8 ms·

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 st

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 great while it lasted.

Torwald 5y ago
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.
- wins32767 5y ago
  That was very standard in the Roman empire at the time. Formalized patronage relationships were one of the core social organizing principles and given the distances, a letter from your patron to one of their contacts was _the_ mechanism for social proof.
cainxinth 5y ago
Pareto principle. 80% of people are decent human beings, but the 20% that aren’t cause 80% of the problems.
- SMAAART 5y ago
  Price's law: the square root of the population produces 50% of the trouble. Apply that to the US (328.2 million people) and we have that 18,116 individuals are responsible for 50% of problems. Mic drop
  - hkt 5y ago
    ..are there 18,116 billionaires and near-billionaires?
  - chx 5y ago
    Wait, what? Price's Law. The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work. Nothing about trouble.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Causing trouble is work, of sorts. But perhaps it would be clearer if restated as, "50% of impact in a domain can be attributed to square root the number of people in that domain".
      - anonporridge 5y ago
        Could also be applied to community discussion, both online and in meatspace. There is an extreme minority of people who comment and up/down vote who drive the discussion of the whole. The 99% rarely participate and just go along for the ride.
  - nathanvanfleet 5y ago
    Uhhhhhhhh... the golden ratio.
    - snek_case 5y ago
      Totally and like... problems are fractal in nature, you have problems within problems within problems!
      - Igelau 5y ago
        It's turtles the whole way down.
  - ermir 5y ago
    And the square root of that is 135, which causes 25% of the total trouble. If we could only find these people and get rid of them, we'd have paradise on Earth! And that's how genocides start.
- im3w1l 5y ago
  If only we had some kind of "credit score" but for social things..
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    And it should be algorithmically driven with all sorts of fun edge cases and poor maintenance. Edit: oh, and obviously closed source, and have it's entire db leak about once a year due to excellent security.
    - smnplk 5y ago
      非常有趣，请告诉更多
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      Nah... surely there's no way that software could mess up... people have all kinds of strange ideas, like traffic cameras looking for people using phones, and tag a guy scratching his head.... this surely is impossible to happen in real life with modern software.
  - prashantsengar 5y ago
    Hello from China
  - Igelau 5y ago
    The old Accidental Black Mirror.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      I'm surprised /r/UnexpectedBlackMirror doesn't exist yet.
      - GravitasFailure 5y ago
        Unlike the inquisition, everybody expects Black Mirror these days.
- jl6 5y ago
  20% of people are not decent human beings? Harsh.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    Have you met people?
    - omginternets 5y ago
      Is one person out of five that you meet causing trouble?
      - seattle_spring 5y ago
        If driving on a highway is any indication, then yes
      - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
        Keep in mind, out of 25 people, one is causing 64% of the problems while the worst four besides that one are responsible for just an additional 16%.
        a1369209993 5y ago
        > out of 25 people, one is causing 64% of the problems while the worst four besides that one are responsible for just an additional 16% Also, if you have any influence over which 20 people you spend time with, they're probably the 20 out of 25 who are not those five.
      - isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
        People who are shit are probably excluded from many social circles, so I don't think that's a great indicator.
      - Igelau 5y ago
        If the answer is "no", it's probably you.
jessriedel 5y ago
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.
- robocat 5y ago
  Does AirBnB provide a “super-guest” filter, or equivalent so that you can brainlessly and reliably filter for suitable guests? I would host independently minded guests that don’t want/need hand-holding, and guests that are vetted for being socially respectful (tidy, no 3AM drunks, etcetera). My property is tobacco and alcohol free, which surprises friends, so I can imagine strangers being disrespectful. Do trustroots.org or movingworlds.org provide filtering? I really never want to have to trawl through reviews, because I find it wasteful and also I think reveiwers tend to avoid writing anything truthfully negative (allusions and omissions might occur, but are not always obvious).
  - xchaotic 5y ago
    it's funny because when it comes to any real disputes, AirBnb sides with landlords as much as possible (and as much as PR will allow), because that's who are they getting the money from. The guests are just the 'meat' in the machine so it would be more consistent if they allowed property owners to vet guests even more to avoid any issues/disputes in the first place. For RoboCat's case - it does still allow to not accept a certain guest after looking at hteir profile etc, but IMO that's too far into the journey - it'd be better from UX perspective and satisfaction if such a guest never found the property as available in the first place.
    - robocat 5y ago
      > [because they are getting the money from landlords] Which is weird, because of course the money comes from the guests. I have seen the opposite dynamic when it was a buyer's market with real estate: the vendor is paying however the agent was actually helping the buyer (to the detriment of the vendor). Real estate agents make their money from volume of sales, to a first approximation.
dkersten 5y ago
> 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.
- marricks 5y ago
  It seems like for any tech company to be successful and sustainable it has to destroy the openness and community it was born from. I discovered couch surfing right as my wandering days came to a close and I feel I sorely missed out.
  - tjs8rj 5y ago
    I think the destruction of openness is a reflection of the user they serve. When Airbnb serves only NYC they can be idiosyncratic to the population there, and their smaller user base is a more similar type of person. Once at scale, they have to appeal to everyone in the addressable market, which is a very diverse set of people, which makes shared community and closeness harder (what do 100m people all have in common except superficially?). They don’t kill the openness intentionally, it’s just a consequence of that fact that mass appeal is the opposite of tightknit
chagaif 5y ago
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
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  Hey Chagai! Nice to see you on HN :) How active are online meetups on Trustroots? It's nice to see that they do now exist, but I wonder whether the map limits it to people in the same geographical area. And I'l always be happy to see you on Thursday's BW Asia-Pacific weekly meetup.
  - chagaif 5y ago
    Hey, long time no see! They are pretty active (the past few weeks are an exception I hope), you mean the volunteering meet ups? I'll try dropping in to the BW online meetup soon!
zwayhowder 5y ago
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.
- Beldin 5y ago
  > he was accidently still wearing his police uniform Hear, hear, fine sirs!
  - blaeks 5y ago
    I like this feeling in my forearm bones when I just strike and hang my axe in a swollen vain of a pure and juicy Gold-pressed latinum of the Internet. Naw, no judgement here - it's just a _gut feeling_ of a high-resolution detection/detector of the decline of the civilization-type-of-situation. again, namaste to us all \m/
- amelius 5y ago
  > It was well thought out too, hard to spam with fake comments etc. Curious, what techniques did they use for that?
  - zwayhowder 5y ago
    Actually I might retract that statement, further reading on https://couchers.org/ https://couchers.org/ makes me think that it could have been a lot better. People may not have left negative reviews because they didn't want to be perceived as difficult hosts/guests.
Aschebescher 5y ago
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.

