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.
I think reviews criticizing aesthetic choices or even cleanliness would tend to be taken with a grain of salt, but also I hosted people (and couchsurfed) from 2005-2020 and managed to avoid bad reviews, so perhaps if I personally had received a slew of silly bad reviews over silly things like that I would have abandoned it earlier.
I had the impression it slowly transformed itself to a hook-up community and that attracted a different crowd than intended.
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 revenue as I was made to cancel bookings until I had a pest controller in, and a mystified but still expensive pest controller.
Pareto’s law is pareto’s law.
It does depend what they've reviewed though. Is the person hosting living in a in a gross apartment vs the towel designs are not nice.
Yes I agree, CouchSurfing.com went to shit through a slow process of enshittification that ended up looking like this. That's exactly why we founded Couchers.org when CouchSurfing.com put up a paywall (it was the last straw for us). We're trying to take what Couchsurfing was at its best and go further. We're solving these issues you're talking about with better moderation, better safety tools, and nudging users to behave in a way that's best for the community, etc.
I think it comes down to setting clear expectations and educating users about what it is and what it's not. We try to make it very clear and then enforce those rules very carefully. Once this happens, it's surprising how quickly the community roots out that behavior.
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 and help us get a mobile app out, as well as React/Python devs for frontend/backend. Everything we do is open source (under MIT): https://github.com/Couchers-org/couchers/
Happy to answer any questions folks might have!
What are you hoping to achieve by launching another hospitality sharing site that the other established non-profit sites couldn't?
I think the main difference is that we're trying to capture the spirit of what CouchSurfing.com used to be: modern, easy to use, welcoming to newbies and centered on genuine social connection. But we also want to go beyond that. Build for today’s world—with better safety tools, better moderation, and more community-driven features that help people find each other easier.
Couchsurfing was initially about free hospitality and cultural exchange but is now largely driven by monetization. They also haven't really provided many new features to users since going for-profit.
BeWelcome is another alternative that came out of the CouchSurfing community years ago. It has a more ideological focus around democratic decision-making and they are not as newbie friendly, have an older UI, and are a bit slower to adopt new tech.
WarmShowers on the other hand is for a completely different crowd: it's for bike tourers that leave at the crack of dawn and arrive at sunset. They need a shower (hence the name), a place to put their bike, and a bed to sleep on. They'll probably be a bit too tired to socialize. That's very different from the traditional couch surfing platforms where socialization is the focus.
(I put up a GitHub issue)
- 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 help drive central/ongoing discussions, and local moderators keep things in order. Couchsurfing began a steep nose-dive when the redesign de-emphasized forums.
- Regular local group meet-ups. There were plenty of people who hosted and surfed who never went to one of these; but for many, this was their first introduction to the community, and their first "profile reviews" that gave them social credit/standing. For others, the meetups were all they ever did... not really the point of the site, but it was a symbiotic relationship. Without regular in-person meet-ups, the community is too decentralized, and moderation suffers. Once regular meetups died, and the other "features" of Couchsurfing emerged, it became a weird hookup app, which you could see not only in "chat", but also in profiles and reviews. The social pressure and moderation of local meetups created a culture and reinforced its values. (also: depends 100% on forums)
- Reviews. Love 'em or hate 'em, you live and die in the community by your reviews. I feel like we should have public, irrevocable reviews for all kinds of things now. And bad reviews aren't necessarily a death sentence, but they are the meat and potatoes of the site, so they really have to work well. Looks like Couchers is still improving them, which is good.
- Weirdness. Part of the allure of Couchsurfing was the unexpected. People would tailor their profiles in all sorts of ways; long lists of rules, unique formatting, almost like an old MySpace page. Maybe you'd stay with a Mormon, or a Naturist, or at the last art-punk squat in Berlin. This creates safety issues, uncomfortable situations. But it also challenges people to deal with the real world (when they elect to).
I see Couchers has banned some of these last types of interactions (nudism & shared space). Regardless of what you think about this, every such restriction will shrink the human experience surfing used to provide. You can still have a restrictive hospitality site, but it's unlikely to be as successful. I think it would work if dedicated to one thing, like tourism, or rock climbing. But if you want it to be general, it's gotta be messy.
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 too busy. Couchsurfing was like hosting a party constantly, and as work picked up I found it harder to engage.
Still seems to be a community there. I found myself in Split a while ago and stumbled upon a meetup, had a great evening unexpectedly.
Unfortunately the whole platform changed a few years ago.
Very low quality requests, hosts had to paid, bad support, and bad filtering.
It’s too bad, bc it left a sour taste at the end. Many people would chat in English, but in reality they can’t speak nor write English. Also, the last few years pale just use it as a cheap hotel. No interaction and sometimes plain rude behavior. I even had to kick someone out.
