Meetup

This site is great for meeting people with similar interests, attributes, or talents that are outside of the interests of the average local bar patron. I have a rare personality type and a 160 IQ which makes it very difficult to meet people that I can have a meaningful conversation with. I started a meetup group and have met some very interesting people. I think that groups that revolve around cleverness have better odds of turning out well because most of the people that show up can have amusing conversations on just about anything.

The much older people, shyer people, or geekier people that show up I just try to include and give them advice on things that they complain about. I like the idea of helping people with what I have learned as much as I do meeting people who challenge me and teach me things.

Most of these people would take me years of pub crawling to meet randomly

Almost 1.2k of my group members were removed by Meetup.com, after I stopped charging member fees. I had to stop charging, because Meetup.com put all the unpaid members in trial... pending removal... mode. So basically, they just took my money for 6 months and took away more than 90% of my members. Now, I have no way to contact many of my friends. I emailed them and tweeted at them... So far, no response. :(

Meetup pro trial is being pushed by meetup. If you sign up for the trial... meetup makes it very time consuming to rid yourself of meetup pro. Meetup pro is 2 or three time the already exorbitant standard meetup price of around $200 per year.

I signed up to create a meetup group over the weekend. Nothing risque. Nothing shady. Just a group to enable people and business owners to develop and maintain a WordPress site. Before I could even announce my first meetup, I got an email stating that my group had been cancelled. Granted, I did plan on coming back to add more details to my profile. According to the email I received, my group "wasn't a fit" for meetup. No specific reason. Just a link to their terms page. Also that it would take 4-7 days to refund my money. Hogwash. If they have the time to review every new group, then they can reach out to new members to correct the issues before cancelling their group and making them wait 4-7 business days to refund their money.

I have been a member of Meetup since 2008 and have met many many friends and had many wonderful experiences as a result of it. I have lived in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange county and have explored many different groups and met lots of great people through Meetup I seriously dont understand all the negative reviews... am thinking someone has an agenda.

I am not normally a complainer but as the organizer of a social meetup, I am totally fed up with trying to use the website and just go with a Facebook page and use eVite. It seems I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to address an issue I'm having and I feel my time is better spent with other things. Currently, I'm trying to figure out how to mark certain people who RSVP'd they were coming to an event as no-shows but am coming up empty. Plus I marked the people who did come and Meetup still maintained the head count for all who RSVP'd including the no-shows that I did not mark as attending!

Also - the site is not the least bit attractive and just difficult to navigate. I think by now (1-7-18) any issues they said they were having/fixing should have been remedied. Meetup is not cheap and I have a hard time justifying the amount we are paying, so it may be time to tell Meetup goodbye!

There is bad and good. If they don't like you or you don't fit in, you re just treated like dirt. Some of the organizers are very nice and others are ignorant. I already talked to organizer who had serious trust issues with meeting new people. Well duh! What are you doing on meetup? I guess it's like everything else. You have good and bad but I did meet some really cool people. There are better ways of meeting people. Oh and if you re new to a group and you re not liked, some organizers will delete the event!

Check out my site p2pcolorado.com... working to replace failing meetup, as a five year organizer, with my own site... Meet-up sucks... hate it now! Also lost a bunch of unpaid members and all control of my group... lame!

I have been an assistant organizer for 3 years and loved the old app. Why did they change it and not ask the organizers of one of the best meetups in the San Francisco East Bay what we thought of the app and gained feedback before they went live with it? It's not user friendly, you can't find comments and the pictures are so small you can't tell who is who. Go back to the old app PLEASE!

I been thinking of sueing meetup for mental crap! I joined a bunch three years ago, and it was fine. It helped me with all my depression and activities during my divorce.
I helped this organizer this weekend, felt strange about the situation, she flirted with me, and I didn't respond, next thing I got banned from all my
Meetups, and also some friends on Meetup I was on FB has all unfriended me!
She got two organizers to kick me out of the two popular ones I always have done!
What the $#*! did I do!

This isn't fair. She never ever thanked me, she just left me to be myself in a room of 70 people, awkward and left alone!

They suck

I am the organizer of a Meetup group and I just had a simple question, which I hoped I could email or call to find the answer. The Help page is a total joke with almost no information. It would be one thing if I was just an attendee, but I am a paying member of this service. Is it legal to offer a service with absolutely no way to contact the company? Don't they have some responsibility to assist their customers?

Until this time, I felt very positive about Meetup, but I simply cannot believe their lack of customer service or even anyone that can help me. I guess they have my money and that's all they care about... rather than having good customer service. Maybe customer service is a thing of the past in our new world order of millennials?

There are some decent meetups, but the majority of meetups are people shilling their services. This is especially true of the singles meetups. I'm just tired of being hit up to join some therapy session, personal coaching, or what not at a meetup. I thought the meetups were to "meet" people, not to be hit up for sales calls.

