Yeah, I was a paying Meetup member for a short bit back around 2018-2019 when I hosted events with my own group, and have been a very active attendee of others' groups (but no longer an organizer of my own group) since 2020 on. I feel like the payment situation hasn't actually gotten that much worse-- the price for organizers that can be achieved with coupons is similar to what it was before, and attendees don't actually have to pay-- but they've made it feel a lot worse by making organizers dig for coupons and trying to trick attendees into thinking they need to pay.

But I think most of those changes happened before Bending Spoons bought Meetup. I don't think it was a situation where everything was great, then Bending Spoons bought them and it started going to crap (which I've heard some people in these groups retroactively claiming recently).

Meetup now is weird.. they hide everything behind blurs (for example people's last names), but the blurs are CSS, and one could modify the CSS and get the obscured info.

I think it also advertises "get premium to see gender ratios"...

> Bending spoons, the name just sends up red flags as parlor trickery.

'Spoon bender' was a deep insult in my circle when we were ~18. In honour of the ur-bender, Uri.

I'm pretty sure the name is after the scene in "the matrix" (there is no spoon etc).