FIrst of all, welcome! It’s great to have you here, Colin!
You pose some very good questions. The discussion here touched on these topics a bit, so that discussion thread may be worth a read.
My thinking is that unlike a for-profit platform that would benefit from having an inflated user and visitor count, Couchers is non-profit and has no incentive to keep inactive profiles around. At the same time, we don’t want to remove people who simply may have not used the platform in a while (months or years). So I think a combination of the following should help:
- When searching for hosts or people to meet up with, show active members only by default, with most active members at the top. You can use search filters to allow you to see people only active in the last X amount of time.
- If an account has been inactive for X amount of time (maybe 1 year? 2 years?), send an e-mail and/or push notification to the person asking them if they want to still remain active, and if there is no response then temporarily “hibernate” their account. If they log in someday, they can immediately reactivate their account.
- When searching, make it much easier to increase or decrease the search radius and allow people to search by maps (rough geographic location only to preserve privacy) so you’re only seeing relevant profiles.
I’m sure there are other things that could be done to address these issues too. This is a great topic worth digging into, so thanks for bringing it up!