One thing I learned about meet up is I rather make friends the old fashion way and gradually in time get to truly know a person. Just hanging out with strangers from the start is something I would not do again. Worst time I ever had in my life. For the people I hung out with in the group YBLA can go to hell for the inaappropiate and ignorant ways they conducted themselves on this one night.

It is a stalker's paradise! There are so many obvious fake profiles; people who have been banned just rejoin with fake profiles, then show up to meetup events to repeatedly stalk, harass and terrify the person they are obsessed with. When Meetup is notified of these fake profiles, they do absolutely NOTHING about it even though they are aware through comparing the stalkers IP addresses. I have been told that I need to file repeated lawsuits against the criminal stalker before they will divulge the information. I had Organizers who repeatedly had to warn their membership to beware of this sick man and his repeated presence in banned groups in an attempt to protect me and keep me safe. Ultimately, I had to leave Meetup completely, while the sick, perverted stalker now has up to 8 fake profiles. All Meetup screams loud and clear is that they are a "Safe Harbor"... meaning they will take absolutely NO RESPONSIBILITY for any resulting harm. Meetup is a disgrace to the community.

The latest version of the app is horrid, clunky, and hard to navigate. Also, the redesign of the app icon/logo looks more like a Strawberry Shortcake design than a meetup site. The whole thing feels like little thought was put in other than to just change it - not improve it.

I started an account as a way to get people together that might be interested in Toastmasters. Toastmasters clubs can be (ours is anyway) a very diverse group of people with differing opinions. For Meetup to go political (#resist) is very classless. In my opinion, a waste of a good concept. Bye Bye Meetup.

I'm reading a lot of negative reviews, especially from organizers. It makes sense since many online businesses won't let you cancel or close the account. They want to keep charging $$$ against your will.

I researched online "how to report an online business" and I found "10 Effective Ways to Complain About a Company Online". Some may not be effective, others may:

1. Go to the company website
2. Contact the Better Business Bureau
3. Contact the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
4. Check out the Ripoff Report
5. Email *******@uce.gov
6. Try Yelp
7. Post on Planet Feedback
8. Google your attorney general
9. Post on Pissed Consumers
10. Visit Resolver

Source: https://www.salesforce.com/hub/service/how-to-complain-company-online/

Be very careful which groups you join & scrutinize the intentions of the organizers.
In general, the organizers exist to serve their own interests. I have first hand knowledge of one organizer who's created various singles clubs to target the age groups of twenties, thirties, fourties, fifties. He also used fake personas of pretty girls as co-organizers, to kickoff invite to meetups. Now approach a venue / restaurant and offer to bring X people if they can give you a kickback. The kickback varied from negotiating a cheap meal (and not passing it on, in effect pocketing the difference). Needless to say, the pretty organizers always found an emergency excuse not to turn up. This happened in Sydney Australia. Thread very carefully if you live in Sydney and see variations of the same theme, do not take anything at face value.

DISCLAIMER! I'm not associated with the group AT ALL! But I witnessed them in action today at SUTRO Baths SF. About 150 amateur photographers shooting. They took over the entire ruins, beach, rocks like little ants with cameras and their music blaring. The main guy (organizer) asked me how long I was going to be on the beach?!? The entire experience was embarrassing to witness and my experience at Sutro was RUINED. I saw a few guys had flashes on tripods with the ocean. Heheheh. Wave coming...

I have seen plenty of my friends find the love of their lives on meetup as well. Highly recommend all single young person to join 20s and 30s meetups. Meetup can be a great way to build social network for persons of all ages too.

I've been using it for over 5 years. I've never been scammed or setup. Its a good to use site to find like minded people or support.

One problem is on the site, it does not display the year of events so it's hard to tell if the event is recent or not.

Las Vegas Modeling and Photography... I didn't know it was going to be handled like a professional business as it is only a meetup to help teach, educate, and meet other people in this. The organizer, Gia, seems to be a bit too forward with people if any issues having certain people photos that they like as their favorites same to her photographers but doesn't seem to be fair and reasonable. She tells me after I realized my single photo wasn't out there that this is the way it operates in the industry whether I like it or not, the way she is putting it. Now her last comment back to me was 'no one asked me to come to this' as it only is where anyone can come to this to see if it's a good fit or good group. I"m shocked of her taking charge how she handles customers coming in. Not sure if she's been doing this in charge thing for long or not. She has two other assistance on this program assisting her.

MeetUp provides ZERO features that could be used to track no-shows. MeetUp has zero incentive to keep groups fresh or encourage attendees to actually honor their RSVP and just keeps raising their price. It's clear that many "attendees" RSVP "yes" to signal interest, but have no intention of actually going. Just took over a group of 600+ members. 99% hadn't even looked at the group in a year. Conversion from member to RSVP is abysmal and chance of an RSVP attending is anywhere from 1 in 3 to 1 in 10, but MeetUp's pricing model is built on inflated numbers. I expect social distancing will take out many MeetUp groups... hopefully it will put MeetUp out of its miserable existence as well.