Paradise lost: The rise and ruin of Couchsurfing.com

The social proof that a couch surfing reference brought was second to none. Each one boils down to this &quot;I, a stranger, stayed for a few nights in this other strangers home for free, and they were good human beings&quot;. That social proof carried to any part of the globe you visited.<p>I cannot think of an internet app that brought people together in a more meaningful and wholesome way at scale.<p>It was great while it lasted.

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 &quot;well, if Airbnb wants me to pay for this, why do I go to CS and get it for free?&quot;<p>I CS&#x27;d only once, in Ghana in 2011. It was great, but I was too late for the trend, it died pretty shortly after.

A few developers from different HospEx (hospitality exchange) platforms (Trustroots, WarmShowers Android app devs, BeWelcome) started an attempt to federate the HospEx world.<p>Mariha (@mariha:matrix.org) was contributing for Warm Showers Android App and with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;warmshowers.bike&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;warmshowers.bike&#x2F;</a> happening she kind of kick-started the whole project.<p>We got funding recently from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ngi.eu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ngi.eu</a> and with that we start to work for the next generation internet.<p>We would love to revive the spirit of early Couchsurfing and Warm Showers<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openhospitality.network" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openhospitality.network</a>

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).<p>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.<p>I loved the two week experience. It made me feel good about people. It also made the world seem smaller and more accessible.<p>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.<p>I did read of some bad experiences, but the review system did seem to work pretty well for building reputation.<p>If CS had started charging $10&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;d fire up when arriving in a new city was the CS app.<p>I&#x27;d announce myself in the activities section - ie. I want walk around the city. A few mins later I&#x27;d have a group of people wanting to meet up and explore.<p>Instant friends. It was wonderful!

A friend of mine, she used to travel a lot, used it as a dating app.<p>She said better as Tinder, more transparency and in the worst case still a comfy couch. She met her husband via it.

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&#x27;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.

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.<p>We need help, mostly in developing new features, features to help connect all of us and create meaningful relationships and connections.<p>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.<p>Thanks and we can do this and keep HospEx networks like this thriving for decades to come.

<p><pre><code> “There really is no similarity between Palantir’s business model and Couchsurfing’s business model,” </code></pre> Ok, but I still can imagine a few ways it could be useful to intelligence agencies : It&#x27;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 <i>new</i> 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.

Previous discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23211495" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23211495</a><p>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.<p>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&#x27;s been difficult for committed developers to get involved.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bewelcome.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;stats" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bewelcome.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;stats</a><p>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&#x27;d like!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meet.jit.si&#x2F;BeWelcome-Chat_4MembersVolunteers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meet.jit.si&#x2F;BeWelcome-Chat_4MembersVolunteers</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldtimebuddy.com&#x2F;?qm=1&amp;lid=2193733,1673820,2660646&amp;h=2193733&amp;date=2021-9-23&amp;sln=23-23.5&amp;hf=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldtimebuddy.com&#x2F;?qm=1&amp;lid=2193733,1673820,266...</a>

I&#x27;m a volunteer dev for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;couchers.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;couchers.org</a> which was started in response to the Couchsurfing paywall and mentioned in this article. It&#x27;s steadily growing in both users and features, and is open source and non-profit.<p>BeWelcome is similarly open-source and non profit, which I&#x27;d also recommend as a CS alternative (although they have a somewhat different vision to Couchers and CS).

Very well written and researched article. What an interesting deep dive into a fascinating corner of internet culture!

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, &quot;CS2&quot;) 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.<p>I met a lot of people through Couchsurfing and HospitalityClub. It&#x27;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 <i>participate</i> in stuff. Youth hostels are somewhat better than hotels on that axis, but CS2 was the bomb.<p>One of the great things about it was that, even if you didn&#x27;t have a budget to travel, you could travel virtually by having people from random foreign countries come and stay at your house.<p>During the years I was participating in CS2, I was in a monogamous relationship, so I didn&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;m probably part of the problem, or I was too &quot;late.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m on the younger end, and around 2014 is when I was in my early 20&#x27;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&#x2F;marketing fluff guarantee piece.) So I joined airbnb and used that, because couchsurfing was on the way out.<p>Early 00&#x27;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&#x27;t happen on airbnb or hotels, but the optics were never handled properly because &quot;stranger, staying on couch, assaulted host&quot; always catches headlines.<p>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.<p>Now, there&#x27;s room for another disruption, airbnb is highly not as efficient anymore for customer experience on the low end as they&#x27;re moving to high end experiences, vrbo is kinda doing it&#x27;s own thing and hotels are hotels.<p>Or maybe the high price of airbnbs are a reflection of how in demand and efficient all this actually is.

