To be clear, the community standing is fundamentally a safety rating. It speaks to how much the people that have met them have trusted them. The largest weightings should of course come from safety, and it’s very true that that should be made explicitly clear. However we can assume that the vast majority of experiences are going to have people feeling safe and comfortable, which is why other subjective metrics should be included.
The community standing score is only reflective of activity IF their interactions are positive ones. imagine person 1 has had two interactions which have been positive and person 2 has had a hundred interactions which have been positive. The community standing score should reflect that person 2 is more likely to be trustowrthy based on a larger set of experiences. If they were shitty, then that would be reflected too and the score would be low. E.g. a person with 10 all positive experiences should have a standing score higher than a person with 20 where 2 of their experiences are negative in some way.
We should however approach it that if community standing score ends up not being reflective of safety, then it should be fundamentally changed if not scrapped
Negative how? That’s very subjective, was the couch too lumpy? Or did they make an unwanted advance on me? What’s in place to weed out those people who take advantage of the platform and community. As for the ones who get through, how do you remove them when they have crossed a line and keep them from creating another account and returning?
Yeah it is subjective, but trust is a very subjective thing so I don’t see any way around that. Unwanted advances will be explicitly covered by safety questions, which we are discussing like “did this person make you feel unsafe?”, which will very heavily affect the standing score, more than anything else. If someone is generally taking advantage of the platform - e.g. freeloading for free accomodation without meeting the spirit of couch-surfing - then that will be reflected as people will rank them low subjectively and their score will go down, and people will have filters in place for what score they are prepared to interact with.
People will be removed if they do cross a line by cancelling their account. They will be prevented from returning through a rigorous verification process that prevents multiple uses of the same piece of identity. You can read about it here