategy.

No idea why they keep doing this, and I stopped caring. They do this with all sorts of programming language related meetups, and it's always the same talk in one form or the other, and they do this all over Germany. It's ridiculous.

If you want to google them: "thinktecture meetup" and you'll find yourself in groundhog day.


This seems like a feature to me. It allows members of the group to keep going if the original admin/owner goes away for whatever reason. But I don’t think you get a list of emails, unless that was like one of your screening questions?


I think you're right, also I think if you're getting the option to take on admin of the group, you're already a member of the group and have access to the members list, and ability to message people on it, anyway. So other than the possibility the community you created might continue to interact when you somehow don't want them to, I'm not really sure what you're losing if somebody takes over as group admin after you leave.


On one hand I understand your frustrations, on the other hand, I'm coordinating a bunch of meetups and one of them lost its crew and was abandoned. Then I got in touch with a guy who bought it and is happily running the meetup now.

The actions you can take can be based on owning the trademark or copyright on the logo of the meetup.


I ran a 1000 person NodeJs group for 4 years. I was aware meetup would offer up the group to anyone if I stepped away.

When it started dwindling and the other co-organizers lost interest I made an announcement that we were sunsetting the group at the end of the year. The last meetup was at a brewery instead of an office and we deleted the group right there.

It would be nice if there were a way to archive the group, but the only options are abandoning for anyone to grab as a marketing list or complete deletion.


> meetup.com thinking our meetups would be destroyed at some point

That seems naive, you created a meetup on a free platform that is built to bring users together. You are just the initiator, you don't own the community.


> free platform

It's not a free platform. It's $15 to $24/month, depending on the location of the group owner.

https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001620472-Organ...


That seems harsh if OP is paying Meetup to create and support the meetup. I think there's an expectation that if you pay for the community, then you actually do own it, at least in some sense.


That's a valid point. It gets tricky because, from my experience, many/most Meetup organizers ask group members to donate to cover those fees.

If they do this, then arguably the members are the owners rather than the organizer.

But not all organizers do ask for donations. Some run meetups more like a business where they charge to attend events and may even make some profit. Some run meetups as a marketing tool for their business. It's less clear that the members are the owners of those meetups.


> If they do this, then arguably the members are the owners rather than the organizer.

That’s not how donations work, that’s how investments work.


Creating a Group on Meetup is not free: https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/sections/360000203492-Organ...


This is by design and it happened to the HN Paris meetups I co-organized a decade ago. The new owner was a sales person and completely ruined it by spamming the list and creating new events that were just a cover for sponsored talks/hackathons :(


They've been doing this since at least 2019. When I shut down my Meetup, they sent a note out to everyone asking them to "Step up to become this Meetup Group's Organizer and you can guide its future direction!". Thankfully, I knew it was coming and messaged everyone beforehand so there wasn't any confusion.

https://ibb.co/xDmfSGd


Used to be that it was only possible for this to happen if the organizer failed to pay, then assistant organizers, then members. During the process the group was locked and no new members could join.

Curious:

- Do you know if the party that took over the group was an member or assistant organizer?

- Anyone able to link to a group that’s currently in detail for payment? (Think I saw something like this before, but I was a member of the group.)

_____________

Edit-001: Yep, here’s the related FAQ for failure to pay and group take overs:

https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002883171-What-...


I'd start with fine-combing the terms of use and service in place at the time of you agreeing to them (web.archive.org is your friend). Chances are you're SoL but always start there.

As for actions, consider if maybe taking back some control is better than yielding to someone else for next time if control is what you actually desire? There are various federated and/or self-hostable alternatives with way better migration stories.

Or maybe offer meetup lots of money for it back. Not much else you can do.


WeWork had purchased and then sold Meetup.com to "AlleyCorp" (whatever that is). Is AlleyCorp still the owner?

I was thinking my alma mater, Eventbrite, should have acquired Meetup.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/30/wework-sells-off-social-ne...


So, this in no way justifies what Meetup.com is (allegedly) doing. It sounds like a very bad business decision, besides being morally questionable.

However... stuff like this is quite normal a few steps up the big-fish, little-fish food web. Even very restrictive regimes allow data to sell with a company. Since company structure is malleable, a lot of acquisitions can be structured that way.

