Not talking about any local meetup group or meetup community. This is about the company and the platform.

They spread propaganda of "community" and "connection." But in reality, they leverage their paying subscribers called "organizers" by having them do all the work, assume all the risks and liabilities of practically running their own little companies, let them drive themselves crazy marketing their groups. This gives the Meetup platform high visibility, which in turn attracts more members many of which try "organizing" (and paying for) their own online groups. The cycle perpetuates. This has been going on for years.

Yet there's no service. The company is poorly run. In fact, there's no management. Their offices in New York is "organically" self-guided by teams where employees pick only what they want to work on. There's no accountability. There's absolutely no customer service. Organizers are neither customers nor employees nor independent contractors. Nobody answers the phone. No online contact. No immediate email reply (usu. 48 hr response by an intern who can't understand English). They censor their forums. They ban organizers from posting criticism. Their platform has always been buggy.

Now they abruptly change everything yet again to what they call "New Meetup" without warning nor instructions. Everybody is even more confused and pissed. They don't beta test anything. They don't listen to organizers who are their paying revenue base. They downright embarrass them. They use them as guinea test pigs. What pompous arrogant disrespect! Oh there's also a systematic diversion to another website called UserVoice to placate angry customers who try to offer suggestions for improvement. It's all an extremely shrewd, sinister and brilliant scheme. Most scams are.

Top management will continue cheering about themselves as a "tool" for "better communities." This is the most egregious twist. Their investors and parent company (eBay) must be proud. Yet the only source of revenue for them is actually the organizers. They continue to sucker their organizers into thinking their preferences matter.

No wonder their site traffic is going down month over month, year over year. While Yelp, Groupon and BigTent traffic keeps increasing. Check out SiteAnalytics at Compete dot com. And they still don't get it. It's just blind arrogance. They know they've got the organizers "by the balls" and they think that's all they need.