Paradise lost: The rise and ruin of Couchsurfing.com
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I cannot think of an internet app that brought people together in a more meaningful and wholesome way at scale.
It was great while it lasted.
Edit: oh, and obviously closed source, and have it's entire db leak about once a year due to excellent security.
If 20% of people cause 80% of the trouble and this idea fixes that, then perhaps there is some merit in the idea even if you consider the downsides.
Apply that to the US (328.2 million people) and we have that 18,116 individuals are responsible for 50% of problems.
Mic drop
Nothing about trouble.
But perhaps it would be clearer if restated as, "50% of impact in a domain can be attributed to square root the number of people in that domain".
There is an extreme minority of people who comment and up/down vote who drive the discussion of the whole. The 99% rarely participate and just go along for the ride.
And that's how genocides start.
Also, if you have any influence over which 20 people you spend time with, they're probably the 20 out of 25 who are not those five.
I would host independently minded guests that don’t want/need hand-holding, and guests that are vetted for being socially respectful (tidy, no 3AM drunks, etcetera). My property is tobacco and alcohol free, which surprises friends, so I can imagine strangers being disrespectful.
Do trustroots.org or movingworlds.org provide filtering? I really never want to have to trawl through reviews, because I find it wasteful and also I think reveiwers tend to avoid writing anything truthfully negative (allusions and omissions might occur, but are not always obvious).
Which is weird, because of course the money comes from the guests.
I have seen the opposite dynamic when it was a buyer's market with real estate: the vendor is paying however the agent was actually helping the buyer (to the detriment of the vendor). Real estate agents make their money from volume of sales, to a first approximation.
But actually, on Airbnb you can't see the review of the other person before both have submitted their review. That ensures that neither party retaliates.
Furthermore, guests and hosts submit a review a very high fraction of stays, and one cannot submit a review without actually hosting or actually spending substantial money as a guest, so AirBnN avoids most of the problems that Amazon reviews have.
> I cannot think of an internet app that brought people together in a more meaningful and wholesome way at scale.
It also carried over to friendships. For a few short months, I was one of the most active hosts in my city (mainly because we had a house with lots of space and all of my housemates were couchsurfers), until the landlord wanted to sell and we had to move. After that, when I could no longer host, couchsurfers were still my primary social group and we met up multiple times a week to hang out, party or do activities together. I miss those days. I also know at least three people who met their spouses through couchsurfing.
On the other hand, my Airbnb experience was that of a cheaper hotel/rented accommodation, with no new friends, no social aspect, just a place to stay in exchange for money.
Once at scale, they have to appeal to everyone in the addressable market, which is a very diverse set of people, which makes shared community and closeness harder (what do 100m people all have in common except superficially?).
They don’t kill the openness intentionally, it’s just a consequence of that fact that mass appeal is the opposite of tightknit
How active are online meetups on Trustroots? It's nice to see that they do now exist, but I wonder whether the map limits it to people in the same geographical area. And I'l always be happy to see you on Thursday's BW Asia-Pacific weekly meetup.
I'll try dropping in to the BW online meetup soon!
My family hosted people for a year or two and we were never empty. The appeal of a family home with a private room that had dozens of reviews from well travelled guests was so overwhelming people would take an air mattress in my study if the private room was taken by others. We regularly had multiple groups of people staying. Our record was 11 which included 6 German 19yr olds who had a campervan but wanted access to a shower after a week in the Australian summer together.
We also were contacted by one person who was trapped in one of those "We paid for your travel here so we've confiscated your passport and you work in our shop until we decide you've paid your debt" situations. We gave her the comfort to know she had a place to stay and then a friend and I went round to collect her, he was accidently still wearing his police uniform from work, so unsurprisingly we recovered her passport quite quickly.
It was a truly great site at that time, I stayed in a few places using it, but switched to AirBnB when I could no longer find places to stay in the cities I needed to visit.
Hear, hear, fine sirs!
Naw, no judgement here - it's just a _gut feeling_ of a high-resolution detection/detector of the decline of the civilization-type-of-situation.
again, namaste to us all \m/
Curious, what techniques did they use for that?
Wait, this was a cop? Did they face any consequences for this?
I CS'd only once, in Ghana in 2011. It was great, but I was too late for the trend, it died pretty shortly after.
