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.
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 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
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.
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!
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.