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Comment by PanMan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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