The social proof that a couch surfing reference brought was second to none. Each one boils down to this "I, a stranger, stayed for a few nights in this other strangers home for free, and they were good human beings". That social proof carried to any part of the globe you visited.
I cannot think of an internet app that brought people together in a more meaningful and wholesome way at scale.
It was well thought out too, hard to spam with fake comments etc.
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.
Actually I might retract that statement, further reading on https://couchers.org/ makes me think that it could have been a lot better. People may not have left negative reviews because they didn't want to be perceived as difficult hosts/guests.
> That social proof carried to any part of the globe you visited.
> 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.
It seems like for any tech company to be successful and sustainable it has to destroy the openness and community it was born from. I discovered couch surfing right as my wandering days came to a close and I feel I sorely missed out.
I think the destruction of openness is a reflection of the user they serve. When Airbnb serves only NYC they can be idiosyncratic to the population there, and their smaller user base is a more similar type of person.
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
Could also be applied to community discussion, both online and in meatspace.
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 the square root of that is 135, which causes 25% of the total trouble. If we could only find these people and get rid of them, we'd have paradise on Earth!
The episode focused only on the downsides of this idea, not the upsides. And of course they chose the worst possible implementation to make the plot more juicy. With this attitude you can make any technology look bad.
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.
Nah... surely there's no way that software could mess up... people have all kinds of strange ideas, like traffic cameras looking for people using phones, and tag a guy scratching his head.... this surely is impossible to happen in real life with modern software.
I am very much still living this, Couchsurfing got more difficult to use and a lot of people don't use it because of the so called "pay wall" but luckily alternatives are there and will hopefully with more posts like this get more traction... I like Trustroots most
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 agree it's not the same, but AirBnB profiles with a long list of positive ratings as a guest play a similar role. "This person slept under my roof, acted well, and treated my home with respect". When I advertised my apartment for a sublet on Craigslist, I received a couple AirBnB profiles and considered them pretty compelling as references. I ended up subletting to one of those people, and they were great.
The dynamics are such that bad reviews are rarely given by host or guest. The flow is carefully tailored to produce this result. As a guest especially, why complain about a place you’ll never revisit when the payback could be a negative review of you that makes it more difficult to use the service?
As mentioned by another comment, both host and guest submit their review before seeing the other's review. And they rarely interact again. Having looked at many property listings, and stayed at places with marginal reviews, I'm quite sure bad hosts get bad reviews. And I am pretty sure the same is true of guests.
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.
You could make the same argument about Couchsurfing.
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.
Does AirBnB provide a “super-guest” filter, or equivalent so that you can brainlessly and reliably filter for suitable guests?
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).
it's funny because when it comes to any real disputes, AirBnb sides with landlords as much as possible (and as much as PR will allow), because that's who are they getting the money from. The guests are just the 'meat' in the machine so it would be more consistent if they allowed property owners to vet guests even more to avoid any issues/disputes in the first place.
For RoboCat's case - it does still allow to not accept a certain guest after looking at hteir profile etc, but IMO that's too far into the journey - it'd be better from UX perspective and satisfaction if such a guest never found the property as available in the first place.
> [because they are getting the money from landlords]
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.
This was also the success secret of the early church. The apostles and shepherds who visited believers in other cities brought with them such social proof in the form of a written letter.
That was very standard in the Roman empire at the time. Formalized patronage relationships were one of the core social organizing principles and given the distances, a letter from your patron to one of their contacts was _the_ mechanism for social proof.
It's amazing what a well written software is able to accomplish. Other remarkable examples of establishing trust between strangers are eBay and most darknet markets.
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.
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"
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.
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)."
A few developers from different HospEx (hospitality exchange) platforms (Trustroots, WarmShowers Android app devs, BeWelcome) started an attempt to federate the HospEx world.
