[polynomial]

It was abundantly clear from the time Heiferman founded meetup 10 years ago they were pursuing a gatekeeper model with a lock in strategy.

When that struggled to take off they had to relax the gatekeeping a bit, but they're never really changed their spots.

Another example of a widely used service where users trade off a list of hidden & future downsides for a little immediate convenience.

[apgwoz]

Lock in strategy? The strategy is to foster local community--nothing else. If it would work to not charge money they would. In fact, pretty much the only reason Meetup charges is to ensure organizers have "skin in the game" and as a result take it more seriously.

Meetup has a very well put together and well documented API. You can pretty much get all you need from that if you'd like to migrate away from Meetup, though, they do in fact make it hard to get email addresses to avoid spam.

But, you could easily write a simple OAuth app which authenticated a user, pulled their details and asked for an email address to migrate away.

[dickbasedregex]

Becuase the API is really a valid option for the average user...

[apgwoz]

I can name no website that makes migrating away from itself easy. The fact that you can more or less get everything you need to migrate off of Meetup with a couple of scripts is pretty good in comparison.

If it's too much trouble as an "average" user, it's not too hard to find someone who can help.