HN Explorer

Tell HN: Meetup.com is offering abandoned meetups to anyone willing to pay

317 points by prune998 ↗ HN
We moved away from meetup.com thinking our meetups would be destroyed at some point. When we stopped paying, meetup.com actually "offered" our meetups, including subscriber's list with full name and email, to anyone willing to pay to keep them alive.

We are now out of control with no way to get the userlist cleared. meetup.com support is not responding to support requests.

Thinking of any action that we can take against meetup.com ?

128 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] thread
DIARRHEA_xd
> meetup.com actually "offered" our meetups

Do you have a link or a screenshot you can show us? Might help contextualize.

bandzest
When an owner of a meetup decides to stop doing so – the ownership is offered to other members of the meetup group. This allows the group to continue even if the owner disengages. But yes, it does also allow the new owner to gain access to a complete list of members in the meetup group (since they are now the admin of the group)

It's a bit messed up, but it's been that way for a long time.

scarby2
Don't members of the meetup group already have access to the members list for that group?

Thought that was a core concept?

donretag
Meetup.com will first offer a group whose organizer had stepped down to the members of the group. They will not shut down a group easily.

I disagree that they shared emails since I do not think organizers have access you that data.

prune998
The new owner (organizer) can export the user list, including full name and email...
mehdim
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...
mod
Maybe they're moving their community to a new platform.

Christ, controlling a meetup group is not where running a community ends.

aardvarkr
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.
jfoster
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.

agileAlligator
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.
ghaff
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.
rhodorhoades
Intentionally dissolving a community seems pointless. If a community wants to be dissolved people just… stop.
sigmoid10
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.
vorpalhex
Meetup is not free. Meetup is expensive as hell.
Clent
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.

sigmoid10
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.
BolexNOLA
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.

CubsFan1060
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?

Symbiote
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.

CubsFan1060
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.

tacon
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.
BolexNOLA
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.
CodeWriter23
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.
clmay
Well, can't those people just leave the group if they don't want to hear from the third party anymore?
zxlk21e
not to anyone willing to pay then, right? only in cases where the organizer has gone awol
namenotrequired
Yes, if it is abandoned (notice that word in the title), the meet-up is available to anyone willing to pay
zxlk21e
title has been updated since i commented
Joeboy
You mean they're being offered on the dark web or something? Is this something other than the thing where members get to take on admin'ing the group if the original admin leaves?
3np
I'd start with fine-combing the terms of use and service in place at the time of you agreeing to them (web.archive.org is your friend). Chances are you're SoL but always start there.

As for actions, consider if maybe taking back some control is better than yielding to someone else for next time if control is what you actually desire? There are various federated and/or self-hostable alternatives with way better migration stories.

Or maybe offer meetup lots of money for it back. Not much else you can do.

Operyl
This seems like a feature to me. It allows members of the group to keep going if the original admin/owner goes away for whatever reason. But I don’t think you get a list of emails, unless that was like one of your screening questions?
Joeboy
I think you're right, also I think if you're getting the option to take on admin of the group, you're already a member of the group and have access to the members list, and ability to message people on it, anyway. So other than the possibility the community you created might continue to interact when you somehow don't want them to, I'm not really sure what you're losing if somebody takes over as group admin after you leave.
gargs
This has always been how abandoned communities are offered a chance to stay alive...at least for the last 15(?) years or so.
dewey
> meetup.com thinking our meetups would be destroyed at some point

That seems naive, you created a meetup on a free platform that is built to bring users together. You are just the initiator, you don't own the community.

marcus_holmes
That seems harsh if OP is paying Meetup to create and support the meetup. I think there's an expectation that if you pay for the community, then you actually do own it, at least in some sense.
adrianmonk
That's a valid point. It gets tricky because, from my experience, many/most Meetup organizers ask group members to donate to cover those fees.

If they do this, then arguably the members are the owners rather than the organizer.

But not all organizers do ask for donations. Some run meetups more like a business where they charge to attend events and may even make some profit. Some run meetups as a marketing tool for their business. It's less clear that the members are the owners of those meetups.

kortilla
> If they do this, then arguably the members are the owners rather than the organizer.

That’s not how donations work, that’s how investments work.

naugtur
On one hand I understand your frustrations, on the other hand, I'm coordinating a bunch of meetups and one of them lost its crew and was abandoned. Then I got in touch with a guy who bought it and is happily running the meetup now.

