In that way the algorithm needs to include statistics of how many men vs women are visiting X city… easy to update the algorithm and modify my X number of 3 per a variable %, easy.
How about a way to just report weird or creepy messages from anyone. Maybe you could have button for flagging dating/flitering/non hospex values messages. Many people especially men I think don’t really realize just how many weird messages women get. This one women just showed me her inbox and like 15 guys had messaged her in the past few days. They were all really short and said something like “wanna meet for a drink?” …just weird vibes…as a guy I don’t really get that type of thing. When someone gets a message like that they could flag it.
I had suggested to have a “bouncer” on duty to review messages for 12 hour shifts…that could instantly just suspend profiles for weird or creepy things. A dedicated safety person would review later. Maybe this could be something. I think that in general too many filters can bring people apart but at the same time there are plenty weird things going on that can draw people away(generally women) from a site…
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I dont think ““wanna meet for a drink?” is a creepy thing. Are you gonna report a sentence like that as creepy? I’m think is excessive. It is an obvious invitation to met the woman to hangout. The other part who decide to go or not. That happen in instagram or the actual hangouts of Couchsurfing. What it has to be fixed is the algorithm to prevent this dating behaviour that is the focus of other apps. Not this one. So if the algorithm is improved, the ““wanna meet for a drink?” would be read as a new experience to share experiences of hosting and surfing in our community.
The approach we generally have taken for these problems is to provide information to users and let them make their own decisions. We make people accountable for their actions rather than restrict their actions. If someone is being creepy then we need to find a way to lower their community standing score so that is signalled to the rest of the community, then people can make their own decisions based on their own tolerances by setting filters.
I think you’re right in that it’s hard to distinguish between what’s acceptable or reportable for this example, and puts a lot of onus on the person receiving the message. But maybe we could use a statistic like “what proportion of first messages that this person sends are responded to”. If it is low, then the person is likely spamming. If we find that spamming/dating messages of these kinds are being a big problem, then we could do something like lower community standing.
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The asking for a drink thing can come off in a creepy way when it is like 15 guys asking and no girls …it really comes off in context. Just asking to have a drink generally isn’t creepy in and of itself
Having a percent of messages responded to might be a good idea
Since this is not Tinder, it actually is. An invitation to hang out in a couch surfing way sounds differently.
Maybe, when you press the flag, there could be a list of reasons for flagging, and one of them could be “not in the spirit of Couchers”. And if a person gets flagged for that a lot, they can receive a message saying what they are doing wrong.
Do you mean to say people will not be banned for any kind of behavior, only their community standing score will be lowered? If yes, I don’t think it is a good approach. As @Aleja said earlier in this topic:
Not saying people should be banned for “wanna meet for a drink”, but I think there are a lot of cases where there should be harsher measures than just lowering their score.
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As for this, I was shocked by the idea, to be honest.
First of all, I find gruesome the thought of algoritmising the search. It’s a platform to find likeminded people and new friends all over the world, and I definitely do not want an algorithm to decide whether I can or can’t meet (host) someone based on my gender.
Secondly, I believe it will just make it harder to use the platform without achieving the safety purpose. The problem is not people hosting the opposite gender, the problem is creepy people, and we should target them.
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No, people will be warned, suspended, or banned in cases where it is shown they have a clear detrimental effect on other users depending on the severity and repeated actions. The support team is drawing out rules for this. But this is mostly for when we have clear-cut cases.
What I meant is that on these fuzzier problems, we shouldn’t be restricting user actions to solve the problem. Creepyness can be very subjective, so we can try to get many users’ subjective experience of that person, or their actions around that person, to work out what’s going on.
For example, as you’ve said it’s not inherently a problem for a man to only host women, only if they’re being creepy. If those women are rating that man low because he’s being a bit creepy, but not in an explicit or reportable way, that’s when we want community standing to kick in and be a useful metric.
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been asked by opposite sex quite a number of times to meet up for drinks or a café on CS, people who message me and say they want to hang out instead of needing a couch (CS does have that “Can meet” option instead of just hosting), was never anything creepy about it, and it never occured to me that people were doing similar things to hookup on CS till i started reading about hangouts here
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Sure, me too, but there’s a difference between “wanna meet for a drink?” and smth like “hey, I’m coming to your city and I don’t need a place to stay, but it would be great to meet in person and maybe grab a drink!” and probably smth else about the person and their trip.
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I very much agree with that. But then, there will be many different aspects affecting the score, right? Not sure what you have in mind, but I saw % of answered messages as an example somewhere. So if a person doesn’t answer everyone, that’s one thing (I never answer if I get uninformative requests, for example), and if many people find a person “a bit creepy” - totally different.
Yeah good point. I think we will need to fine tune it to make sure we’re measuring what we actually want to. This will be an important discussion when we go to implement it, and will likely take many iterations to get right.
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Phaula, my proposed algorithm is not filtering gender, is filtering sex.
You as woman could accept any men, whatever gender is, and women with a balance… if you are shocked with the idea to not be able to select any person… you need to agree with something that is possible to do. Create an algorithm to identify creepy people is technology too expensive that could be purchased maybe to the FBI.
