Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts | Hacker News Reader

Meetup, you've been bad, bad hosts

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146 pointsyoavfr78 comments

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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

If Meetup's error rate was public information, your point would be sound. Since it is not, it is reasonable for the author to look at his experience only. Giving them two chances and experiencing a 100% failure rate seems like reasonable cause to abandon them.

The Vim Meetup was rightfully shutdown. It was the first meetup, and that meeting was intended to promote a product. In the end, the meeting and it's intended purpose was against the ToS. Moreso, it amounted to using Meetup as a way to spam people about said product.

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.

From the sounds of it - just change your group description to something not descriptive enough and hey, presto, one perma-deleted group.

We still have >4K members, and still have to keep paying to keep them from getting spammed.

Spam them yourself, telling them to leave the group; tell them what will happen when you stop paying; and if someone still sticks around, they can face the consequences.

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.

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.

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

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.

You can cancel a group. You have to email customer service and ask them to delete it.

> There is no export or even access to the data of 'your' members.

Er...doesn't this pose a privacy issue that Meetup has to be concerned about? When someone signs up for a Meetup group, do the TOS include the possibility that your information and associations could be exported somewhere else?

Because I would be annoyed that if I had signed up for a Meetup group, where, IIRC, my email address is not explicitly known...and the group's admin decides to export all the data and import it into a Facebook Group (if that were even possible). What actual group data do you want from Meetup?

His first bullet point talks about how that is not possible. While that does offer some protection from spammers, two wrong policies don't make a right business model.

There actually is an API to access meetup data. I've used it before to get the names of attendees to provide to building security before. Maybe it didn't exist last time you used meetup, though.

The problem with Meetup is that there's nowhere to switch! Meetup is enjoying its monopoly position on the market. There's no alternative with the comparable features. I'm not even talking about userbase and discoverability. I'd be happy to use any alternatives and I hope someone from HN can come up with a better solution.

Drop me an email. If you'd like to discuss your ideas.

You can use the meetup api to get the data out for the members who have set their details to public.

Also, no way to opt out of email announcements from a group short of completely leaving it.

You can opt out of all announcements from a Meetup Group. We used to require that you receive announcements from organizers, but we recently allowed you to unsubscribe from those as well as the automated announcements.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

That is a great reason to say, "This one-time meet-up sounds like a better fit for $Competitor, as we are trying to foster recurring meetups", but NOT a great reason to irrevocably delete a group with no communication. TOS may be TOS, but few customers read them quite closely enough.

Is the recurring vs one-time distinction (and, more importantly, that one-time meetings are NOT welcome) made clearly? I realize that they say "Meetups are ...." on the help page, but it seems like this group really got screwed.

This meeting was for people who already followed a podcast, as part of a local software development community. There might have been later meet-ups. As long as it is clearly stated what the frequency is, does it matter if the meetups are once a month, once a year, or once a decade? You could still have a passionate community of people who want to use your system to help them organize in-person meetings.

On top of any policy / communication quirks, there should have been technical tools in place to ensure that the organizers' hard work was not lost.

Everything you say is correct, at the very least technically. I still feel meetup can do better here. Why not just disable the group? To everyone else it looks as though the group is gone or at least indisposed, but admins can still log in and see things while the issue gets resolved? This would also give meetup a chance to indicate to the admins why the group was disabled and options they can do to fix it. Potentially a win/win for everyone, as the group could evolve into a profitable one with a little bit of coaxing/aid.

what you are describing is exactly what happened.

That post is from a couple of hours ago, so maybe give them a little time. Reading down through the wall they seem to be responding to most requests posted there.

False positives always suck, and for good reason. The thing is that it's not that easy to get it right, no matter how good the algorithms or the data-sets are. Just in the last two days I've had gmail decide to tag as spam two messages received from different people, with whom it is true I had not communicated before via email, but whose messages had nothing spammy about them and were of great interest to me.

And now I'm left wondering if a email that I sent to a third person a week or so ago wasn't tagged as spam as well. That person has not responded yet, and I'm reverse-engineering in my head if maybe me including two links to Imdb in the said email could have been enough to tag it as spam, or if I finally decide to follow up with a second email and probably making a fool of myself would it be wise to in include the word "spam" in the message, as in "Hey, did you happen to check your Spam folder?"

Like I said, false positives are a bitch, for both users and developers

False positives are understandable and expected. I think the larger issue is how to handle them. Meetup's method is to completely delete the event, registrants and all info related.

I think it'd make more sense to flag it with a delay for permanent deletion.

False positives are a problem, and it is impossible to have a 0% false positive rate.

So how does the company HANDLE false positives? Perhaps they send out a notice which includes contact information and requests specific information be provided for an "appeals" process of some sort (ideal). Perhaps they say "email us if you object" and then mostly maintain radio silence unless you happen to know somebody (Google). Perhaps they delete the data automatically so there is no possible way to recover (maybe Meetup?).

False positives are a problem and I'm not going to get overly upset with a company when a false positive is triggered. But if you pretend that your process is perfect and do not ALLOW for the possibility of false positives, then I have a problem working with you.

I don't even think this is a false positive. They claim the conference is 'not for profit' which sounds all nice and fluffy, but it is sponsored by three orgs [1]. Even if they don't turn a profit on the first year they're still building the brand of the conference.

The takeaway here is don't try to use Meetup to promote your conference.

[1] http://summit2013.reversim.com/

'not for profit' don´t means don´t charing money, it means that money don´t goes to founders/owners

maybe the sponsored money goes to pay the rent, beers and food so the event can be free, and any money goes to founders/owners

Not for profit means the organisation doesn't distribute funds to shareholders. The founders/owners are still free to pay themselves a wage.

That's what I mean about 'sounds nice and fluffy', actually it means very little in practice.

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. :)

I think Lanyrd can do CfP and selecting these days?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

That's a good point; on Meetup's scale, they probably deal with a large amount of similar disputes. It's still a shame that they don't make exceptions for cases like this.

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.

They probably get a constant amount of spammers making fake meetups to collect information from people who sign up. That's why they delete them so easily. Much like how Google kicks people out of AdWords so easily because people are always signing up and getting robots to click ads, bans them on Google Groups so easily, etc.. I can get banned on Google Groups just by opening a bunch of tabs to read later. Makes me look too much like a bot.

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.

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 )

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.

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

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/

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.

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

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.

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.

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. :)

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

More legible: http://gist.io/4568377

Why is this hosted on GitHub?

Since when is Github a personal blog hosting service?

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/

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.

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.

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.

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

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