The actions you can take can be based on owning the trademark or copyright on the logo of the meetup.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
cstejerean
This has been an issue with Meetup for as long as I remember. The problem is there are two distinct scenarios.

One is that the organizer has lost interest or is stepping down for some reason. Allowing the community to continue on Meetup in that case makes sense, by having someone step up to continue paying Meetup.

The other is that the community as a whole has decided to move to a new platform. In this case keeping the now defunct community around and making it seem viable is bad. The current active members will know where to go, but new potential members or former members that want to re-engage are going to get confused.

I got burned by this a couple of times, finding a group on meetup only to discover that it’s a ghost group, to the point where I’m now suspicious of any meetup group I find that hasn’t had an active event in the last couple of months.

This is where I think Meetup is shooting themselves in the foot by not having a way to dissolve a group if the group as a whole decides to move.

robertlagrant
If someone wants to pay for it then at that point they could ask participants if they want to remain part of the group and give the new sponsor access to their PII.
Joeboy
I think the "new sponsor" has to be a member of the group, and will thus have access to your PII (ie. whatever name / nick you registered with) anyway.
Semaphor
> including subscriber's list with full name and email

That is the issue here. Someone taking over and creating events that others get notified about, okay. But the first paying person coming along gets all that personal data? That is not acceptable in any way and probably against GDPR and whatever that California thing is called.

Joeboy
I'm very doubtful that part's true. If you have your full name on your profile then sure, the new organizer will have access to it (as they did when they weren't the organizer). Meetup wants you to message people through their app, so I very much doubt they give away a bunch of email addresses willingly. I think perhaps what's meant is that the new organizer gets the ability to send group messages, which get emailed to people.

Edit / possible U-turn: There's a post from Symbiote below that suggests maybe they do let organizers pay to get more data.

Semaphor
That sounds more reasonable.
whimsicalism
> Edit / possible U-turn: There's a post from Symbiote below that suggests maybe they do let organizers pay to get more data.

But still not email or full name, just stuff like attendance record.

Joeboy
> 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"

Is what I was referring to. Not exactly clear what it means, but it starts to sound potentially sketchier than I initially thought.

protonbob
What is the platform where these events have moved? Please tell me it's not just Facebook.
caust1c
Eventbrite is a common one I've seen.
Closi
What’s wrong with Facebook? It probably works better for lots of groups - at least you don’t have to pay Facebook £80, and they won’t sell your group to someone else if you don’t pay.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
forgotmypw17
I have a Facebook account, and I use it for attending events.

I often am not notified about new events, because they are not "boosted" with a payment.

When there are updates on the event page, I do not see them.

When someone sends me a message, I'm not always notified about it in the interface, even if it is not sent to the "Other Messages" alternative inbox.

Once the event is done, it's difficult to find its page again to look for photos from the event or have a follow-up discussion. And even if I find it myself, other people aren't notified about my posts.

Then there is the general site-wide auto-moderation system that often flags my comments as spam and hides them from everyone. I am not a spammer, nor do I post anything political, critical of anyone, or in any way offensive, in my opinion.

Also, the interface for discussion feels like wearing a Harrison Bergeron ringing bell thought disruptor hat, with no threading, tiny textboxes for replies, having to expand each reply, only seeing a handful of comments at a time before having to click "more", not being able to keep track of what I've read and not read, etc.

All of this is very sad, because I remember when Facebook was just AMAZING for events and social things, with a great combination of events, event photos, groups, photo tags, and an easy commenting system.

sshine
Website + mailing list, in one recent case.
JumpCrisscross
> the community as a whole has decided to move to a new platform. In this case keeping the now defunct community around and making it seem viable is bad

If the community keeps responding on Meetup to the new organiser, the community didn’t move. One organiser tried to get it to move and Meetup fomented a popular rebellion.

mark-ruwt
They've been doing this since at least 2019. When I shut down my Meetup, they sent a note out to everyone asking them to "Step up to become this Meetup Group's Organizer and you can guide its future direction!". Thankfully, I knew it was coming and messaged everyone beforehand so there wasn't any confusion.

https://ibb.co/xDmfSGd

dougmwne
This sounds like mostly an issue of bad user communication and expectations setting. Most meetups are communities, not someone's personal fiefdom or mailing list. If the organizer disappears, the community should be empowered to keep the group running. But meetups could have been created for all kinds of reasons and it would be pretty horrifying to be able to purchase Dave's family BDSM group.
lupire
It's not a miscommunication, it's a crass monetization.

