LJ in bed with meetup

[gusl]

Why is LJ in bed with an evil dot-com failure?

MeetUp was popular up until they started charging group fees. This drove away the large majority of their community. I have nothing against group fees in principle, but MeetUp's fees overburdened organizers, and were high enough to mostly cause deadweight loss. MeetUp was also the only "respectable" website that I ever caught in the act of sharing my email with spammers, despite their privacy policy.

LJ should at least charge them for the advertising!

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Btw, I think it's great that LJ is promoting meet-up events. I just think they would do better to promote free standards ("free" as in freedom), instead of a proprietary site with lock-in powers.

Comments

lock in

[metaeducat10n.livejournal.com]

I think that the local LJ-user groups were among the popular meetup groups back in the day, and LJ probably got locked-in (and or feels it owes them a debt). Livejournal probably had very little appearance on any other social networking site (how many Tribe or Myspace groups are there for LJ-users?...)

I have been wanting there to be a POV Software Wiki where people can go to instantly get the information about the best-of-genre and be warned about crappy stuff. Wikipedia is sort of like that, in that you can provide "See Also" links and put in NPOV comparison but you can't really bias things toward open standards. Some guy has made a blog about free alternatives to meetup.

I was surprised I couldn't find a LJ discussion with people yelling to slash and burn the meetup support and switch to something else. Usually LJ users are a vocal community for free software and open standards. But LJ is infamously hard to search. I couldn't find anything in the suggestions community, and all I found in a personal journal was this entry:

http://sanguinarius.livejournal.com/13464.html

If you find a few more you might be able to start a movement. Might be good to try the alternatives first and see if a compelling argument can be made for switching...I'd think this would be an easy enough feature for LJ to add to its own source base.

[bondage-and-tea.livejournal.com]

I like this writing style with the wikipedia links. Also was thinking how nice it would be to be able to use fancy new words in conversation and somehow subliminally transmit their meaning to everyone.

Also lock-in powers are what make Hotmail evil. As far as I recall, you can't forward a hotmail addy anywhere. You can with Yahoo - at least with their pay service - which made it easy to shift over to Gmail (back in the day).