Comment by veemjeem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by veemjeem | Hacker News Reader

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This "Meredith" also runs these meetup groups as well:

http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Startup-Pitch-Night

http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-Startup-Pitch-Night

http://www.meetup.com/New-York-Startup-Pitch-Night

She's also a member of multiple meetup groups in NYC, so my guess is that she's likely a real person who lives in NYC, but just happens to want to be an admin for other meetup groups in random cities.

This was found by simply doing a reverse image search of her profile picture on google images.

She also the organizer of Startup Pitch Night, which explains her meetup affiliations. Her full LinkedIn profile can be found here:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/meredithmonroe

(the profile used the same profile photo found on meetup.com)

Yes, I saw that but it does not help me understand why someone would want to do something like this. That being said, the best approach right now is to consider the Meetup.com null & void for the purpose of "Hacker News Cologne Meetup". We'll discuss alternatives IRL during the next meetup. (see post above)

I think it's fairly obvious why someone would do this? Suppose you want to create an event that happens to have a similar audience as those who might attend a Hacker News meetup. Now you can create a marketing message to those people without spending any effort in recruiting members. It's easier to do a hostile takeover than trying to create a meetup event from scratch.

In a way, it's like buying a very targeted email list.

However, I'm sure there will probably be a backlash in this case, and I doubt Meredith would show up at any of these events because she'll probably get stoned to death there.

Exactly what I was thinking & what got me worried: why do this if your intentions are honest? I hope this is just a terrible case of bad judgement. We may be pirates, but we gave up stoning a while ago. May I suggest a good discussion over a glass of Koelsch instead? I know who'll be buying!

I hope we can all refrain from personally attacking this person. Let's keep it nice and clean. No need to escalate.

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