At the very least, Meetup should require existing members to opt-in to the transfer.

vorpalhex
When my meetup was active, we would frequently have "promoters" show. Often times these were for corporate-y events. Needless to say their attempts to indice a bunch of drunk socializing nerds to attend some corpo BS went poorly.

I can't imagine those slimey promoters being allowed to spam that meetup group now.

tbassetto
This is by design and it happened to the HN Paris meetups I co-organized a decade ago. The new owner was a sales person and completely ruined it by spamming the list and creating new events that were just a cover for sponsored talks/hackathons :(
JohnHaugeland
They've been doing this forever, and this is a core concept in meetup

It doesn't require payment. It's free to any of your old members.

guestbest
They have been doing this since at least 2009, which turned me off on using the site for organizing. My advice is to strip out everything that belongs to you or you paid for if you are uncomfortable with a stranger using your previous efforts without input from you.
cableshaft
Yep. I had a 1200 person geeky event meetup (board game events, geek movies, role playing, escape rooms, renaissance faires, conventions, zombie walks, a bunch of random geeky stuff) that I eventually wanted to stop paying $180/year for when the pandemic hit, since I wasn't willing to host any in-person events anymore.

I stepped down and someone who wasn't even a member of the group swooped in to pay for it and has only used it to post speed dating events since (so the past two years).

Technically I inherited the group myself, but I was an active member already and the original creator chose to hand it over to me after she moved away from the area, since I said I was willing to pay for it of the people on the leadership team (I was a moderator and posted events already).

It's one of the things I hate most about Meetup. There can be good things about it, if someone else is willing to carry on the torch like I was, and wants to keep the group going, but letting whoever wants to swoop in and snipe it just to harvest the user list is pretty crappy.

It should be something the admin (or at least a moderator, since maybe an admin could just ghost at some point) can choose to hand over, not just be an automatic process up for grabs for anyone.

monksy
I razed my group to the ground over that. Their best offer was half off for the next 6 months. No one wants to socialize over zoom unless it's their close friends. I had 7k members.
acomjean
I was part of an urban exploring meetup. (We went to an abandoned Christian theme park). But the meetup organizer stopped, and speed dating site took it over.

If I remember correctly the members were notified the organizer stepped down and asked someone to step up.

LorenPechtel
I don't see why people even bother--take over a group and post garbage events and people are just going to leave.
ataru
If you don't renew a domain name, someone else can buy it. Is this much different?
cweagans
If you don’t renew a domain name, the person who buys it after you doesn’t get access to all the emails you’ve sent + a copy of your website. They just get the name and have to start from scratch.

(Which is how it should be on meetup — clear all of the group content, members, etc and let somebody start over with just the name)

black_puppydog
Not sure how this can possibly be legal in the framework of GDPR. I'm not a lawyer of course, but treating data is tied to a purpose, and treating it for some other purpose requires new consent. (IANAL of course)

So if someone comes in and runs the same community, that's one thing. It at least kind of still does the same thing.

Harvesting the user data and then offering speed dating stuff that's completely unrelated, as one comment here describes, that's just grabbing "random" data off the webs and starting spamming; no relation to the previous purpose of data treatment. And meetup making a profit off of that... I mean, again, I'm not a lawyer, but that's certainly against the spirit of the law.

cookiengineer
Fun fact: deletion of your messages is not possible. Meetup can only manually delete all user data, and doesn't have a possibility to delete data by purpose.

I filed a complaint to the Datenschutzbehoerde here, but the legal process takes a while.

