111–120 of 168 posts
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Pareto principle. 80% of people are decent human beings, but the 20% that aren’t cause 80% of the problems.
If only we had some kind of "credit score" but for social things..
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…
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…
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Is one person out of five that you meet causing trouble?
Keep in mind, out of 25 people, one is causing 64% of the problems while the worst four besides that one are responsible for just an additional 16%.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only we had some kind of "credit score" but for social things..
The old Accidental Black Mirror.
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.
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.
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?).
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 thi…
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 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.