Couchers is officially out of beta

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.

Couchsurfing really went to shit towards the end (2020 when they went from "we will always keep our core service free" to locking you out of your account unless you paid them overnight without any warning)

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.

Yeah, I really doubt any one turned down the opportunity, because of the criticism. It was just one review mentioned it and the next review disputed it. It just became a train of reviews. I just became annoyed by it and it made me wonder why I was bothering.

Interesting.

I had the impression it slowly transformed itself to a hook-up community and that attracted a different crowd than intended.

Reviews in these kind of sites should always be moderated before it reaches the hosts, if not by a moderation team (due lack of fund) then at least other users, e.g. 2 out of 3 other hosts that mark the review as helpful and within the spirit of the website.

"He has the ugliest towels I have ever seen! I still have nightmares about them! 1 star!"

But then the next one is like… “The towels ARE ugly but it’s worth it for the location," you can’t make this sh*t up.

I’ve only had boring towels in the entirety of my life and i’m suddenly curious about what your towels look like.

That's hilarious I am sorry lol

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

Can we please see a photo of the towel(s) I'm too invested in this now.

In this scenario hosting couch surfers also puts you on the hook as a moderator? I’ll pass.

Sharing towels is a great way to feel better about not being the only one with a fungal infection.

As much as stackoverflow puts you on the hook as a moderator.

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 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.

I think the difference between Airbnbs and couchsurfers is huge. Couch surfing is a voluntary yet free service provided by someone out of the goodwill of their heart. Airbnb is provided for profit. Leaving such reviews is fine for an Airbnb (assuming it's deserved ofc), but certainly not okay for couch surfing.

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.

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.

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

"...and upon reaching for a hand towel I realized that the motif on it was not a diagonal pattern of dog bones but without doubt actually row after slanted row of penises, 100%"

Some people are just plain...weird? I was reading reviews of some book on Amazon (can't remember which one now). Someone gave the book a one star review, because "it was delivered two days later than it was promised" while simultaneously saying they haven't read the book. How is it the book's/author's fault that Amazon delivered the book late? Why are they giving lowest rating for a book without even reading it? None of this makes any sense

Just consider it a tax on the amount of damage your business did to local housing costs.

In that case, the reviewer seems to have completely misunderstood the subject of the review. That's a fine review (I guess) if the subject of the review is Amazon and the purchasing/delivery experience. Of course, it would be obvious from reading the review that it's not useful to somebody looking for book reviews and it should be (re)moved, but for whatever reason we have accepted platforms such as Amazon will simply fail to handle it properly.

You jest, but if you encountered towels with print of the logo of a programming language you detest?...

(I'm the Couchers co-founder who wrote this blog post.)

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.

Surely people wash bath towels after visitors use them, no?

These are selfish, immature people. They exist all over and the reason why we can't have nice things.

i would hope by now such reviews are heavily down-weighted on the back end as far as contribution to the overall rating displayed for a given product. seems relatively easy to automatically detect and I struggle to see why Amazon would want deflated reviews for products they're selling.

maybe it's a legal thing, could be viewed as market place manipulation i suppose. and they've certainly had enough worries about anti-trust already.

You need a high-touch process, something like wash with high heat, maybe disinfectant, not overloaded, separate loads (cross-contamination). Dry with high heat for a long time, run a hot empty cycle after to clean machine.

In an ideal world, the host cares about your health and cleanliness and of course does all this for your sake. In the real world, it's toss and wash for minimal care, time and money.

What's the plan to monetize and keep the lights on without starting to charge users like Couchsurfing did?

Honestly, part of the overall ordering experience has pretty much always been included as part of the review on Amazon. It's weird that people take such umbrage with it. It may not be the author's "fault" but that's part of having your products on Amazon. I want to know if the product won't be delivered in a timely manner or if it won't be packed correctly.