Well, for me community is much more than hosing and surfing. Why we have such a big and active community in my city? Easy: because the locals hang out between each other. Lot´s of us have become good friends. And that´s what keeps the spirit alive when you are not hosting or traveling: you keep engaged with likeminded people, any meetings on this friends group are always open to travelers passing by or surfing with any of us… For me it´s way more than the one on one relationship with a guest or a host: it´s a community, a group of people I am part of, even when I am in my own town. I think that´s what makes possible to arrive to a city and find people available to hang out (we were going to do it anyways) and available to host (we are used to have visitors anyways).
But: this is my personal view. And I´m not an introvert, so: it´s just my 2 cents =)
Yes i had that too and i am searching for it again! Sounds great.
But you said it. You life in a city.
When i travel with hitchhiking for example, i dont mind staying of the path. I personally dont mind a host having low community standing core, if there is a chance to see, that they are good persons! I am not the person to read a whole guestbook to know that.
I agree about the introvert/extravert part. On CS my extravert friend always got many more vouches than I did, it is frustrating, but it is also a metric on how many successful interactions have been made. We introverts just have a lower rate of interactions, therefore fewer successful interactions.
About this part: “This is so that it’s reflective of the user as time passes, and also helps prevent people from maxing out their score and staying up there forever (Super Host Effect)”.
I would advise caution about any mechanism that “disincentivizes” activity of power users. In every social network, power users are those who generate most of the activity, and are necessary to reach a certain critical mass. I will repeat what I said in another comment, you don’t want to end up in Bewelcome’s situation, putting limits on BW on problems that existed on CS, but never existed on BW due to lack of activity. Wait until there is a super host problem before trying to fix it.
I agree with this, and I think these are really good points. We certainly don’t want to disincentivize being active or helping to grow the community. In the beginning we should focus on growth, but also keep in mind our long-term goals.
I don’t think a score matters at all, just numbers that can’t describe what a person is like. That’s why I always read the most recent references they have. Whether they have 500 or just one, you get a better picture than a score. I wouldn’t want a number to represent me either. So the guest book would be a lot more useful to me.
The majority of the time I preferred hanging out with just my host. Rarely went to events unless I really couldn’t find anything else to do, or had the urge to be social. I do consider myself introverted, but have no problem being social.
The best way I can describe it is to hink of people like batteries, extroverts are charged by being around other social people, and introverts are drained by it. I can usualy spend a good full couple of days with the same person, but one night out at an event does it pretty quickly.
The hosting and events are 2 esperate things, 1 should not affect the other. If people are really involved with the community like organizing a lot of events, meet ups, or generally like to hang out with people then give them that acknowledgment, like “Ambassador”.
I’d see the score as an approach that’s worth trying out. But I also think it would be the most experimental feature of the app, so I’d suggest not making it too central for now.
To me the key question would be: what is the aim of the the score? If we have a clear answer to that, we can always be flexible about how to best implement it, be it a score or something different.
Greetings Manuel. Yesterday both You and me took a look at the prototype mobile app. About the community score, what I suggested to the development team in my conversation with @Kellyt is to make the community score bar clickable which upon clicking on it the user is presented with an infographic that breaks the overall displayed score into all the parts that composes it. Something like this:
The purpose of having such an infographic is to allow (more experienced) members to better understand what type of member is the person they are dealing with.
To answer to your question, Manuel: isn’t the aim of the score obvious to You? To me it seems quite obvious - the aim is to make users who don’t match someone’s ideas of what Couchers is about to self exclude themselves. Pretty much the same purpose of the references but exponentially amplified.
This is as evil as it gets. Funny to see that is a “fruit” of all of us who contributed here in all these months since June. If I am asked if I want a “community score”, my answer is: no. But I am not here to tell the founders what to do, I am here to bring ideas that is up to them to consider or not.
Yeah, a shout-out and big thanks to everyone from the UX team!! I don’t know how many testers are still needed, but would definitely recommend it to everyone
I think right now we have quite a variety of aims related to the score. In addition to @kellyt’s points I’d see :
giving room for feedback on unpleasant and objectionable behavior and making it visible
giving insight into the level and kind of engagement of another member
aiding especially new members in navigating the site and reading profiles
giving direction and education about wanted behavior
distinguishing members that contribute a lot to the community
And there’s probably more?
I also didn’t like the visualization on a single bar. I’m not sure about a chart though, but something round would certainly feel more accommodating.
After the user tests yesterday, I’m kind of unconvinced about the community standing score. @womxn brought up the fact that the score doesn’t really tell me much aside from the fact that the user is very active or not - sure, the score goes down when someone says I’m unsafe, but that score can be propped up by being active. So the purpose of it is extremely muddy.
We really like how Airbnb has ratings for different aspects of the experience - safety, friendliness etc. which makes it extremely clear how an experience will be like when you meet with this person (that’s the whole point of looking at someone’s profile, isn’t it?)
On the other hand, I know it makes people uncomfortable to be ‘rated’. To me, as long as it’s an objective metric such as ‘safety’, the experience being rated is fine. Thoughts pls!
