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Comment by nateberkopec | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb ruined Couchsurfing because it changed social expectations around hosting strangers at your house. Before Airbnb, no one really even thought people would pay for the privilege to sleep on your couch or your spare bedroom. But once Airbnb started getting popular, I think a lot of hosts on CS were thinking well, this is neat, but I could get paid doing this. And a lot of CS guests became refugees from Airbnb thinking "well, if Airbnb wants me to pay for this, why do I go to CS and get it for free?"

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.

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I was an avid Couchsurfer and early AirBnB host. Initially AirBnB had a vibe very similar to Couchsurfing. Both seemed to lose the personal touch as they became larger networks. Money exchange is highly influential as well, but I don't think we can cross off network scale from the causes.

I think AirBnB was trying to have that vibe at the beginning. The problem is that you end up in a situation where that vibe doesn't scale. If you're trying to create a business worth billions, you need a lot more hosts and transactions than amateurs accommodate. An amateur might host someone for a few nights a month or a few nights per quarter. A professional is going to have an investment property that they're looking to book as much as possible and with the conveniences that make sure they get good ratings from guests.

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.

Same thing happened while I worked at Turo. They pivoted from "If we all shared our cars, we won't need as many! Less traffic and better for the environment!" to "We need to optimize for people who are buying cars/fleets and renting them out like a business, as they bring us the most value"

When did the pivot happen?

The worst thing about AirBnB and similar isn’t that it turns human interactions into a financial transaction. The worst thing is that it makes everyone expect that it will be a financial transaction. Once you’ve commercialized something that was more adhoc and free before, it becomes pretty much impossible to go back as you’ve changed the social norms.

I can't tell about the US, but paying money to sleep in spare bedrooms was a thing in Europe well before Airbnb.

Same here. Usually informal and under the table cash transaction. Not nearly as common as a formal lease though, but some people have issues with those.

People forget that prior to the middle class boom when cheap land in the suburbs was opened up with the automobile, home ownership rates were much lower in the US and it was quite standard to supplement your income by hosting a boarder to live in your home. This was very common all throughout the 19th Century and well into the 20th.

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...

I might be off trend myself, but 2011?? I CS'ed in 2016 in Singapore and it was insanely popular

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