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Comment by mehdim | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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