To make my underlying logic explicit :

Why impose fees on the people who are doing the work to organize Meetup groups ? Doesn’t that punish the very people who are putting in the most work ? Would it be unreasonable, then, for those folks to view the new fees as punitive ? Obviously they did, because Meetup seems to have largely collapsed.

Google “Meetup, fees”, and see what you pull up.

There were many other possible financial models Meetup could have pursued.

I did a couple of posts, in the last few days, on The Daily Kos which declared Meetup.com to be dead or dying.

One hung out on the recommended list all day. Then Scott Heiferman, CEO of Meetup, emailed me. His email started with “Dude” . It went something like this : “Dude. Meetup’s not dead. it’s just begun. We working on a whole new set of tools to give people even more power…..”

He left his NYC number. I called it. He wasn’t in and I left a message letting him know that since I’d declared his business kaput that I felt a responsibility to let him know what I thought could be done to salvage the mess and that I’d been willing to have a chat about it. I also suggested that he might want to consult with Mark Kraft.

I asked Mark Kraft about Meetup. Mark Was very succesful in getting lots of people to somehow work together for free in a way that met their needs and also his. Mark’s the ex-business manager of LiveJournal , which recently sold out to Six-Apart. He told me that he didn’t think Meetup’s business model was very sound : so-so software and too many employees.

That’s about what I thought.

One funny aspect of it has been that, because of the way in which Meetup facillitated the Dean campaign I assume, DFA folks weren’t willing to take action or criticize Meetup even as most of Meetup’s members were fleeing the crazy new fee system that punished group leaders.

So, grassroots Democratic organizing took a body blow.

It was all pretty dumb, and what I couldn’t figure out was this : why not just ask all Meetup members for a flat $5 yearly fee ? That would have raised far more money and only deterred a few from joining.

I’m still scratching my head.

This is a rip off or a scam to get money for nothing.

I think your analogy on banking is a little off. Let’s look at Wordpress instead…it is more apples to apples. If WP decided that they wanted me to pay $3/month to continue to use their software to run my blog and to have access to the support community, I would pay it. That isn’t bullshit, I would pay it. WP has provided a great piece of software that I have gotten a great deal of use from. I have even made some good income from blogging, so I would have no issue with paying a very nominal fee if they decided to try and make a business from it.

If you look at the first picture, it’s pretty clear. The $2 was, well, a Better Off Dead reference, not some “we all have to pay $2″ thing.

I mean, reframe it this way: If you had “free checking” at your bank, and out of the blue they started charging you $9/month for the “privilege” of taking your money, wouldn’t you look consider looking at other banking options? That’s all we’re doing here, considering other options. What’s Communist about considering other options?

This is funny! I laughed when I saw Peter Caputa (comments pictured above) taking breathless swings at our Seattle Blogger group for — how dare us — considering to organize an alternative meeting/event website? “Whiners,” he calls us.

Hmm, l…