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 one of my friends. Others I kept in touch with for many years.
I haven’t been part of it in a long time, but I haven’t many fond memories of the couchsurfing community. Like you, I didn’t have any bad experiences.
I'm not living in a very touristic area, but every other month, I get a request for a night and if it fit's in my schedule, I'll accept. It's been only nice experiences so far and no one gave me the vibe of seeing it as a cheap alternative to hotels only. Most people ask on bewelcome.org by the way.
I just like that even though I stay in my bubble most of the time, I get the opportunity to spend some quality time with a stranger. Especially because those strangers are often on some kind of a mission, else they typically wouldn't come to my area.
Couchsurfing used to be a relatively niche thing which allowed it to work and thrive. The percentage of freeloaders or bad actors was low enough not to be a problem.
But now with more people being aware of it/its alternatives, the percentage of bad actors would increase too (and maybe not even proportionally to the number of good actors).
I see 900+ Couchers registered among a few of the New York City boroughs. My impression is that this means someone can live in NYC for an entire Summer, couch-surfing the big city and establishing a real connection with at least 60 hosts. That would be quite an experience, with many stories to share.
Sounds like my idea of Hell, but i'm introverted.
For the n00bs: I think the best way to explain the concept of couch surfing is to imagine visiting a friend in another city — they show you around, you have a great time, and you crash on their couch, or guest room or whatever. With Couchers, it’s just like that — except you’re meeting that friend for the first time (via Couchers).
Anyway come join us we're fun lol.
Had some great experiences with CS and I'm happy to pay them for these couple of times a year I host somebody.
Currently it’s just a PWA, but we’re trying to keep it simple so it can get onto the App Store.
I was a big fan of CouchSurfing before they started charging a monthly fee, which is a similar gripe I have with Servas. I met my girlfriend at the CS meet up in Kaohsiung, and although I’m no longer able to help, BeWelcome has several ways to volunteer.
Another POV is, everyone is fatigued out of selling to customers who cannot afford to pay more. In this space: Trusted House Sitters is like having a homeless person stay over. Couchsurfing: is it similar?
AirBnB is about the space itself. You pay for the space.
Couchsurfing is about the people sharing the space with you, cultural-exchange, etc. You do not pay, it's more about connecting and meeting with people.
> 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.
Couchsurfing started as a 501c3:
https://blog.couchsurfing.com/a-letter-from-co-founder-casey...
Anyway to answer the question, we are totally separate from Couchsurfing.org!
We created Couchers in 2020 after Couchsurfing put up a pay wall, after going for-profit and going downhill for awhile.
We want to keep the original Couchsurfing spirit alive, so we started Couchers.org.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CouchSurfing#Change_to_a_for-p...
This is the phoenix rising from the enshittification, as is tradition.
I happen to have an account with them, and also BeWelcome (what seems to be the closest to popular alternative to the original couchsurfing.org) and TrustRoots, too. Also, the original one, of course.
I don't think so: it just takes thoughtful moderation, setting clear rules, and then enforcing them. When you make it socially unacceptable on the platform, people do a good job reporting inappropriate behavior.
I think the reason that CouchSurfing.com turned into a low-key hookup app is that it was actually a profitable strat for them. They used to monetize verification (something like $60 per verification), and my hypothesis is that a large proportion of people who ever verified paid for verification soon after signing up. By being a hookup site, it actually increased the perceived value to a certain subset of people signing up, which increased signups, verification numbers, and revenue. Of course this made the experience worse on the platform itself once people tried to use it, but they could milk that "easy way to hook up" concept for a long time (basically until the pandemic killed it).
Tell the reader what your product is - first.
And you can't manage to do that, then your logo link should go to your product, not back to the blog.
I gave this TWO attempts to find out =what the product is - that's the biggest opportunity most startups will get - and this company failed twice to tell me conveniently what it is and I am not trying a third time.
You are likely violating the GDPR. You can’t just assume consent (that applies to other areas of life), that’s the whole point.
Either you only use cookies which are essential for basic usage—in which case you don’t even need to tell users about it—or you need to provide a way to refuse everything else which has to be at least as easy as the way to accept.
It’s as if companies had been pissing in your beer for decades, then a law passed saying you could only do that with consent, and now you’re complaining that there are all these consent forms every time you want to drink your pissed beer instead of taking it as an indicator to buy from another brand.
If anything, the GDPR should have been more aggressive and made all extraneous data collection outright illegal with no option to opt-in. As it stands, it’s still a powerful indicator of those you cannot trust, letting you know as soon as you open their website.