The proverbial meetup organizer organizes her meetups as a company, then sells that company. Such structuring can often be done on the fly, between offer and closing. In non-proverbial land, Meetup.com itself is likely to be the legal owner of the customer relationship. It is meeting organizers' access to data that is questionable, assuming restrictions exist.

The most restrictive examples are usually regulated markets. Casino regulators, for example, mostly issue licenses. The "licensed entity" is not so malleable, because the regulator gets to approve/relicense sales. In practice though, having a regulator involved doesn't change that much. Online casinos, big and small, get sold and the data follows one way or another.


Hi, my name is Gwynn from Meetup's support team. So sorry to hear you've had a poor experience receiving assistance from the support team. We'd love to be able to help you out in any way we can. Please shoot me an email at gwynn@meetup.com and I can research your case history.


This has always been how abandoned communities are offered a chance to stay alive...at least for the last 15(?) years or so.


Reselling (and sometimes even worse: handing them over for free) abandoned groups has been part of Meetup's original business model (or at least for a very long time). I personally avoided this bad situation only by luck, thanks to a friend who had her company group and all members handed over to a competitor.

I am really sorry you were tricked by this. It is documented in their terms of use (which nobody reads) so I don't think there is much to do but to spread the word and warn other Meetup users around you. Let them know to make sure they get everyone to leave their group before they leave it or abandon it.


This behavior of letting anyone take over the meetup makes historical sense to me based on how I remember the earlier days of Meetup. Back in 2004, I think most meetups I attended ended up being ~5 people getting together at a coffeeshop and we'd just try to come up with things to talk about on the spot. There weren't official leaders (remember that being added later) so I imagine at that time some member probably would informally lead but if they just stopped attending, someone else would take that role.


Considering the other mentions of a legit use case for continuing the group, and the problem of a random "new owner" swooping in and sniping the group/list for their purposes, I wonder if the solution is to intentionally corrupt the list [0]?

At least that would prevent the sniping. In your case, do you have any continued access or has control already been sniped?

[0] Delete all but a few members, replace all members's email addresses with junk/temp email addresses, etc.


In our case, our Org was the organizer, and we had a bunch of co-organizers. The only way to step-up as Organizer is to pay. None of us wanted that, and we were expecting the group to be destroyed after some time. I wan't also expecting meetup to "sell" the group to "anyone", maybe not being a member of the group, and not being a co-organizer.

Co-organizers can do almost anything BUT delete users or close the group.

Did our Org let us down on that ? sure. Was it cleat that anyone could take-over the group ? clearly not. What can we do ? Well, none of the comments helped on that... Meetup.com support neither...


They have been doing this since at least 2009, which turned me off on using the site for organizing. My advice is to strip out everything that belongs to you or you paid for if you are uncomfortable with a stranger using your previous efforts without input from you.


Is "we" anything deeper than "a few folks who do stuff together sometimes"?

If you're (say) the Cleveland Kiwanis Club, and Meetup tries to keep using that name after you've moved on, then Meetup is probably on the wrong end of a legal and PR situation.


I have used this ability to pick up defunct meetups as a business opportunity. We used it to expand the footprint of our group to a much larger user base in some parallel communities. We now cross post our events across multiple groups.


Before leaving a Meetup.com group, change the name to "DEFUNCT" or "CLOSED". This should signal to people not to join the group.

I've always felt Meetup needs a competitor, as the cost is rather high, and the UI is not great.


On that note:

Anyone know a good platform/tool to organize meetups that is not hot garbage? Ideally something that is FOSS/self-hostable.

Edit: Nevermind, FlyingSnake asked the same below and got some good answers, thanks!


In April 2020, I emailed them with a question about the privacy policy. Never got a response, though reading it back I could have phrased it better I guess. Anyway, somehow this doesn't surprise me. They just don't care to operate within privacy ethics/laws.

---

[hello, your privacy policy says:]

> In order to provide you with more tailored recommendations, we may obtain information about you from publicly and commercially available sources and other third parties as permitted by law. For more information about the data that we obtain from these providers, please contact us at privacy@meetup.com.

I have two questions about this:

1. Could you send me the information referred to?

2. How is it legal to obtain that data without informing users what kind of data is obtained? Article 14 of the GDPR specifically requires the controller (Meetup) to provide the data subject (users) with "(d) the categories of personal data concerned".

