Couchsurfing is like a master class in how to destroy community engagement in your business/project. So, back before the ubiquity of 2 or 3 social media sites,

Couchsurfing is like a master class in how to destroy community engagement in your business/project. So, back before the ubiquity of 2 or 3 social media sites, CouchSurfing was a quirky place to meet travelers and let them crash on your couch. One of the things that made it work was profile reviews and couch requests. The second thing was the community forums. The profile reviews and couch requests acted as a quality filter. Bad reviews lead to much lower community engagement. An interesting profile and good reviews, combined with community instruction on how to compose a good request, leads to acceptance of couch requests. The system works as long as the community polices itself, teaches its values to new members, and encourages good behavior. The community forums were a huge part of facilitating all that. Profiles would often include instructions on how to behave, but the forums filled the gaps by adding social pressure to enforce standard conventions. They also ensured there was constant user engagement and content, which we know from modern social media sites is imperative for a vibrant community. All of that got flushed down the drain when Couchsurfing reorganized and annihilated their old site. All the community engagement fled to private Facebook groups. That caused profile quality to crash, and the result is anti-community behavior, like how the majority of single men on the platform now host only single women, which besides being sketch as hell, just makes it harder to find a reliable host. After I literally flew across the country just to have lunch with the Couchsurfing team and discuss the community problems I'd collected, I got the impression that they were not going to change. My concerns were mostly considered bug reports, and the problems that drove the community away were never addressed. Years later, it looks like no work has been done at all. I was grandfathered in as an older user so I never even realized they started charged you to send more than a certain number of couch requests. But why would any new user seriously commit to a community now? It can probably still be a place to meet amazing people, but you can also just meet amazing people anywhere you go in the world, without Couchsurfing. The saddest part of all of this is that now there won't be an amazing platform to show people how insanely generous humans are all over the world. Hopefully BeWelcome or another site can pick up the mantle and restore the old ways, so we can go back to showing more people the inherent goodness of strangers - when those strangers are tied together via community and purpose.