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Couchers is officially out of beta

couchers.org

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Re: Couchers is officially out of beta

#91

Post by seanhunter »

nandomrumber wrote: post #89
madaxe_again wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just hospitality reviews 101. I run a couple of Airbnbs in the uk - 99.9% of guests leave gushing reviews, 0.01% break open locked cupboards and are like “There was a cupboard FULL of cleaning supplies! Disgusting! 1/5!”. I’ve even had people bring a plastic rat with them and pose it around the apartment to then complain to customer service - successfully. That one cost me about £5,000 in a refund, lost reven…

Scam plan: know someone in Airbnb customer satisfaction team > rent expensive Airbnb accommodation > make bogus complaint complete with faked pictures to support bogus claim > have the claim approved by acquaintance > share profit.

The “profit” you would be sharing with the person in Airbnb customer satisfaction in your hypothetical scam is a refund of your money which you would have paid to rent the place. This is like Homer Simpson’s grease business.

Re: Couchers is officially out of beta

#92

Post by erlend_sh »

aapeli wrote: post #23

I'm one of the Couchers founders and wrote this blog post (and incidentally spend way too much time on HN), awesome to see this show up here! This launch is the culmination of a huge push from our volunteer team to clean up a bunch of core features and make the platform easier to use. We are also launching a new branding strategy and new landing page. Quick plug: we are looking for senior React Native devs to join us…

Highly recommend integrating with the atproto network to hop onto its social graph; that could be a major differentiator for your service. I’d love to log in with my Bluesky account and see who else in my network has opted to share their couchsurfing status.

(I put up a GitHub issue)

Re: Couchers is officially out of beta

#93

Post by stevekemp »

nosioptar wrote: post #75
daft_pink wrote: post #10

I hosted couchsurfers and it was fun, but i stopped when i started getting detailed reviews about random shit about my home after people left. Letting people live in your house in the central business district of a top tier city and then having them comment on your towel designs. It’s not a hotel. I’m so over it.

That's some weird shit. I'd never couch surf without my own towel.

Hey, you sass that hoopy nosioptar? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.

Re: Couchers is officially out of beta

#94

Post by [deleted] »

yunesj wrote: post #71
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #65

I haven't used Couchers, but I was once very active with the Couchsurfing community in a couple cities. Here's what made Couchsurfing once a vibrant, thriving community: - Forums. Regular-old stupid 1990's CGI web forums. They are the perfect way to grow organic community on the web. Simple, functional, compact, reliable. They don't bury content in endless scroll, they organize discussion by topics, pinned messages h…

Wow, thanks for the warning that Couchers bans naturists. I am aware of many unique and beautiful experiences by naturists hosts. It’s disappointing that Couchers would want to eliminate them.

[deleted]

Re: Couchers is officially out of beta

#95

Post by 3abiton »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #65

I haven't used Couchers, but I was once very active with the Couchsurfing community in a couple cities. Here's what made Couchsurfing once a vibrant, thriving community: - Forums. Regular-old stupid 1990's CGI web forums. They are the perfect way to grow organic community on the web. Simple, functional, compact, reliable. They don't bury content in endless scroll, they organize discussion by topics, pinned messages h…

This brought up so many memories. The CS raves on Paris bridges, the bar hopping in Barcelona, and the nomads of Berlin. If anything defines CS it's the unexpectedly weird. On the other hand, you will need to dedicate sufficient energy and time to it, be it as a guest or a host, or an event goer.

Re: Couchers is officially out of beta

#96

Post by [deleted] »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #65

I haven't used Couchers, but I was once very active with the Couchsurfing community in a couple cities. Here's what made Couchsurfing once a vibrant, thriving community: - Forums. Regular-old stupid 1990's CGI web forums. They are the perfect way to grow organic community on the web. Simple, functional, compact, reliable. They don't bury content in endless scroll, they organize discussion by topics, pinned messages h…

[deleted]

Re: Couchers is officially out of beta

#97

Post by cmtcosta »

yosito wrote: post #72
yrcyrc wrote: post #12

Very fond memories of couchsurfing met very nice people both as a traveler and a host. But this was long ago. Not sure this will ever work again though

CouchSurfing still has a very active community. I'm hosting these days and get multiple requests every week.