[thank you in advance, kind regards, etc]

---


Is there an open source selfhosted alternative to meetup.com?


https://framagit.org/framasoft/mobilizon/

https://github.com/GetTogetherComm/GetTogether

https://github.com/agorakit/agorakit


Not sure how this can possibly be legal in the framework of GDPR. I'm not a lawyer of course, but treating data is tied to a purpose, and treating it for some other purpose requires new consent. (IANAL of course)

So if someone comes in and runs the same community, that's one thing. It at least kind of still does the same thing.

Harvesting the user data and then offering speed dating stuff that's completely unrelated, as one comment here describes, that's just grabbing "random" data off the webs and starting spamming; no relation to the previous purpose of data treatment. And meetup making a profit off of that... I mean, again, I'm not a lawyer, but that's certainly against the spirit of the law.


Fun fact: deletion of your messages is not possible. Meetup can only manually delete all user data, and doesn't have a possibility to delete data by purpose.

I filed a complaint to the Datenschutzbehoerde here, but the legal process takes a while.

If you want to do something against this, find out who is the representative for your state or country, and tell them about it. Usually they have a website for this, and need some screenshots or documents as evidence to start the legal process.


Good way to market I guess take over old groups and send messages, or host events at your own restaurant/brewery, or whatever else.


No action you can take against meetup at this point. Meetup owns the subscriber list and account and can do with it what they like.


I remember wildly popular social news site Digg went under and some guy bought the assets and made it a lame newsletter. I'm afraid of the next incarnation of Meetup.


They've been doing this forever, and this is a core concept in meetup

It doesn't require payment. It's free to any of your old members.


Well, if you already pay, they basically give you all meetups you're part of and none other will continue, for free.

I have 300 meetups at home.


As someone who spent 2.5 years working at Meetup during the early '10s (no idea what it's like today, mind you)... But:

Organizers were never able to see anything but basic information about users. Definitely not email. Mostly historic RSVPs, a userpic, and whatever information provided when you joined a group or RSVPed (organizers could ask questions in both cases).

Despite what people seem to believe, the _vast_ majority of Meetups are about topics that aren't technical at all. There have always been technical oriented meetups, of course, and that category used to have a lot of user volume for events, but most of the meetups on the site were for hobbies, support groups, hiking, biking, dogs, etc, etc, etc..

Let me also say that _most people_, at the time, resisted changes to the site. Redesigns (and there were a few attempts while I was there) would result in crushing amounts of support tickets, and social media campaigns threatening the business. It was wild! During this time:

1. Meetup did usability studies (and even paid for them) 2. Ran lots of A/B tests, and did so properly (and by this, I mean, we waited until the statistics gave us actual confidence) 3. Were generally very conservative about roll outs or design changes, must to the chagrin of everyone that worked there.

Meetup also had (and likely very much still has) a really interesting problem. Most people want to passively join a group and show up to a few meetups when their schedule allows. But! Organizers who don't organize meetups, or who aren't into it anymore, mean that the group exists but doesn't do anything and sits inactive. There's no worse feeling in the world than finding a group of potential shared interest holders only to realize that the group doesn't actually do anything, and maybe never has.

And here's the problem. When I was there, we were about 100 employees, and we _all_ were there (not for large sums of money, let me just get that out of the way) because we believed in the mission: "A Meetup everywhere about (al)most anything." This company was completely mission driven!

So! What do you do? You want organizers to have "skin in the game" and be passionate about what they're doing so that the rest of the group actually has a good experience. Well, you charge the organizer! When they run out of passion, they stop paying, someone else maybe steps up! It worked so well, soooo many times, and it was a big piece of the "how do we make money?" problem.

Meetup was so unique back in those days. There were discussion boards, sure. But, we only ever felt successful when actual people went to actual meetups. It was the best feeling in the world to see thousands and thousands of people getting out in the world and meeting their neighbors to do simple things (and not so simple things, like finding the 5 other people in your state that suffered from the same chronic medical conditions), and if you were ever in the office on Broadway, you couldn't forget that feeling, cause you saw the thousands of pictures of happy people meeting up all over.


> meetup.com actually "offered" our meetups

Do you have a link or a screenshot you can show us? Might help contextualize.


When an owner of a meetup decides to stop doing so – the ownership is offered to other members of the meetup group. This allows the group to continue even if the owner disengages. But yes, it does also allow the new owner to gain access to a complete list of members in the meetup group (since they are now the admin of the group)

It's a bit messed up, but it's been that way for a long time.


