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."
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...
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.
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".