How have your interactions been with CS members? Do people bother reading your profile, do you get a lot of freeloaders requests?

Re: Couchers is officially out of beta

#98

Post by kapsel »

yoavm wrote: post #83
yosito wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couchsurfing isn't aggressively monetized. They've got a very very small annual fee, and once you pay it they never harass you for money. It's far less monetized than other mainstream apps.

Making it impossible for me to even see my own profile or message with people I previously hosted is exactly what I call "aggressive". It's not about the cost, it's about what exactly is being restricted. They literally took content that I created (MY profile) and are asking me to pay for it. A sane monetising approach would be to charge for sending new requests, for example.

100% this. They took away all the (often very personal) reviews that is part of my account, and forced me to pay for access to them.

Re: Couchers is officially out of beta

#99

Post by som »

dkersten wrote: post #42
specproc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosted loads for a while, a brilliant time. We were living somewhere unusual at the time, everyone that came through was interesting, intelligent and fun. Zero bad experiences. Made some friends for life. My flatmate at the time ended up marrying a couchsurfer we'd hosted, after reconnecting many years later. We all got sulky and huffy when they started charging and stopped engaging, but the sad thing is we just got…

I lived in a house where one of my housemates was also into couchsurfing and for a few month in summer and early autumn 2008, we were very active hosts. One weekend while there was a CS event on in my city, we hosted 12 people at once. In 2009, I was living somewhere I couldn’t host, but my primary social group for that year was other local couchsurfers — we used to meet up twice a week. One of them got married to on…

I was hosting around this time too (and surfing a bit, but less so), it was a great experience. Never got up to 12 but we always had someone with us, someone crossing over ... and probably someone we were doing a favour for. At one point had two Italian climbers in a tent in our living room for multiple weeks, who ended up moving to our city and becoming good friends.

I tended to go out my way to try and accept people to stay who were either very new the the platform (which usually made it hard to find a place as karma was low) or were very different to my normal group of friends. Which definitely made for some interesting experiences and conversations. Price of entry was usually a list of their favourite albums. I discovered so much great music out of it.

Finally gave it all up when I moved back to Australia and wasn't in a position to host anymore. So many fond memories tho. I miss it.

Re: Couchers is officially out of beta

#100

Post by spreeni »

gardnr wrote: post #44
vintagedave wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks completely different and is a non-profit: > Couchers, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization ... [incorporated] in the United States in late 2021, and the project was moved under the purview of this new non-profit in early 2022. -- https://couchers.org/foundation

Couchers has the same color "theme" that Couchsurfing had in ~2010. Couchsurfing started as a 501c3: https://blog.couchsurfing.com/a-letter-from-co-founder-casey...

Hey, Couchers backend volunteer here - this is a very good and valid question as many of us have gone through the same disappointment with Couchsurfing.com in the past. This is an excerpt from our FAQs on that topic:

"How will you prevent this platform from ever becoming a for-profit like Couchsurfing™ did?

We fundamentally believe that attempting to make a profit out of couch surfing is a bad idea. It introduces incentives that damage the community and would not make financial sense — the couch surfing idea, based on non-transactional experiences, is not monetizable. This is about societal value, not monetary value.

We are keeping the platform as a non-profit forever. Our plan to follow this relies on three fundamental pillars:

1. We are legally established as a non-profit foundation, and our constitution contains provisions that prevents the company from ceasing to be a non-profit, or transferring its assets to an entity that is not a non-profit.

2. We will carry out a policy of distributed moderation, so that we will engage hundreds of moderators as volunteers around the world to moderate their own communities. We will make the platform reliant on volunteers, and so the entity controlling the platform could not be a for-profit business without violating laws in many countries. The foundation would have to remain as a non-profit to continue operating.

3. Our code base is open source and anybody can spin up an alternative instance. If the community ever comes to feel that the leaders of the platform are not acting in their interest, they can simply fork the codebase, making a copy that is under control of new management.

Finally, we do hope that you can trust our Founders (Aapeli and Itsi) and Board Members in their promise to keep the platform not only community-led, non-profit, and open-source, but in line with the greater interests of the global couch surfing community."

https://couchers.org/faq

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