Torwald 5y ago

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.

wins32767 5y ago
That was very standard in the Roman empire at the time. Formalized patronage relationships were one of the core social organizing principles and given the distances, a letter from your patron to one of their contacts was _the_ mechanism for social proof.

cainxinth 5y ago

Pareto principle. 80% of people are decent human beings, but the 20% that aren’t cause 80% of the problems.

SMAAART 5y ago
Price's law: the square root of the population produces 50% of the trouble. Apply that to the US (328.2 million people) and we have that 18,116 individuals are responsible for 50% of problems. Mic drop
- hkt 5y ago
  ..are there 18,116 billionaires and near-billionaires?
- chx 5y ago
  Wait, what? Price's Law. The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work. Nothing about trouble.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Causing trouble is work, of sorts. But perhaps it would be clearer if restated as, "50% of impact in a domain can be attributed to square root the number of people in that domain".
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      Could also be applied to community discussion, both online and in meatspace. There is an extreme minority of people who comment and up/down vote who drive the discussion of the whole. The 99% rarely participate and just go along for the ride.
- nathanvanfleet 5y ago
  Uhhhhhhhh... the golden ratio.
  - snek_case 5y ago
    Totally and like... problems are fractal in nature, you have problems within problems within problems!
    - Igelau 5y ago
      It's turtles the whole way down.
- ermir 5y ago
  And the square root of that is 135, which causes 25% of the total trouble. If we could only find these people and get rid of them, we'd have paradise on Earth! And that's how genocides start.
im3w1l 5y ago
If only we had some kind of "credit score" but for social things..
- pope_meat 5y ago
  And it should be algorithmically driven with all sorts of fun edge cases and poor maintenance. Edit: oh, and obviously closed source, and have it's entire db leak about once a year due to excellent security.
  - smnplk 5y ago
    非常有趣，请告诉更多
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Nah... surely there's no way that software could mess up... people have all kinds of strange ideas, like traffic cameras looking for people using phones, and tag a guy scratching his head.... this surely is impossible to happen in real life with modern software.
- prashantsengar 5y ago
  Hello from China
- Igelau 5y ago
  The old Accidental Black Mirror.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I'm surprised /r/UnexpectedBlackMirror doesn't exist yet.
    - GravitasFailure 5y ago
      Unlike the inquisition, everybody expects Black Mirror these days.
jl6 5y ago
20% of people are not decent human beings? Harsh.
- bogwog 5y ago
  Have you met people?
  - omginternets 5y ago
    Is one person out of five that you meet causing trouble?
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      If driving on a highway is any indication, then yes
    - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
      Keep in mind, out of 25 people, one is causing 64% of the problems while the worst four besides that one are responsible for just an additional 16%.
      - a1369209993 5y ago
        > out of 25 people, one is causing 64% of the problems while the worst four besides that one are responsible for just an additional 16% Also, if you have any influence over which 20 people you spend time with, they're probably the 20 out of 25 who are not those five.
    - isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
      People who are shit are probably excluded from many social circles, so I don't think that's a great indicator.
    - Igelau 5y ago
      If the answer is "no", it's probably you.

