Personally I don't mind paying 2$ to attend a meetup. I'd prefer having pay $2/attendee as organizer myself to the system of making attendees pay. Because they

Personally I don't mind paying 2$ to attend a meetup. I'd prefer having pay $2/attendee as organizer myself to the system of making attendees pay. Because they.simply.will.not.pay and will not attend. That is how the Internet has worked since forever. This is really bad for me because meetup actually has been extremely useful for me and, as you say, there's a good change they are simply going to loose that audience completely with nothing replacing it, at least for a while (or Facebook replacing it and that kind of sucking).