Meetup is a testament to the extent one can polish a turd. They've put so much effort into aesthetics and yet their app/site is so slow and fails in random ways.

Meetup essentially had a monopoly, you could go to a new city or foreign country and immediately connect with likeminded people. I guess it wasn't profitable enough to pay off their VC so they kept changing it and adding dumb "features" and raising the price... and now it's basically useless.