WarmShowers still seems to work very well, with a spirit similar to the original CouchSurfing, though it is restricted to cyclists.

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.<p>It&#x27;s a shame that as a business CS didn&#x27;t work out, but it also urges me to think of what things exist <i>now</i> that are equally magic that I don&#x27;t appreciate. Craigslist?

<i>&gt; There was a massive spike in users on the site under Espinoza, but because they’d been attracted in part by an advertising push and there was an easier onboarding process, they were less committed and slower to adapt to the pay-it-forward spirit of Couchsurfing. Suddenly, there were a ton of people who were active surfers and relatively few who were actively hosting. So it started taking surfers longer to find hosts.</i><p>Organically grown communities are both more durable and more fragile. Durable if not tampered with or commercialized, fragile otherwise.

Excited to see Trustroots highlighted in the article.<p>If you&#x27;re interested to help build Trustroots with us (we&#x27;re a non-profit, volunteer based) — join us here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trustroots.org&#x2F;volunteering" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trustroots.org&#x2F;volunteering</a><p>Different skills needed, starting from coding, ops, design, organizing, member support, translating, and more!

The decision to take venture capital was really the start of all the subsequent issues. They should have just asked surfers to pay a dollar on each day that they sent a message or something to that effect; surely it would have added up to millions without being onerous.

Glassdoor reviews of CouchSurfing are an entertaining read: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.co.uk&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;CouchSurfing-Reviews-E568573.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.co.uk&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;CouchSurfing-Reviews-E56...</a>

I learned to couch surf in the 1980s, west coast Canada, US and Europe. Convivial people in the arts, music and so. Even surfed a barn couch in southern france. Biking and hiking was sometimes a common denominator. Internet optional.

Is there a good alternative?<p>Does couchsurfing still work WELL if you’re willing to pay membership fees?

I have been pretty heavily involved with couchsurfing for years to the extent that I barely spend time with anybody who I did not directly or indirectly meet through couchsurfing. The well-traveled curious misfit persona I associate with the network works great for me. I have met the most curious personalities, forged strong relationships with people in other parts of the world, and I think I have experienced more good-will and generosity than most people ever will.<p>It really seemed couchsurfing.com became a victim of it&#x27;s on success beyond whatever happened behind the stage. Over the years the number of popular articles that &quot;advertised&quot; it as a way to either have sex or just a free place to crash has brought attention that was detrimental to the experience. The number of stupid &quot;hey bro, me and my buddy need a place to crash&quot; requests went up significantly. This is what happens with any community.<p>But the important thing is that couchsurfing.com is just a website, it does not even matter so much. There are millions of people out there who are adventurous and out to meet people and those have not gone away. Couchsurfing meetups still happen. Couchcrashes (big long get-togethers in random cities of the world explcitly affiliated with couchsurfing.com) still happen. Airbnb is easier, but couchsurfing to a large extent was not about a place to stay - it is about connecting with the place you went to and people who lived there. (A good example of what doors couchsurfing might open seems to be &quot;Couchsurfing in Iran: Revealing a Hidden World&quot;, but it&#x27;s still on my to-read list) Back in the day you could always break that connect-with-people contract to a certain extent and it was not unwelcome, but as more people flooded the platform it became a much rarer paradigm.<p>Whatever happens I hope the word couchsurfing gets decoupled from the the website. I still travel and hop hostels and the target audience of couchsurfing has never ceased to exist. With more remote work it has perhaps grown? What has happened to couchsurfing.com happens to any online community. Growth entails erosion of value. Partly, why I am actually not apposed to light gate-keeping of a paywall. In any case, I welcome the next stage. And I am glad the article ends on a list of lesser-known alternatives (contributors to some of which commented in this thread!). Couchsurfing is not couchsurfing.com and it is not dead it is just looking for new forms.

I hosted dozens of people during my time floating on a houseboat in Amsterdam. Met some amazing people with incredible stories

For surfers, I felt it wasn&#x27;t just awareness of potential reviews that made it work. Before you surf, you describe yourself and then someone offers you their trust based on who they think you are.<p>That&#x27;s pretty strongly bound up with your self image. You&#x27;ve described your character in writing. Most people will try hard to live up to that.

