Comment by j2labs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j2labs | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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