jessriedel 5y ago

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.

robocat 5y ago
Does AirBnB provide a “super-guest” filter, or equivalent so that you can brainlessly and reliably filter for suitable guests? I would host independently minded guests that don’t want/need hand-holding, and guests that are vetted for being socially respectful (tidy, no 3AM drunks, etcetera). My property is tobacco and alcohol free, which surprises friends, so I can imagine strangers being disrespectful. Do trustroots.org or movingworlds.org provide filtering? I really never want to have to trawl through reviews, because I find it wasteful and also I think reveiwers tend to avoid writing anything truthfully negative (allusions and omissions might occur, but are not always obvious).
- xchaotic 5y ago
  it's funny because when it comes to any real disputes, AirBnb sides with landlords as much as possible (and as much as PR will allow), because that's who are they getting the money from. The guests are just the 'meat' in the machine so it would be more consistent if they allowed property owners to vet guests even more to avoid any issues/disputes in the first place. For RoboCat's case - it does still allow to not accept a certain guest after looking at hteir profile etc, but IMO that's too far into the journey - it'd be better from UX perspective and satisfaction if such a guest never found the property as available in the first place.
  - robocat 5y ago
    > [because they are getting the money from landlords] Which is weird, because of course the money comes from the guests. I have seen the opposite dynamic when it was a buyer's market with real estate: the vendor is paying however the agent was actually helping the buyer (to the detriment of the vendor). Real estate agents make their money from volume of sales, to a first approximation.

dkersten 5y ago

> 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.

marricks 5y ago
It seems like for any tech company to be successful and sustainable it has to destroy the openness and community it was born from. I discovered couch surfing right as my wandering days came to a close and I feel I sorely missed out.
- tjs8rj 5y ago
  I think the destruction of openness is a reflection of the user they serve. When Airbnb serves only NYC they can be idiosyncratic to the population there, and their smaller user base is a more similar type of person. Once at scale, they have to appeal to everyone in the addressable market, which is a very diverse set of people, which makes shared community and closeness harder (what do 100m people all have in common except superficially?). They don’t kill the openness intentionally, it’s just a consequence of that fact that mass appeal is the opposite of tightknit

chagaif 5y ago

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

peterburkimsher 5y ago
Hey Chagai! Nice to see you on HN :) How active are online meetups on Trustroots? It's nice to see that they do now exist, but I wonder whether the map limits it to people in the same geographical area. And I'l always be happy to see you on Thursday's BW Asia-Pacific weekly meetup.
- chagaif 5y ago
  Hey, long time no see! They are pretty active (the past few weeks are an exception I hope), you mean the volunteering meet ups? I'll try dropping in to the BW online meetup soon!

zwayhowder 5y ago

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.

Beldin 5y ago
> he was accidently still wearing his police uniform Hear, hear, fine sirs!
- blaeks 5y ago
  I like this feeling in my forearm bones when I just strike and hang my axe in a swollen vain of a pure and juicy Gold-pressed latinum of the Internet. Naw, no judgement here - it's just a _gut feeling_ of a high-resolution detection/detector of the decline of the civilization-type-of-situation. again, namaste to us all \m/
amelius 5y ago
> It was well thought out too, hard to spam with fake comments etc. Curious, what techniques did they use for that?
- zwayhowder 5y ago
  Actually I might retract that statement, further reading on https://couchers.org/ https://couchers.org/ makes me think that it could have been a lot better. People may not have left negative reviews because they didn't want to be perceived as difficult hosts/guests.

Aschebescher 5y ago

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.