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The Death of Couchsurfing?

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Re: The Death of Couchsurfing?

#271

Post by blaser-waffle »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #151
JSavageOne wrote: post #71

More reason to move towards a free and open source decentralized web. Otherwise a beautiful community over a decade in the making can be obliterated by the flick of a switch of a couple money-hungry idiots wearing suits.

I feel like the biggest money drain for any community website is not server or development fees, its moderation and community management. You cant just stick up a php app on a vps and let it run forever for $3/month. You have to hire people to remove spam and to read user reports to remove rapists and creeps from the platform.

Hell just plain ole support. I got locked out of my Couchsurfing account twice and getting in was a pain.

I also dispute the "get a VPS and ship it" for 3/month -- there are a lot of images on Couchsurfing, and a userbase that's non-trivial in terms of size.

Re: The Death of Couchsurfing?

#272

Post by nabnob »

dbancajas wrote: post #268
pelario wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A key technique to avoid those situations was the "poisoned pill": buried in your profile there is some keyword they must include in their request. With that (which I copied once I was reading a full descriptive profile) you get a great filter. I have done a good share of CS, both as host and guest, over the last ~10 years, having either good or amazing experiences.

> ading a full descriptive profile) you get a great filter. I have done a good can you explain? what keywords do you have to put to avoid this?

It's a way to check if someone read your entire profile, so you can filter out people who are just looking for a free place to stay. For example, you could hide the word "pineapple" two paragraphs in and ask that people mention it in their first message to you.

Re: The Death of Couchsurfing?

#273

Post by kpennell »

CS generated billions in social capital but that can be hard to monetize. I wish they had solicited donations sooner and not raised that 10M round.

They could have started a Patreon or buy me coffee-esque donation model several years ago and people would have been down to help sustain them.

It seems that mid 2000s internet knew how to use CS without being creepy but more and more of the 2010s internet just didn't. There were so many allegations of harassment and women not feeling comfortable. One woman traveler I met said if she even logged in in India, she would get 6-7 invites from men to stay with her. Seems like this 'travelers near you' feature maybe had some downsides.

It's also just hard to stay relevant with the rise of facebook, airbnb, and reddit. It's a bummer they didn't stay more focused. Gosh, I would have loved to work for them back when I lived near the mission, but it sounds like it would have been incredibly frustrating.

Re: The Death of Couchsurfing?

#274

Post by dkersten »

welly wrote: post #199
dkersten wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hosted a lot of people in summer of 2008. All of my housemates were into couchsurfing too (mixed gender house: two guys and three girls, that probably helped), so there was a period where we always hosted at least one person. One weekend, for a couchsurfing event in my city, we hosted 12 people at once! We eventually stopped hosting because people got busy and priorities changed, but our experience as hosts was ver…

You certainly do hear creepy stories about hosts surprising guests by only having one bed. And more than that. Of course, if everything is mutually agreed then that's fine. I was actually pretty surprised when I was speaking to another couchsurfing host how many women he'd hosted that he'd slept with. Perhaps I'm (or was) naive but it never occurred to me that people would use it for hooking up.

Yeah. It’s sad really.

Re: The Death of Couchsurfing?

#275

Post by pg-gadfly »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #229
globular-toast wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come to think of it why don't men just walk around town with a big sign saying "SEX WANTED" on it? I can't believe nobody has thought of this before.

I have to wonder how much of this thread is just stereotypically sheltered programmers not realizing that you can have consensual sex without any rigmarole, and that many women are actually looking for it if you're a cool guy that they like, even if they pick you as the house they want to sleep in while traveling, which in my experience often involves some beers with the host. One clue is that it's just focused on me…

The programmers brain easily gets stuck on a thought loop similar to the _categorical imperative_; in which if something is true, it must be applicable in _all_ circumstances.

Human life however is not an infinite array of possibilities, but stay in very specific zones for most of the time.

Think about it; exponential behavior would propably be deemed bad for most things out there in code, but if you knew the iterations never peaked above 3, it doesen't apply. Much like in real life, you have concrete real values that never really change, unlike the abstract unknowable problems you're used to dealing with.

Re: The Death of Couchsurfing?

#277

Post by valuearb »

inimino wrote: post #213
Noos wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are in need why on earth are you couchsurfing and traveling at all? If you cant afford $15 for the site what happens when you get sick or any emergency whatsoever forces you to shell out money?

Maybe a relative gets sick in a foreign country and you'd like to see them? Maybe you can't afford health care and you just get sick and die if you're in a first world democracy with American-class health care, or if you're in a civilized country, maybe they just treat you? I don't know, man, use your imagination.

In America hospitals and emergency rooms are required to treat you.

Re: The Death of Couchsurfing?

#278

Post by madskdc »

welly wrote: post #185
vincnetas wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a world outside USA also ;) And you don't need money to travel.

You don't need money to travel beyond your front door/neighbourhood but come on, you need "some" money to travel. You can't travel without a penny in your pocket.

You can do pretty well with next to nothing. I spent three months hitchhiking and couchsurfing my way through the US and Canada, covering roughly 20,000 miles and staying with dozens of hosts. I started with $700 in my account, and still had a few hundred left by the end of the trip. Had I wanted to be more frugal, and not get 'local food' when someone suggested something especially good, I probably could have gotten by with less.

So it's true that you need something....but you can do it with little enough that $25 can be a significant part of your budget.

Re: The Death of Couchsurfing?

#279

Post by vorpalhex »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #256
teddyh wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a “brown M&M”, not a “poison pill”.

Yeah phrasing it that way -- poison pill -- is a good way to make people feel uneasy when you're staying with them.

It would explain why they kept going out to restaurants instead of eating anything at the house...

Re: The Death of Couchsurfing?

#280

Post by vorpalhex »

zozbot234 wrote: post #232
eanzenberg wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guys hitting on girls is sexual assault now?

Hosts hitting on their guests has always been regarded as a gross violation of hospitality. The biblical story of Lot is all about that.

> The biblical story of Lot is all about that.

The moral flaw "the crowd" made was that it was men attempting to coerce sex from other men. Lot wanted to solve the problem by throwing his virgin daughters into the crowd.. which was apparently a perfectly righteous thing to do.

And anyways, that's why you shouldn't get your morality from an ancient book from a very different culture. Please don't throw any of your family members into crowds of rapists, it's not polite.

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