I think someone of you are requesting too much, impossible things to do out of the knowledge or the developers or to advanced, and developers don’t have time. My proposal is a simple algorithm to do. If the developer here design something to filter here creepy guys… the technology will be purchased for sure 
@jcdelascasas I still don’t see why sex (male/female) should be part of the equation here. As @aapeli said in a different thread, we are not concerned with reproductive health of users, so gender (man/woman/non-binary/other) should be the variable to filter. Assuming you read and understood the couple of post replies that I sent to you in other threads (defining the difference between sex and gender), you seem to think of “gender” as a trivial concept and “sex” as the only “real” variable here, which is a bit insensitive to say the least. Edit: or it’s just an issue with different languages like Spanish not differentiating between sex and gender… I’m sorry!
In any case, I agree with others above that trying to limit how many people of a certain gender one can send requests to will not be effective. However, we could use an algorithm to “flag” users for further review. E.g. if a man only sends requests to women, the moderators could get a notification to look into his case more carefully. But there shouldn’t be a hard-cut restriction.
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I think the words and concept is different in different countries…
As in facebook you can see sex as gender, so the meaning is understood by us.
You can see that in Facebook the use “sexo” to difference in spanish the gender.
So, take out the variable sex that I propose and make it in just three (woman, man, non-binary) and a text field who wants to add more info in the non-binary field.
The algoritm would work with just the gender woman and man.
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@jcdelascasas you are mixing sex and gender. Sexo es la cuestión biológica (masculino, femenino, asignado generalmente por el aspecto de los genitales al nacer) genero es como se identifica la persona (mujer (cis o trans) , hombre (cis o trans), no binario y otros). I do agree that we still use “sex” for this, so this may be confusing for Spanish speakers. For example in my country you can request your id to match your gender, but the card still says ‘sex’ : woman, men, non binary.
I do not agree that people should host tge same amount of people from each gender. I only host people that send nice requests. 90% of them happened to be men, for several reasons (including than woman are less likely to surf a strangers home due to security concerns, so obviously there are more male requests). I will not host a lady just because ‘I have to balance’ of she sends me a 'I’m at the train station, is the room available?` (yup, this is a real request I got).
Anyhow: Ya’ll talking about filtering by gender or sex, or checking if someone is creepy based on that make me laugh a bit. There’s also creepy gay and pan and other sexual orientations creepy people.
I do agree that the majority of creepy people are man (sorry guys 
) , but if they are gay they can still be creepy to other man, can’t they? I think the tree is blocking the forest, however you say that in English.
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I second that. Idk how that happens, but I rarely get a good request from a girl
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Que el 90% de hombres solteros prefiere una mujer es bastante normal.En las mujeres solteras no es así,la tranquilidad que otra mujer le aporta está por encima de todo y es lógico que prefiera la comodidad de saber que podrá estar relajada.En todo caso,la propiedad privada y los gustos de su propietario,dentro de la legalidad,son un producto a respetar,no podemos ignorar que sin casa se termina el viaje.Es cierto que no está bien visto ni es políticamente adecuado elegir abiertamente qué sexo prefieres alojar,pero la realidad existe.Si alguien siente preferencia por un sexo,en su casa es legal que tenga esa opción.No olvidemos que,igual que una mujer,en general,se siente más segura entre mujeres:un hombre también.Aparte de segundas intenciones que pueda tener.En Youtube hay varios casos de parejas estables que se enamoraron gracias a este método,imagino que serán muchas más,de haber elegido un hotel:nada habría sucedido.España tiene una ley que protege todo acto en contra de la mujer y tiene un teléfono con auxilio inmediato en caso de ver vulnerados sus derechos.Admiro a esas mujeres solas que viajan a países donde sus derechos no existen,yo no tengo esa valentía.Saludos y abrazos…That 90% of single men prefer a woman is quite normal, in single women it is not like that, the tranquility that another woman gives them is above all else and it is logical that they prefer the comfort of knowing that they can be relaxed. In any case, private property and the tastes of its owner, within the law, are a product to be respected, we cannot ignore that without a house the trip ends, it is true that it is not well regarded or politically appropriate to openly choose which sex you prefer but the reality exists. If someone feels a preference for a sex, at home it is legal for them to have that option. Let’s not forget that, just like a woman, in general, she feels safer among women: a man too. ulterior motives you may have. On YouTube there are several cases of stable couples who fell in love thanks to this method, I imagine there will be many more, had they chosen a hotel: nothing would have happened. Spain has a law that protects all acts against the woman and She has a telephone with immediate assistance in case her rights are violated. I admire those women alone who travel to countries where their rights do not exist, I do not have that courage. Greetings and hugs.
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Yes you are right, globally gender is what I meant in sexo in our country… forget my idea…
Gender with three options is ok. as @n.spark and. you mentioned.
I think that creepy guys could be identified by many reviews (not just for one review that thinks that “Hi, lets have a drink” is creepy), reviews as the hidden ones that are able to be send in airbnb to the moderators. In that way, they creepy or predator could be ubicated in an algorithm that balance the requests taking into account the quantity of men vs women in that city.
Good luck developers to make the nice choice!
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