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MeetUp introduced a price change (increase) in mid/late-2019 which most of my local groups protested as not feasible... just in time for the pandemic. During th

MeetUp introduced a price change (increase) in mid/late-2019 which most of my local groups protested as not feasible... just in time for the pandemic. During the pandemic, it seems most groups in my locale went virtual with FB pages or Discord groups with some Reddit/Twitter presence for announcements, and stayed there. MeetUp didn't make any moves to exploit post-pandemic opportunities. imo it's dead at this point, there's so many zombie communities with stale recurring events that discovery is poor, and I've seen a high flake-rate for any events organized there (presumably too many low-engagement old accounts).

WorldMaker 3y ago
Some of those zombie communities only exist because Meetup allowed people with enough money willing to pay for the increased prices to just usurp the leadership positions of organizers that had been long time community figures. I still can't imagine how Meetup expected that to play out other than destroying those communities. It seems like it was a desperate bid to make these old communities seem to have "continuity" across the pricing changes/community internal debates and pre-Pandemic/Pandemic burn outs for the sake of homepage metrics. But "sell the community leadership to the highest bidder without the permission of existing leadership" seems to violate not just most community management rules/policies in history, but also general common sense. It became an obvious spam vector because guess why people would want to buy large community mailing lists? I know a lot of people who disabled/deleted their entire Meetup accounts from the fallout of this bizarre action because they had no idea which communities they were in weren't at risk of this same problem. Meetup should probably be a textbook example of how to entirely destroy trust in your platform with bad community management tactics.
- em-bee 3y ago
  that is tricky. i have not seen that happen, but i can imagine. however on the other side, what is the alternative? volunteers in groups come and go. some groups have an obvious owner, but some are just a collection of people with a common interest. these groups need to be able to have a new volunteer take over without requiring the cooperation of the previous one.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    I think the alternative was somewhat obvious: Meetup's original focus was always on Discovery. "If you like this community, you might like these others." If a group dies, because yes of course they will that is natural, recommend new ones, bring the members of the dead community back into the Discovery loops. That's opt-in and should, in theory, have put Meetup's best foot forward that their main tools/products worked as designed. There certainly is some value in "this community has been going strong for X years" metrics in that Discovery loop for entirely new people looking for a "sure thing", but that's a trap for so many reasons: it led to Meetup doing what they did to destroy communities I followed; it led to stagnation in people afraid to create new communities simply because Meetup's Discovery engine was down ranking new stuff; arguably part of their multiple pricing change fiascos was that they weren't growing new communities as fast as old ones. There should have been other tools at Meetup's disposal to enhance their Discovery engine for new communities and for new forms of old communities rather than rely so heavily on old communities it "couldn't" let die.

WorldMaker 3y ago

Some of those zombie communities only exist because Meetup allowed people with enough money willing to pay for the increased prices to just usurp the leadership positions of organizers that had been long time community figures. I still can't imagine how Meetup expected that to play out other than destroying those communities. It seems like it was a desperate bid to make these old communities seem to have "continuity" across the pricing changes/community internal debates and pre-Pandemic/Pandemic burn outs for the sake of homepage metrics. But "sell the community leadership to the highest bidder without the permission of existing leadership" seems to violate not just most community management rules/policies in history, but also general common sense. It became an obvious spam vector because guess why people would want to buy large community mailing lists? I know a lot of people who disabled/deleted their entire Meetup accounts from the fallout of this bizarre action because they had no idea which communities they were in weren't at risk of this same problem. Meetup should probably be a textbook example of how to entirely destroy trust in your platform with bad community management tactics.

em-bee 3y ago
that is tricky. i have not seen that happen, but i can imagine. however on the other side, what is the alternative? volunteers in groups come and go. some groups have an obvious owner, but some are just a collection of people with a common interest. these groups need to be able to have a new volunteer take over without requiring the cooperation of the previous one.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  I think the alternative was somewhat obvious: Meetup's original focus was always on Discovery. "If you like this community, you might like these others." If a group dies, because yes of course they will that is natural, recommend new ones, bring the members of the dead community back into the Discovery loops. That's opt-in and should, in theory, have put Meetup's best foot forward that their main tools/products worked as designed. There certainly is some value in "this community has been going strong for X years" metrics in that Discovery loop for entirely new people looking for a "sure thing", but that's a trap for so many reasons: it led to Meetup doing what they did to destroy communities I followed; it led to stagnation in people afraid to create new communities simply because Meetup's Discovery engine was down ranking new stuff; arguably part of their multiple pricing change fiascos was that they weren't growing new communities as fast as old ones. There should have been other tools at Meetup's disposal to enhance their Discovery engine for new communities and for new forms of old communities rather than rely so heavily on old communities it "couldn't" let die.