The politics of corporate stupidity - Meetup.com ignores its paying organizers (again)

[LVZ]

Wikipedia:

Meetup is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. Meetup allows members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies. Users enter their ZIP code or their city and the topic they want to meet about, and the website helps them arrange a place and time to meet. Topic listings are also available for users who only enter a location.

Here in metro Las Vegas, there are 900+ meetup groups and nearly half have 100 members or more:

http://www.newcityvegas.com/moz-rss/meetups.php

In early 2011, Meetup.com made dozens of very radical and often broken format changes without consulting its paying organizers. There was mass confusion from members and massive protests by lots of organizers but many just gave up and moved to competing sites. Unfortunately, none of these sites were as full featured for organizers as Meetup.com and none had the mindshare/marketshare either. Meetup.com had a de facto monopoly since there was not really a large alternative present that was tuned to the organizer's need for managing "real world" offline events/meetings.

Since then Meetup.com fixed a lot (but not all) of their screwups and never really apologized for their disruptive and poorly thought out changes. Many organizers believed, as I do, that quirky [font color=red]Meetup.com founder/CEO Scott Heiferman[/font] was trying to turn Meetup.com into the next Facebook-ish "social media player" with his organizers footing the bill for [font color=red]his megalomania[/font]. With the belated fixes to Meetup.com's many screwups, we had hoped that despite lack of apology, Meetup.com had learned a lesson from the fiasco.

Well, not so - Meetup.com did it again - this time on a smaller scale. Scott apparently decided that the RSVP comment field was underutilized and wouldn't it be "social media cool" to replace that field with partial "member introduction" text of each person who RVSPs YES or NO? To anyone who actually "uses" (not runs) Meetup, the answer should be an obvious "NO". The intros are often several years old, or just say "Hi", "I just moved here", etc. Scott chose to replace a functional comments area intended for things like early or late arrival times, transportation requests, potluck items, problems, suggestions, etc. with massive CLUTTER making things much more difficult for organizers to run their groups.

The reaction from Meetup.com organizers has been unanimously negative and yet Meetup.com has not even responded to organizer threads (which they started) with 265+ comments (6,500 views). Two weeks of this harmful, dysfunctional change and no sign that Scott has any intention to reverse course.

If you belong to a Meetup.com group (even if you are not an organizer, event organizer, etc.), please add your comments to this thread about this latest Meetup.com screwup:

http://www.meetup.com/boards/thread/31635792/250

[Las Vegas Mixx]

1. Repost of founder/CEO Scott Heiferman's own failure as a Meetup organizer (not a big surprise)

http://www.meetup.com/boards/thread/31748812/0/ (from Tim, aka scubaguy)

In any other company, when hundreds and hundreds of the people who pay the company's bills (in this case, Meetup organizers, who are charged several hundred dollars per year) rise with one voice to decry sudden, ridiculous and unannounced changes that hinder the company's success, the CEO of the company would reasonably be expected to respond immediately. Yet, several days after yet another in the long list of fiascos involving the imposition of garish, debilitating changes to all of our pages, the powers that be at Meetup remain silent.

Like all of you, I'm tired of waiting. It is my hope that the following will be sufficiently alarming that it will get noticed and will get a response. Perhaps I'm just tilting at windmills in attempting to battle the silence from Meetup's inner sanctum. If so, then thus, while continuing to hope for a response, I tilt:

Recently in these forums, Scott Heiferman, co-founder and CEO of Meetup, explained his desire to revamp the look and feel of all of our sites with the following comment:

"As for me, I'm not a successful meetup organizer right now. I'm an organizer of 2 failing meetup groups (plus 1 small one). I'm very very interested in seeing how the product/service could have made those meetups come alive."

Let's look at the facts about Scott's failing groups and why they haven't "come alive." He actually runs five groups, not three; of the five, one has only four members, although it has existed for 20 months. In that time, there has only been one event, and no future events are planned. His second group has seven members and has only had one previous event, with another scheduled two months from now. Group three has 13 members, and has only held four events in more than four years. His fourth group has only 37 members, has not had an event in 11 months, and has none scheduled. The fifth group, created by someone else, has existed for more than six years, has more than 1,000 members, and held 63 events from 2007 to 2011. Scott took over as organizer last year. The result: There has not been an event in four months, and no future events are scheduled. The failure of Scott's groups to "come alive," it can reasonably be concluded, has absolutely nothing to do with website look and feel.

(By comparison, I run three groups. In the 28 days of February, my groups will stage 26 events. I will personally host 15 of them, virtually all of which have wait lists, and I will attend several others simply as a member. I know several other wildly successful group organizers whose calendars are similarly full.)

It is Scott's organizational mishandling of his groups, not their look and feel, that has led them all to the brink of collapse. To cite that organizational mishandling as a legitimate pretense for tinkering with that which is not broken in everyone else's groups is myopic and utterly ill-conceived. Frankly, selfish and lazy are other words that come to mind. Great groups are born of an organizer's passion, creativity, personality and commitment. Not an off-putting, gaudy red button that is a laughingstock among my members ("Nice to see you," we now all say, mockingly, at the end of each event) or a hideously cluttered and confusing, homogeneous event page that obscures all that is inventive and unique about a given group.