To me there’s good purposes and Community standing is a good overall concept to address many of them. I just think we have to acknowledge that this is experimental and will need continuous iteration to work out. So I wouldn’t put it front and central on the profile right now. I’d rather see a dedicated “Community standing” section on the profile for now. And thus stay more flexible in adapting and visualizing it.
First of all I want to congratulate all the developers who invested their time, skills and effort in building the platform so far (both the mobile prototype and the desktop version). Great job guys! Keep up the good work!
Personally, what makes me uncomfortable is not to be rated in general, but to be rated anonymously. It makes me uncomfortable to know that a member can give a rating to parts of our interaction that I cannot see. This is what makes me uncomfortable: not to know what is the rating that that user gave me. If there is nothing hidden/anonymous, then I am totally okay with being rated. I just can’t stand people who act “behind my back”.
I think as you mentioned, people have an aversion to being rated, and it ties back into this. The purpose of Airbnb is to commodify your house to compete with others. “Hosts” on Airbnb don’t act as they would with friends, because there’s a lot at stake with each of their interactions, some professionalism is required. We need to avoid these kind of interactions, we don’t want to comodify the experience. I suspect that’s that plays in a lot to people’s discomfort with being rated, they just want to be themselves in couch-surfing experiences.
This is the key. We can design various calculations using different weightings for different experiences and then monitor and change it as we go.
I think we should start listing the goals first (example: safety), and derive indicators from them, not start with the indicator (example: friendliness, community standing) while not knowing what it is meant to accomplish.
Maybe a table could useful here to map our ideas.
I will attach an example. The comment about commodification of interactions is interesting too, so I 'm including it too.
My problem with the score is that i am a competitive person. I want to be “good” at sth. so a low community standing score of mine, would lead to me stop using couchers. One idea of mine to avoid that, is that i can get a “strike freeze” for Hosting.
From time to time im not as active, but i dont want to come back with a low score. So 1 time hosting- for 1 Month without negative impact on my score when im not active.
Than i thought the score just Shows if a person is active or extrovert. So i said sth like i would host user with 50% community standing score and not the ones with 100% in interview, bc i think the low standing score users would just be introvert. @anon46748786 s idea about it being clickable is Spot on! Bc i have no idea what is this score about… and im not the only one.
Is it possible to have only negative references but a high score bc you host a lot and do a lot Events?
And i did not think about the Stars of airbnb but them of cs. Like as a extra to the references. But i think i am the only person checking them on cs
Another approach we can keep in mind is not having a continuous score, but several community standing (or community trust) levels/steps/distinctions… similar to sth like the member trust levels on the forum.
One advantage I see with this is that it supports both continuous crediting and necessary checks. E.g. you couldn’t advance to some level if you’re not fully verified. Or you can’t reach nor maintain a certain level if you have sth like 2 ‘unsafe’ reviews out of your recent last 10.
Below is an example how requirements for reaching a certain trust level are listed on the forum. So this can also support transparent insight, both for oneself as for others.
This has potential to reveal itself as a good idea.
Something that was good on Couchsurfing was that all users were given the chance to RECOVER their status in the community. For example, if one didn’t reply to a certain number of requests their reply rate dropped progressively towards zero percent, but if then they started to reply promptly to new requests received their reply rate was then progressively increased towards hundred percent.
Maybe is a good idea that also here on the future Couchers.org platform to give members the chance to recover their status once damaged. Otherwise probably people will just abandon the community if they see that their community score drops and they are not given a way to recover it.
To me it doesn’t sound so good either. Or rather: it sounds too disciplinary.
I do think it’s the right approach to judge people on whether they are respectful when sharing hospitality. But that’s probably the only context where we want to have a strong opinion about another user?
Maybe we should keep and present this clearly apart, because combining it with other activities can give the impression that the community should be judgemental about lots of things?
A direct feedback on the user testing still: we could combine the distinct questions about feeling safe and feeling comfortable into one with three possible answers:
It’s a bit confusing, feeling safe and being comfortable are separate things.
The wording needs to be simple and not open to interpretation, because some volunteers will have to go through disputes and false accusions. We’ve all seen those reference wars on CS sometimes over nothing. An example of what could happen: host was rude or dirty, guest left negative reference, host leaves “not safe” as retaliation, big drama, etc…
Safety scoring is a can of worm, but I’m curious about comes out of it. It is great that couchers are willing to test new ideas.
Wouldn’t you be able to say the same for rating a person Positive, Neutral or Negative then? I’m doing it out of the goodness of my heart to host you or bring you around - “I don’t want to be judged on how well I do it, I’m doing it out of the goodness of my heart!”
If you bring the emotions out of it, the crux of it is that users make use of these indicators from the profile to see if a person is worth hanging out/would be a danger to him or her. As we do the user testing, this is how it is being perceived:
Community score - tells me about how active a user is
Positive/neutral/negative references - no change from CS, have to read nuances
Safety - no clear indicator at all
It doesn’t matter the magical mumbo jumbo we do in the back end for the community score. If it’s not clear that it’s used a certain way to users, it won’t be used that way (talking about baking in safety into the score here).
This is very good. Personally, I really only see a need for last login and a clear safety rating. Everything else is just noise (and clutters the UI or functionality of the platform).
to everyone from the UX team!! I don’t know how many testers are still needed, but would definitely recommend it to everyone 