Don't members of the meetup group already have access to the members list for that group?

Thought that was a core concept?


Meetup.com will first offer a group whose organizer had stepped down to the members of the group. They will not shut down a group easily.

I disagree that they shared emails since I do not think organizers have access you that data.


The new owner (organizer) can export the user list, including full name and email...


not to anyone willing to pay then, right? only in cases where the organizer has gone awol


Yes, if it is abandoned (notice that word in the title), the meet-up is available to anyone willing to pay


You mean they're being offered on the dark web or something? Is this something other than the thing where members get to take on admin'ing the group if the original admin leaves?


title has been updated since i commented


If you don't renew a domain name, someone else can buy it. Is this much different?


If you don’t renew a domain name, the person who buys it after you doesn’t get access to all the emails you’ve sent + a copy of your website. They just get the name and have to start from scratch.

(Which is how it should be on meetup — clear all of the group content, members, etc and let somebody start over with just the name)


It used to be possible to delete a group: https://support.google.com/developergroups/answer/7378020?hl...

I did it myself a few times. However, maybe that is not possible anymore?


Is meetup help on support.google.com? I’m confused.


It's not. The link is referring to Google Developer Groups.


i recently unsubscribed from meetup out of abject disgust.

---

here is the unsubscribe sequence for meetup Pro:

- there is no unsubscribe/cancel button in the app

- google and find this https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002862672

- learn that you have to email pro-billing@meetup.com to cancel

- they reply:

> Canceling a Pro subscription is something we have to do at the back end. We'd like to offer you a one-time 50% discount to continue your Meetup Pro subscription. This would automatically apply to your upcoming Pro renewal. > Without a subscription, you will no longer be able to organize your groups. Your groups may be closed or another organizer may take them over. > Please reply to this message to confirm if you’d like to accept the discount and continue your Meetup Pro subscription. > We will not take action on your account until we hear back.

- me: no. cancel. come on guys

- 1 day later

- me: hi Diana, just checking in, can. you please cancel my subscription.

> Thanks for confirming that you do not want the 50% discount to stay on Pro and retain your groups. Without a subscription, you will lose access to all Pro features and you will be removed as the organizer for your groups. After thirty days, your groups will either close or someone else may step up as the organizer. Before I proceed, I'd like to make sure you're aware of your options. Please let us know how you’d like to proceed by choosing from one of these options: Continue leading 3 or fewer groups by downgrading to a standard Meetup subscription. Or cancel your subscription entirely, which disables all Pro features and leaves your group vulnerable to closure or takeover. > If you've read through these options and would still like to cancel your subscription, please reply with the words, "Please cancel my Pro subscription." We'll restore your account to its status before you enrolled in Meetup Pro. This means we'll remove you as the organizer from any groups you started or took over while you had a Meetup Pro subscription. Let me know how you'd like to proceed! I'll keep an eye out for your reply so I can take action on your account.

- me: Please cancel my Pro subscription.

> Yvan here from the Community Support team, filling in for Diana. As you requested, I've canceled your Meetup Pro subscription, effective immediately.

---

i wanted to put them on a shit list so badly. its probably easier to launch nukes than quit meetup.


DAM.


WOW!

Comments pointing out that this is illegal in the UK and Europe under the GDPR removed! What gives?


Dunno why the comments aren’t there anymore but nothing here is even remotely against GDPR, as no user information is actually given to the new meeting host.


The new owner (organizer) can export the user list, including full name and email...


They cannot, no.


Well, (co-)organizers can, sorry if you never found the right button... but I got this beautiful Kubernetes-XXX_Member_List_on_2022-06-30.xls which contains:

Name User ID Title Member ID Location Joined Group on Last visited group on Last Attended Total RSVPs RSVPed Yes RSVPed Maybe RSVPed No Meetups attended No shows Intro Photo Assistant Organizer Mailing List URL of Member Profile

I guess that totally falls under GDPR, just that sadly we're not in Europe.

It too 18 days for the support to answer and give the link https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002865332-Closi...:

``` If you’d still like to close your group, please submit a request to our Community Support team. ```

Which also explain what Jessica wrote in her response:

``` We're a small team and, unfortunately, we've been experiencing high volumes of requests lately, which caused this delay. ```

Come on, involving support to close groups ? I guess it's even worse than forcing organizers TO PAY to get heir group deleted...




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