All of the recent changes that so many of us abhor are aimed at creating a false sense of community, an entirely phony one, in failing groups where that sense does not already exist naturally. That is insidious in and of itself, but the even greater issue is that these nonsensical changes stand in the way of and thus serve to destroy the more intimate and genuine sense of community that DOES already exist in successful groups. In other words, the feel-good nature of healthy, thriving groups -- to which all of Meetup's successes can be traced (including its financial success and thus Scott's paycheck) -- is being sacrificed in the interest of trying to artificially generate fake communities in the few unsuccessful groups -- such as those run, by his own admission, by the head of the company.

Let's say my sense of balance is such that I cannot learn to ride a bicycle. Does it make sense, then, that I should issue a global edict requiring that henceforth, all bicycles must have four wheels, making them much easier for me to balance, but reducing them to plodding, enervating shells of what they once were, now serving no useful purpose and slowly being abandoned by society? The metaphor's not all that stretched.

Respond to this letter, Scott. Publicly, right here. We organizers who pay all of your bills are more than deserving, and have been for a very long time.

[Tim O.]

2. An update from the author of the letter to Scott

As the author of the above open letter, I thought I would include a bit of updated information.

The letter was allowed to exist without constraints in Meetup's discussion area for several days, much to my surprise. It generated several pages of replies from Meetup organizers and members, generally expressions of surprise at Scott's failures, and outrage at his subsequent actions. After a few days, however, the post was closed to further replies, which has the effect of squelching it, because Meetup's thread hierarchy causes any post that does not receive replies to slowly move down the list, and the pages, within the thread. Thus, a post that until that time had remained on the first page, where others were more likely see it, has now moved several pages back and of course continues to slide.

What is more interesting is that Meetup reacted, at the same time it closed the post to new replies, by banning me from any comments on the board whatsoever. A search for my other posts over the years will show that while many were complaints about the mishandling of the company and my own outrage at being charged for the privilege of having my groups slowly mishandled while I watched, nevertheless a substantial number of my replies were to other Meetup users who needed help with various parts of the site -- how to change their email addresses, why they couldn't get some function to work, etc. I am no longer able to post replies of that nature, either. Meetup's terms of service as it applies to the message board says that if a member repeatedly posts items that Meetup HQ finds objectionable, the member will be warned. If the problem continues, and only after repeated incidents and warnings, will the member be banned from further posting. I received zero warnings, and have in fact never received any response from Meetup HQ. The only way I learned that I can no longer post was when I attempted to reply to another member's problem with a solution, only to see big red letters telling me that I no longer was authorized to comment.

It's in some ways gratifying that Meetup was sufficiently moved by what I had to say that they broke their own rules in their efforts to silence me. But, clearly, they weren't moved enough to actually take what I had to say to heart, or even to give me the courtesy of a form-letter response. Apparently Totalitarianism is an acceptable philosophy in Scott's world. I'm fairly confident that no one reading this will find that even a tiny bit surprising.

[Tim O.]

3. And one more thing

I hereby give my permission for anyone so inclined to copy the above and post it in the Meetup discussion thread that is linked in Post 1 of this thread. I, of course, am no longer able to do so. But be advised that posting my words on Meetup could well be viewed as grounds to similarly silence you, so if you post the above there, you do so at your own peril. I must say, though, that there's something rather satisfying about being silenced by Meetup. I take it as a sign that I'm doing the right thing.

[madinmaryland]

4. This is a really odd thread. Have never heard of this site and don't really want to. nt

[LVZ]

5. 13 million members, 120,000 meetup groups

13 million members is just slightly less than, for instance, the entire Asian population of the USA.

Although Meetup.com says they are in 196 countries, the vast majority are in the USA.

http://www.meetup.com/about/

In 2004, Howard Dean (still my favorite) used Meetup.com as his main early organizing vehicle.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/07/tech/web/meetup-2012-campaign-sifry

Unlike the majority on Facebook (and DU?), most Meetup members are not just active online, but active in their communities. There are Democratic Party Meetup groups (I am the nominal organizer for one) in every state and thousands of liberal cause groups that use Meetup.com for organizing. When Meetup.com HQ makes organizing more difficult, it affects millions of people. The fact that some remain unaware of the world's largest site for in-person real-world meetings does not make it less important.

[LVZ]

6. 32 pages of unanimous angry organizer comments and still no reversal

Damage your customer's organizing functions and events - what a way to run a business.

(2013) http://www.meetup.com/boards/thread/31635792/300

(2011) http://meetupbannedme.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/scott-heiferman-apology-from-meetup-you-never-saw-fisked/

[Chris28mm]

7. Southern California Meetup Organizers Unite

Since Meetup.com HQ has closed down the forum site (as of March 28th), Organizers have no way to voice their opinion or even assist each other, I would like to recommend that Organizers create a group in each city so you can meetup and have a way to stay in touch.

It is clear that MeetUp.com neither wants our input or advice as organizers and have made it as hard as possible for Organizers to have any input in the design or functionality of the Meetup.com site.

For any Organizers in SoCal please join us at: http://www.meetup.com/SoCaMO/

Chris J.

[ellisonz]

8. I remember this site from the Dean campaign in 2003.

I've seen some of their groups around town but I guess they've really gone down hill. Oh well.