I think a bunch of things have started out this way. Uber/Lyft: just people driving in their spare time to help people out and make a little spare cash. The problem is that if you're an app that just relies on people helping others out for a little spare cash, you don't have a lot of capacity. If you don't have a lot of capacity, you're just a cute niche thing that isn't worth much. So you end up relying on full-time drivers and you need to cater to them and figure out ways to attract and retain them. An pro driving 60 hours a week is worth a lot more than an amateur driving 4 hours a week every other week - 30x more. Likewise, a pro renting out an investment property 25 days a month is worth a lot more than someone renting a room in their house a few days a month.
I think you end up with a pivot from "oh, this is a cute thing with a little compensation" to something that's just a regular business.
There is a nice census article on this. Here's a sample quote:
"In a study of Boston neighborhoods circa 1880, 37 percent of boarders were between 20 and 29 years old, and 27.5 percent were between 30 and 39 years old (see also, Scopilliti and O’Connell 2008). Widows and single women commonly made up their ranks. Indeed, estimates from 1900 show that 38 percent of working single women lived away from their families as boarders, often in the homes of their employer (Goldin 1980)."
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa...
Mariha (@mariha:matrix.org) was contributing for Warm Showers Android App and with https://warmshowers.bike/ happening she kind of kick-started the whole project.
We got funding recently from https://ngi.eu and with that we start to work for the next generation internet.
We would love to revive the spirit of early Couchsurfing and Warm Showers
WarmShowers Uncensored has more details on what’s happening: https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2111860
What shocked me was that even in the town of Bern, which is not a huge city, there were over a hundred people on CS who were advertising their couches or spare rooms for guests.
I loved the two week experience. It made me feel good about people. It also made the world seem smaller and more accessible.
A couple of years later I hosted a couple of teen brothers who were long boarding across the US. They were kind, goofy, and super appreciative. Again, a great experience.
I did read of some bad experiences, but the review system did seem to work pretty well for building reputation.
If CS had started charging $10/year, I think a lot of users would have paid it. That’s not much, and maybe not enough to fund it, but perhaps it would have postponed the bad changes.
I'd announce myself in the activities section - ie. I want walk around the city. A few mins later I'd have a group of people wanting to meet up and explore.
Instant friends. It was wonderful!
She said better as Tinder, more transparency and in the worst case still a comfy couch. She met her husband via it.
But I also heard from people how they hated when guests would show up and start acting like it was for dating. So many profiles would explicitly state that they were not looking for dates.
But in her case, she was super alpha female (gay), and I _think_ she had an eye for people who would be receptive to that. But she was also very cool, so I'm sure if she didn't get the right vibe she wouldn't push something that would become awkward.
From my background, I wouldn't have advised single women to host men. But two of the people who hosted me were single women, so I guess they were just more comfortable (or perhaps Swiss people are less accustomed to bad behaviors?
Really...I always heard it was terrible for guys because people only wanted female guests, women because it probably meant they weren't interested in sex, men because it meant maybe they might get laid.
The possibility of romance never really seemed like a transparent implication to me.
Both as a host and a surfer, I've always found solo experiences the best. Never had any hook-ups nor intended to, though I know many people who had.
Now I realize with horror that I've been misusing this word all my life.
We need help, mostly in developing new features, features to help connect all of us and create meaningful relationships and connections.
Please check out Trustroots GitHub or connect with how you can be involved. We are a small team but have big hearts to recompensate for the magic lost at CS.
Thanks and we can do this and keep HospEx networks like this thriving for decades to come.
“There really is no similarity between Palantir’s business model and Couchsurfing’s business model,”
The CouchSurfing community was wonderful, as I discovered from my first experience surfing in Irkutsk in 2009, to hosting in Japan in 2012, and co-hosting a meetup in Kaohsiung from 2016-2018. Some of the most dynamic and fascinating people had profiles, and the level of trust in strangers was immense. In my case it started largely because I had no other option, but it became a joy to pay it forward, and see how people worked together for the greater good.
Where is the community now? Many people, myself included, are still affected by lockdowns and border closures. Despite that, in the past year, BeWelcome has grown from 135,571 members to 167,073 members. We know we need a mobile app and an API, but it's been difficult for committed developers to get involved.
https://bewelcome.org/about/stats
These days I host a weekly online meetup at 23:00 New Zealand time every Thursday night. Welcome to come and hang out if you'd like!
https://meet.jit.si/BeWelcome-Chat_4MembersVolunteers
https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=2193733,1673820,266...
BeWelcome is similarly open-source and non profit, which I'd also recommend as a CS alternative (although they have a somewhat different vision to Couchers and CS).
I met a lot of people through Couchsurfing and HospitalityClub. It's boring to be in a new country and having your only social contacts be hotel employees who are being paid to be nice to you, and other tourists; all you can do is buy things, consume, and go out for dinner with other tourists. With CS2 and HC, by contrast, you could meet people and actually participate in stuff. Youth hostels are somewhat better than hotels on that axis, but CS2 was the bomb.