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
I submitted this to HN so if anyone prefers a discussion here rather than on Matrix/Telegram feel free to comment there
Here's the link to the submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28587228
I don’t have experience with CS but for WarmShowers which was built on trust and openness, current spirit is censorship, deleted accounts and no way for the community to influence the board which makes bad decisions - excluding community members, maybe unaware of its US-centered perspective on users and “targeting” to part of the community, maybe prioritizing their own profits over what would be good for the community.
I used CS in 2008 in Switzerland, and it was a great experience. The people I met and stayed with were all nice and friendly (even if sometimes a bit quirky).
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.
Ah, couchsurfing. It truly was a paradise and a fantastic community. I have a lot of fond memories when I would just hitchhike whole summer throughout europe and beyond. Meeting all sort of people with every background imaginable. I don't think there is a way for me to recreate that kind of freedom anymore. And the community was really trusting to the point of ridiculousness - I remember one host in Italy had some emergency and had to go out of town for a day while I was about to appear and he just texted me where he left the keys lol
The first app I'd fire up when arriving in a new city was the CS app.
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.
One of my hosts did the same. She was more casual about 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.
I think hosts learned to post very clearly if they were not looking for dates. That way potential guests would not misunderstand acceptance (for a place to stay) as also being a potential for romance. I saw plenty of host profiles that were very clear on their disinterest in romance. I did not see any profiles that said "looking for dates", as I'm sure that would not have worked out well... imagine the emailed photos they would receive...
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?
Well "dating app" is a bit of a euphemism here for no strings attached sexual encounters since will be leaving soon, isn't it? Met guys who hosted primarily just for "easy hook ups", and am sure many woman enjoyed it for same reason. Nature of travel for most 20-somethings anyways.
That's what ruined it for me. Some time after AirBnB started, no one wanted to host my girlfriend and me as a pair. It seemed like all the people who just wanted to host travelers left for AirBnB and only the hookup-seekers remained.
As someone who used to host, I didn't like hosting couples because many a times they were absolutely not interested in having a "CouchSurfing experience", only looking for a free place to sleep. Also, since reviews were the currency for acceptance, it was hard to trust someone who just mentions their partner in passing, without linking to any profile.
Same applied to people willing to bring friends along.
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.
Yes, but that doesn't apply in my case. Both of us had plenty of recommendations independently. I'm pretty sure we would link to each other's profiles. More to the point, we didn't have trouble finding hosts as a pair for at least a year or two.
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.
I can definitely see the mechanism. On Tinder, people lie about themselves to make themselves more attractive. Couchsurfing info will likely be more honest.
Couchsurfing.com used to be a gem, I hosted a number of people so far removed from my bubble and had a great time with them. I hope a viable successor appears.
There's Pasporta Servo, still going strong since way before couchsurfing was a thing. You need a moderate amount of implication, which acts as a sort of filter for people who only want to goof around. This can be either a good or a bad thing.
The only time I touched cs was in 2014, when my wife suggested to find a place via it and registered a female profile. 100% of the profiles looking at her were male and like from a dating site ad. There also was an unwanted email spam about who she could stay with - also very dating-site-like. Airbnb felt way more friendlier and safer.
Oof, that's rather sad. My experience with it was 2008 and 2009 and it was very different: very casual, interesting people from around the world staying with and hanging out with each other. It was very pleasant and was the focal point of my social life during that time, until I moved to a town without a presence that was too far away from any hub area. And then I heard it declined... which is I guess where your experience comes in. That's very sad.
At Trustroots, we are all volunteers and building a platform for all to use safely and provide the amazing experiences we all had participated in often on CS.
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,”
Ok, but I still can imagine a few ways it could be useful to intelligence agencies : It's a network of places to stay around the globe without the need to show your passport or give your credit card.
In hindsight, I had no idea how new the website was when I joined Couchsurfing in 2005. Now I understand why the people I met were all so enthusiastic about the grand hospitality experiment -- we were the early adopters.
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.