If you want to do something against this, find out who is the representative for your state or country, and tell them about it. Usually they have a website for this, and need some screenshots or documents as evidence to start the legal process.

alphakilo
Meetup was a great platform but has totally lost it in the user experience. Out of all popular consumer apps, I would argue Meetup has the highest friction for both organizers and participants

My problems meeting cyclists in Toronto led me to make a Toronto cycling discord of almost 1000 users

I actually took the solution and have just launched an app for many more hobbies and anyplace! https://radar.ac

We'lr be adding events/plans by end end of Q4. Zero friction to create or join an event!

enraged_camel
Meetup can't even get basic things correct. I updated my profile photo, and now the new one is shown on some pages while the old one is shown in others. I look totally different in the photos too, and since I'm the organizer it confuses the hell out of people!
sexy_seedbox
It's been downhill ever since they switched to GraphQL; seems like their developers can't deliver on the basics.
prodent
Won’t accept non-US phone numbers?
lucb1e
In April 2020, I emailed them with a question about the privacy policy. Never got a response, though reading it back I could have phrased it better I guess. Anyway, somehow this doesn't surprise me. They just don't care to operate within privacy ethics/laws.

---

[hello, your privacy policy says:]

> In order to provide you with more tailored recommendations, we may obtain information about you from publicly and commercially available sources and other third parties as permitted by law. For more information about the data that we obtain from these providers, please contact us at privacy@meetup.com.

I have two questions about this:

1. Could you send me the information referred to?

2. How is it legal to obtain that data without informing users what kind of data is obtained? Article 14 of the GDPR specifically requires the controller (Meetup) to provide the data subject (users) with "(d) the categories of personal data concerned".

[thank you in advance, kind regards, etc]

---

revlolz
Meetup burned the bridge very badly for me. They got super greedy with their monetization and then moved their model to charge based on the number of members yet their site created or tolerated hundreds/thousands of fake accounts impossible to curate without detrimental to the group enforcement.when raising the issue their responses were basically "good luck" or "sorry, but were just going to be shit to everyone equally. Also, we're increasing prices for the third time."
bell-cot
Oh, yes. One little ~30-member local club which I was in put themselves on Meetup - and soon attracted over 1,000 never-heard-of / never-show "members".
ChrisMarshallNY
I had a Meetup.com account, and set up a small group. It was a local tech interest meetup.

I was in at the lower level. I think it was $50 (long time ago), and there was a limit to the number of users.

After a couple of legit users joined, there was a sudden explosion of "mystery users," that I couldn't tell if they were real or not.

I strongly suspect they were not, as they never responded to any questions, and never showed up, as well as their other groups were ... weird ... no connection to the local tech scene.

They crowded the group, so new members would only be admitted if I went up to the next (quite expensive) tier.

The whole thing fizzled, and I abandoned the group. As I believe that there were no more than about five "real" members of the group, I don't think anyone was in danger. No one took it over, and the group died (as did my desire to have anything to do with Meetup.com).

I am not going to speculate in any legally-vulnerable manner, but I was certainly not one to benefit from a bunch of inactive spam accounts...

pontifier
This! I ran a small makerspace, and people would add the group but never show up at the space,and never contributed to anything. I felt like I had to keep paying because when I stopped they basically ransomed the group. I had a bunch of people panicking thinking the physical space was shutting down and that I was quiting.

Actually it ended up being a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. I won't have anything to do with meetup.com anymore after seeing it from the other side.

GoodbyeMrChips
WOW!

Comments pointing out that this is illegal in the UK and Europe under the GDPR removed! What gives?

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
JimmieMcnulty
Dunno why the comments aren’t there anymore but nothing here is even remotely against GDPR, as no user information is actually given to the new meeting host.
prune998
The new owner (organizer) can export the user list, including full name and email...
JimmieMcnulty
They cannot, no.
prune998
Well, (co-)organizers can, sorry if you never found the right button... but I got this beautiful Kubernetes-XXX_Member_List_on_2022-06-30.xls which contains:

Name User ID Title Member ID Location Joined Group on Last visited group on Last Attended Total RSVPs RSVPed Yes RSVPed Maybe RSVPed No Meetups attended No shows Intro Photo Assistant Organizer Mailing List URL of Member Profile

I guess that totally falls under GDPR, just that sadly we're not in Europe.

It too 18 days for the support to answer and give the link https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002865332-Closi...:

``` If you’d still like to close your group, please submit a request to our Community Support team. ```

Which also explain what Jessica wrote in her response:

``` We're a small team and, unfortunately, we've been experiencing high volumes of requests lately, which caused this delay. ```

Come on, involving support to close groups ? I guess it's even worse than forcing organizers TO PAY to get heir group deleted...