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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
[+] [-] carlsborg|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zwayhowder|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dkersten|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] cainxinth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chagaif|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessriedel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Torwald|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aschebescher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nateberkopec|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xapata|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashtonkem|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glandium|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00f|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chagaif|4 years ago|reply
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
https://openhospitality.network
[+] [-] fabianhjr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blunte|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ithinkso|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barcoder|4 years ago|reply
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.
Instant friends. It was wonderful!
[+] [-] CGamesPlay|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xapata|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franze|4 years ago|reply
She said better as Tinder, more transparency and in the worst case still a comfy couch. She met her husband via it.
[+] [-] blunte|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] poorjohnmacafee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purple_ferret|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] inglor_cz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plantain|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rapnie|4 years ago|reply
https://openhospitality.network
[+] [-] thomasahle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enriquto|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breton|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkersten|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salamala|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xapata|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterburkimsher|4 years ago|reply
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.
https://bewelcome.org/about/stats
These days I host a weekly online meetup at 23:00 New Zealand time every Thursday night. Welcome to come and hang out if you'd like!
https://meet.jit.si/BeWelcome-Chat_4MembersVolunteers
https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=2193733,1673820,266...
[+] [-] lucas_codes|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] abyssin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdrini|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rootsudo|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] phreeza|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chagaif|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xoa|4 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] Raed667|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asimpletune|4 years ago|reply
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?