I'm a volunteer dev for https://couchers.org which was started in response to the Couchsurfing paywall and mentioned in this article. It's steadily growing in both users and features, and is open source and non-profit.
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).
This article focuses on the few dozen people who had the most power, including my friend Menelaos, but the real story of CS (after the backups failed, "CS2") was the story of a community of millions of people building something wonderful together. That small nucleus of people who ultimately sold us out contributed, but they only contributed a tiny proportion of the whole.
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 fear I'm probably part of the problem, or I was too "late."
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.
A note for those talking about it going non-free downthread, that's apparently fairly recent and a sad example of central board control going closed behavior. From https://openhospitality.network:
>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.
I remember trying to see what it was like but then you have to pay in order just to see how the platform works. It seemed very hostile to new users and people tempted by the idea.
Probably at least partly a feature, to ensure a minimum level of commitment from members? My word of mouth knowledge of how well it works is good enough that I would pay without hesitation if I needed it.
If I'm trying this idea for the first time. I'd like to know if my planned routes have potential places on WS or am I just paying for a "your search has 0 results" page.
I just checked with the guy who recommended it to me and he said when he used it, it was free. Website also seems to confirm that. Not sure what changed when?
I remember using CS in 2008, and there was also this ensuing feeling of magic. Like, things always worked out in incredible, and unexpected ways. It never occurred to me at the time that none of that was owed or guaranteed, and it could just as easily come to an end. That magic after all was the byproduct of groups of cooperative, uncoordinated actors, all participating in experiment of radical acts of selflessness.
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?
> There was a massive spike in users on the site under Espinoza, but because they’d been attracted in part by an advertising push and there was an easier onboarding process, they were less committed and slower to adapt to the pay-it-forward spirit of Couchsurfing. Suddenly, there were a ton of people who were active surfers and relatively few who were actively hosting. So it started taking surfers longer to find hosts.
Organically grown communities are both more durable and more fragile. Durable if not tampered with or commercialized, fragile otherwise.
The decision to take venture capital was really the start of all the subsequent issues. They should have just asked surfers to pay a dollar on each day that they sent a message or something to that effect; surely it would have added up to millions without being onerous.
I learned to couch surf in the 1980s, west coast Canada, US and Europe. Convivial people in the arts, music and so. Even surfed a barn couch in southern france. Biking and hiking was sometimes a common denominator. Internet optional.
Membership fees was a horrible idea. They should have done a Wikipedia style "We need to pay to keep the lights on.. make a donation" and maybe offered a badge in return.
The same people that wanted to host in the first place. When I was really into Couchsurfing, my girlfriend and I searched for apartments that made it easy to host, the same way that people seek ways to host via AirBnB.
I enjoyed hearing stories from travelers, and showing them around town.
I didn't know about the changes but actually wanted to reactivate my CS account after a couple years of absence. Now that the travel restrictions are mostly gone and me and my girlfriend finally have a flat with a nice living room I wanted to give something forward.
But I'm not gonna pay for it to an at this point frankly dubious middleman.
I guess some people may still want to host. At least if the community is still as good as when I used to host. Personally I'm sceptical that it is, and not going to pay to find out. I'd rather support the newcomers on Couchers.org and the like.
Probably? There may be a smaller one available for you.
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?
I have been pretty heavily involved with couchsurfing for years to the extent that I barely spend time with anybody who I did not directly or indirectly meet through couchsurfing. The well-traveled curious misfit persona I associate with the network works great for me. I have met the most curious personalities, forged strong relationships with people in other parts of the world, and I think I have experienced more good-will and generosity than most people ever will.
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.
For surfers, I felt it wasn't just awareness of potential reviews that made it work.
Before you surf, you describe yourself and then someone offers you their trust based on who they think you are.
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.
I tried to use it once around 2005 while studying my PhD in the UK. I needed to stay in London for a couple of days but was rejected and couldn't find a bed. I ended up going into a Hostel (hostelworld) at that time. It didn't work for me (maybe because of my nationality?).