One of the great things about it was that, even if you didn't have a budget to travel, you could travel virtually by having people from random foreign countries come and stay at your house.
During the years I was participating in CS2, I was in a monogamous relationship, so I didn't have any opportunities to participate in the CasualSex aspect which other people in the comments are talking so much about; I saw it in action at CS2 parties a little, but most of what I know about it is hearsay.
Spies like Patrick Dugan were of course involved in CS2 even before the company was actually sold to them. I recall one ex-nuclear-sailor from the US who came to hang out with the couchsurfers here in Buenos Aires; he was supposedly working on an Argentine solar energy project.
Like a lot of communities, it was destroyed by granting a few people too much power. Being people (but lacking enough power to establish themselves as god-kings and found a dynasty) they used that power to privatize community resources and sell them off for their own benefit. It's a cautionary tale about checks and balances. Free-software licensing is an important control on abuses like this, but centralized hosting inevitably gives a lot of power to whoever has physical access to the data center.
I'm on the younger end, and around 2014 is when I was in my early 20's and rather much do airbnb vs couchsurfing because the reviews and the paywall was a compliment to allowing strangers stay in my place (alongside a fake/marketing fluff guarantee piece.) So I joined airbnb and used that, because couchsurfing was on the way out.
Early 00's Couchsurfing was a bit unregulated, and many people here forgot to mention the downsides - sexual assaults, thefts and such, which is not to say they didn't happen on airbnb or hotels, but the optics were never handled properly because "stranger, staying on couch, assaulted host" always catches headlines.
Plus comparing an airbnb to an couch vs a hotel, airbnbs won , you had a room for $20-40 a night, no fees - sometimes even less.
Now, there's room for another disruption, airbnb is highly not as efficient anymore for customer experience on the low end as they're moving to high end experiences, vrbo is kinda doing it's own thing and hotels are hotels.
Or maybe the high price of airbnbs are a reflection of how in demand and efficient all this actually is.
>Open Alternative to WarmShowers.org - contributors to the community-built WarmShowers Android app, first released in 2012, before any WS board existed (2015), with which the community has grown, and whose access was cut off after WS board closed backend code (ca. 2017) and released a new paid app (2020), effectively excluding from the community members who access the platform from mobile devices only and for whom the fee for the new app is unaffordable (i.a. long-distance bike tourers and hosts from countries with less developed infrastructure). The devs and other community members made previously many attempts to inform the board about the situation.
I haven't dug into the links and it doesn't seem to have been discussed on HN before, but it sounds like an unfortunately typical story. Of course, with each time that happens communities learn a bit about how to react differently going forward which I hope will bear fruit.
It's a shame that as a business CS didn't work out, but it also urges me to think of what things exist now that are equally magic that I don't appreciate. Craigslist?
Organically grown communities are both more durable and more fragile. Durable if not tampered with or commercialized, fragile otherwise.
2. Give it a FOSS and/or Copyleft legal license
If you're interested to help build Trustroots with us (we're a non-profit, volunteer based) — join us here: https://www.trustroots.org/volunteering
Different skills needed, starting from coding, ops, design, organizing, member support, translating, and more!
Does couchsurfing still work WELL if you’re willing to pay membership fees?
Then it’s good enough for me
I enjoyed hearing stories from travelers, and showing them around town.
But I'm not gonna pay for it to an at this point frankly dubious middleman.
Couchsurfing basically needs three things: a way to establish trust (Airbnb accomplishes this by appealing to a central authority), a demographic that’s able and interested in participating, and a way for folks to connect. Of these, trust is probably the hardest. What, in your own life, might enable this?
In my own experience, the inbuilt trust between returned Peace Corps volunteers (from an American long-term international service organization) stemming from shared experience led to its own internal couchsurfing culture that was alive and well when I last checked (pre-pandemic). What other affinity groups might work? Work, school, religious groups, hobbies, music? Are you a part of one, or could you be?
It really seemed couchsurfing.com became a victim of it's on success beyond whatever happened behind the stage. Over the years the number of popular articles that "advertised" it as a way to either have sex or just a free place to crash has brought attention that was detrimental to the experience. The number of stupid "hey bro, me and my buddy need a place to crash" requests went up significantly. This is what happens with any community.
