"A cynic could argue that Meetup saw the opportunity to bring the growing number of Resistance members to its own site, boosting its user base numbers and therefore its revenue. But making a decision like this is a risk for a company like Meetup, which is dependent on paid subscriptions. It went into this knowing it would lose Trump supporters as members, and anger others."
I wonder how long it will allow these "free" #Resist Meetups to continue before reverting them all to "paid" Meetups as they did with their initial business model in the early 2000s, i.e. luring people into the "free" Meetup groups and then later charging substantial semi-annual dues (now nearly $90 every six months per group).
I have lost my four core members because of this unexpected event, so we will settle on our transition strategy at our last Meetup Saturday night.
(I sent this to CivicAction at Meetup dot com. I also sent out-takes to the groups that belonged to, most of them for computer users.)
I am cutting my access to all of my Meetup groups and to Meetup.com as of February 28, 2017, in response to a corporate decision by Meetup to support the Resist political action collectives.
“We decided that we wanted to do more to support these efforts so we created a network of 1,000 #Resist Meetup groups with a few special characteristics.” --
https://www.meetup.com/help/article/2736376/
While I am sympathetic to many of the social justice causes pursued by Resist, I must object to Meetup’s delivering a special value to them. My comrades on the right wing also have advanced the cause of freedom. Their methods and their successes do not grab headlines. It is a matter of culture.
As collectivists, my progressive comrades form strong groups, and groups are easy to see. They grab headlines when they grab other people’s property. But that property had to be created first. The exceptionally great wealth of America was the work of millions of individuals who mostly minded their own business, making their own lives as best they knew how by the standards they chose according to their personal values. That does not make the home pages of news media – unless it is to “doodle” in celebrating the historical birthday of a dead writer, musician, inventor, or scientist.
Meetup.com is a tool for those conservatives, libertarians, and Objectivists who advance the ethics and politics of individualism. By creating new, no-cost platforms for one political group, Meetup.com of necessity excludes those of other political beliefs – and those groups with no political agenda. It is also a platform for millions of individuals who share personal – sometimes peculiar – interests of their own, far removed from politics. And that speaks to a fundamental problem with progressive causes.
It is critical that this be understood. Dr. Martin Luther King looked forward to a future in which each person is judged by the content of their character. But character is an attribute of a person, not of a group.
Choosing not to do business with someone because they are not from your ethnic, social, gender, class, or religious group is irrational. But freedom of association is a fundamental political right. While my collectivist comrades try to eliminate discrimination by engaging the power of the state, my friends on the right go to the root problem: lack of character.
If the owners of Meetup.com want to end social injustice, they should empower their customers who meet to build character. But that would mean creating a 1000 special groups for some religions or some philosophies in preference to others. And there is no way to parse that, because, after all, even karate builds character.
Therefore, I will delete my Meetup account and switch to some other service or set of services, such as Google Groups, which, in fact, evolved from the age-old Usenet maillists. Ultimately, no one needs Meetup.com. That is something to keep in mind.
Michael E. Marotta
Luke Setzer Club Coordinator, RoR Florida Coordinator
In February 2017, Meetup corporate management changed its policy of remaining apolitical and formed a "resistance" movement against our duly elected United States President. Search "Meetup #Resist" to learn more. The Meetup front page now gives the impression that all groups within its umbrella support this hard turn to the political left. Meetup corporate management sent an e-mail blast to all 30 million members with this highly presumptuous #Resist movement announcement. This action has motivated MANY people to leave Meetup. We have no interest in our expensive local group dues (nearly $90 every six months) subsidizing over 1000 "free" #Resist Meetups across the globe. Meetup has essentially turned itself into a Political Action Committee (PAC) which borders on both illegal and seditious corporate behavior.
Interested parties may wish to post similar complaints.
I doubt that Meetup will go bankrupt as you predicted. They may not even take a measurable loss from the few hundred who seemed to have voted with their feet. The site is privately held, so I doubt that we will see fully disclosed numbers, but they do have hundreds of millions of users, according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meetup_(website) ); and we are less than blip in that. Note, also, that they received a boost via the Howard Dean campaign, so they have a history of left wing political service in their business model.