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&#x27;t find a bed. I ended up going into a Hostel (hostelworld) at that time. It didn&#x27;t work for me (maybe because of my nationality?).

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 &quot;pay N€, you can stay M nights&quot; I picked second every time.

Wow, heartbreaking. I loved Couchsurfing. To me, still one of the best examples of what the internet could be. So to see what it was, and then to see what Capital does to it. Heartbreaking. And they call it the tragedy of the commons.

I knew a guy who said he used CS mainly for hookups.<p>Is this really a thing?

i met my Argentine wife on CH. i hope it has a second life one day again, as it was one of the most beautiful social experiments to-date.

I couchsurfed through europe in the mid to late 2000s and had a great time. At the same time I was hosting a fairly popular flat in Glasgow. Half of our guests came through couchsurfing, the other half were word of mouth. Best experience was two italian climbers (who we met bouldering, not via cs) who ended up with tents literally set up in our lounge room on and off for a number of months. These guys were proper characters, just young guys who&#x27;d lost their jobs as bakers back home and had decided to &quot;climb&quot; scotland (in between stints at ours they literally walked and climbed their way up and through the very northern highlands). They had very little english and existed on a diet of stale donuts and nutella. Last I met them was on a trip to Venice (I was back in Australia by that point), one of them travelled down to meet my wife and I from his latest adventure setting a remote cave in the north of the country. By that point his english had improved immensely and we finally were able to have the conversations that were never quite possible in Glasgow.<p>Counter that with my worst experience. We accepted a request on CS from a young brazilian artist to stay for a weekend, over from her studies in Italy. I tended to make a point of accepting people with limited reputation ... I had some things I looked for, but generally if someone looked like they might not get first pick elsewhere we would accept them (non-english speakers with terrible profiles were the norm). In this case we were a little busy but thought she would be an easy, low-effort fit for the household. Especially since one of our roommates was also a (lovely and extremely outgoing) young brazilian artist. Our visitor arrived and seemed cool and relaxed; just in town to see the sights. So my wife and I did the usual and took her for a walk through some of the nicer parks and buzzier areas near the flat. One strange thing happened at this point (that I didn&#x27;t pick up on at all) ... she was smoking, and making a point of talking about being a smoker. I don&#x27;t smoke, but my wife later commented that it was obvious she wasn&#x27;t a smoker. I thought it was odd but didn&#x27;t question it. Anyway, long story short, by the end of the weekend the &quot;visitor&quot; had revealed herself as a stalker who had found our brazilian roommate through her public facebook profile and had begun an &quot;art&quot; project on her, which involved collecting her public photos and stories for a diary &#x2F; portfolio, imitating her in her every day life, and finally tracking down her CS apartment through some very basic online sleuthing (our roommate wasn&#x27;t mentioned in the account) and joining us for a couple of days. She rounded a couple of us up on her last day and admitted everything, including the bit about not being a smoker which hit me for six (because it had already been brought up!). She then went to our roommates work (a local bar) and laid everything out to her while she was working .. which led to our roommate being fired for literally losing it in front of everyone. She wanted to go the police but in the end we just reported the couchsurfer. A totally wild experience that was the beginning of the end of our glasgow hosting adventures.

I honestly don&#x27;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 couchsurfed in the US and Australia 2011 to 2013 and had a lot of amazing experiences. It had a profound impact on how I view the world and people. Here&#x27;s a blog from the time of the buyout that I think some people might find interesting<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.rplasil.name&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-fall-of-couchsurfing-and-need-for.html?m=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.rplasil.name&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-fall-of-couchsurfing-a...</a>

Couchsurfing is my go-to case to present in favor of making all in-app purchases via Apple instead of third-party payment processors.<p>So they had a one-time “verification fee” of around $60-$100 (I think it varied by region or something) and a promise that we would never have to pay anything again.<p>Some time later they started charging a monthly “COVID fee” or something (not much but also varying by region) but unless you paid that, you were suddenly <i>unable to access anything on your account AT ALL.</i><p>I hadn’t used Couchsurfing in a while so when I logged in after that update, it was as if my account had been hijacked and ransomed; people couldn’t even delete their profiles (along with the info visible to the public) until they paid (again.)<p>You might say that a few bucks isn’t a big deal, but if these fees were paid via Apple’s IAP system, Apple would have given me a refund without question like they do with all other crap services, whereas Couchsurfing has yet to even respond to my requests for a refund.