But the important thing is that couchsurfing.com is just a website, it does not even matter so much. There are millions of people out there who are adventurous and out to meet people and those have not gone away. Couchsurfing meetups still happen. Couchcrashes (big long get-togethers in random cities of the world explcitly affiliated with couchsurfing.com) still happen. Airbnb is easier, but couchsurfing to a large extent was not about a place to stay - it is about connecting with the place you went to and people who lived there. (A good example of what doors couchsurfing might open seems to be "Couchsurfing in Iran: Revealing a Hidden World", but it's still on my to-read list) Back in the day you could always break that connect-with-people contract to a certain extent and it was not unwelcome, but as more people flooded the platform it became a much rarer paradigm.
Whatever happens I hope the word couchsurfing gets decoupled from the the website. I still travel and hop hostels and the target audience of couchsurfing has never ceased to exist. With more remote work it has perhaps grown? What has happened to couchsurfing.com happens to any online community. Growth entails erosion of value. Partly, why I am actually not apposed to light gate-keeping of a paywall. In any case, I welcome the next stage. And I am glad the article ends on a list of lesser-known alternatives (contributors to some of which commented in this thread!). Couchsurfing is not couchsurfing.com and it is not dead it is just looking for new forms.
That's pretty strongly bound up with your self image. You've described your character in writing. Most people will try hard to live up to that.
(Man, you accuse the US of pervasive racism and you get flagged into fucking oblivion in this fucking racist-dominated shithole. I only mentioned it because I have a lot of experience with US racism toward Latinos, which is fucking pervasive, but none with UK racism.)
Is this really a thing?
Counter that with my worst experience. We accepted a request on CS from a young brazilian artist to stay for a weekend, over from her studies in Italy. I tended to make a point of accepting people with limited reputation ... I had some things I looked for, but generally if someone looked like they might not get first pick elsewhere we would accept them (non-english speakers with terrible profiles were the norm). In this case we were a little busy but thought she would be an easy, low-effort fit for the household. Especially since one of our roommates was also a (lovely and extremely outgoing) young brazilian artist. Our visitor arrived and seemed cool and relaxed; just in town to see the sights. So my wife and I did the usual and took her for a walk through some of the nicer parks and buzzier areas near the flat. One strange thing happened at this point (that I didn't pick up on at all) ... she was smoking, and making a point of talking about being a smoker. I don't smoke, but my wife later commented that it was obvious she wasn't a smoker. I thought it was odd but didn't question it. Anyway, long story short, by the end of the weekend the "visitor" had revealed herself as a stalker who had found our brazilian roommate through her public facebook profile and had begun an "art" project on her, which involved collecting her public photos and stories for a diary / portfolio, imitating her in her every day life, and finally tracking down her CS apartment through some very basic online sleuthing (our roommate wasn't mentioned in the account) and joining us for a couple of days. She rounded a couple of us up on her last day and admitted everything, including the bit about not being a smoker which hit me for six (because it had already been brought up!). She then went to our roommates work (a local bar) and laid everything out to her while she was working .. which led to our roommate being fired for literally losing it in front of everyone. She wanted to go the police but in the end we just reported the couchsurfer. A totally wild experience that was the beginning of the end of our glasgow hosting adventures.
I was trying to set up my new place for hosting when I ran into the paywall. Didn't want that. Now I'm hosting on Couchers.org instead.
This worked very well and the only "bad" experience we ever had was one of those 12 people that stayed the weekend of that event was.. harmless, but a bit unpleasant and odd, and that was because we relaxed our vetting a small bit for that event.
And honestly, I don't know if I would have paid for an account at that time, as an active host. I got into it because my housemates were into it and when we were planning on moving in together, we discussed it. If it had cost money to join, I can't imagine we would have bothered, certainly not all of 5 of us.
With that said, nowadays, I think some barrier to entry would make me feel more comfortable with it. Back then, in my early twenties, I was a bit more relaxed about sharing my personal space, I guess.
https://blog.rplasil.name/2016/02/the-fall-of-couchsurfing-a...
So they had a one-time “verification fee” of around $60-$100 (I think it varied by region or something) and a promise that we would never have to pay anything again.
Some time later they started charging a monthly “COVID fee” or something (not much but also varying by region) but unless you paid that, you were suddenly unable to access anything on your account AT ALL.
I hadn’t used Couchsurfing in a while so when I logged in after that update, it was as if my account had been hijacked and ransomed; people couldn’t even delete their profiles (along with the info visible to the public) until they paid (again.)
You might say that a few bucks isn’t a big deal, but if these fees were paid via Apple’s IAP system, Apple would have given me a refund without question like they do with all other crap services, whereas Couchsurfing has yet to even respond to my requests for a refund.