From your web site I understand you're Mexican? What kind of attitudes about your nationality did you encounter in the UK?
(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.)
Couchsurfing was too intrusive for me when i tried.
It required somewhat nice and approchable picture of myself, with some interesting story to put on my profile
This was just too much asked.
Compare that to "pay N€, you can stay M nights"
I picked second every time.
To be fair, that is, an small interesting story, IMHO, not much to ask for a stranger to open their place to another stranger.
In the good old times, an story was not enough, you had to describe much more of yourself to help people trust you. That what CS did, created a global trusting metric. The free nights (that is exactly the symptom of not understanding the CS concept) on someone place was just part of the whole thing. The connections were some of the main benefits and those were incomparable.
Or course, CS was not for everybody, you needed to be wired in certain way to use and to enjoy it, but f you did, there was nothing like it and it was as good as travelling gets.
Wow, heartbreaking. I loved Couchsurfing. To me, still one of the best examples of what the internet could be. So to see what it was, and then to see what Capital does to it. Heartbreaking. And they call it the tragedy of the commons.
10 years ago, there was a lot of traveling hippies on CS. We (4 guys) had an appartement in the city center of a touristic town and we did have some female visitors that quite openly talked about how they like the concept of free love and sampling for biological compatibility before committing to a relationship. That said, I don't think any of us ever took any of them up on the offer. That openness tends to come with certain hygiene and style choices.
I couchsurfed through europe in the mid to late 2000s and had a great time. At the same time I was hosting a fairly popular flat in Glasgow. Half of our guests came through couchsurfing, the other half were word of mouth. Best experience was two italian climbers (who we met bouldering, not via cs) who ended up with tents literally set up in our lounge room on and off for a number of months. These guys were proper characters, just young guys who'd lost their jobs as bakers back home and had decided to "climb" scotland (in between stints at ours they literally walked and climbed their way up and through the very northern highlands). They had very little english and existed on a diet of stale donuts and nutella. Last I met them was on a trip to Venice (I was back in Australia by that point), one of them travelled down to meet my wife and I from his latest adventure setting a remote cave in the north of the country. By that point his english had improved immensely and we finally were able to have the conversations that were never quite possible in Glasgow.
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 honestly don't think the paywall was such a bad idea. The barrier to entry was too easy, there were too many people on the platform who had no intention of hosting and were just looking for a free place to stay. The very small contribution at least ensures some level of commitment.
When I hosted (2008), we were very active hosts that summer and we basically required people to write personalised messages telling us who they are and why they like the sound of staying with us specifically. We got a lot of generic copy and paste messages and we ignored them, since we got so many messages. For about 3 months, we were hosting people almost every single day, often multiple people (and the most at once was 12, for a weekend while there was an event on).
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.
It isn't a bad idea per se, but it was contrary to everything many vocal coachsurfers stood for. It was a movement as much as a community, I knew lot of hosts that were mad about it because they felt they were monetizing not the service, but the trust network people built therein.
It's too cheap to be a barrier for those people. I still see that type of people here, because they pay 2.5 euros for one month and they have a chance to stay for free in many places. It's still worth it. I also still see all the predators that are just using CS as tinder, because its cheaper than tinder.
What I don't see are the long term travellers on a shoe string, who are some of the most interesting people in the community those are gone. Many other types of interesting travellers are also gone out of principle. We're left mostly with uni students and middle class people who travel once in a while.
The community has changed completely since the paywall, and not for the best.
The people who put up the paywall also had no intention of hosting; they were just looking for free money. They're the same kind of people you're complaining about, just orders of magnitude worse.
I couchsurfed in the US and Australia 2011 to 2013 and had a lot of amazing experiences. It had a profound impact on how I view the world and people. Here's a blog from the time of the buyout that I think some people might find interesting
Couchsurfing is my go-to case to present in favor of making all in-app purchases via Apple instead of third-party payment processors.
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.
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.