The reference system should include an anonymous element

Community Culture
57

Yeah I think this is where the ‘experience score’ part of the rating comes into it, it speaks to if your general enjoyment but also if it matched your expectations. And that will be more general than the few criteria we can come up with like ‘wants to hang out’ (not that it’s unimportant, just that there’s all kinds of ways the expectations can mismatch the experience)

That’s part of why I think we definitely need this general ‘experience score’, it will reflect whether people’s expectations match their experiences with a person.

I imagined these would be binary options. Do you think there’s scope here for a range this large to be meaningful? Is a 4 for safety or discomfort a bad score because it’s not 5?

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58

How would you display the safety scores on a user’s profile then? 3 Yeses and 2 Nos? Or are you saying not to explicitly state it at all?

59

Yeah was imagining it would just be included into the score, and quite heavily too for Nos. Otherwise we’re going to have like 5 statistics that people have to look at.

I think this is really finetuning stuff though, and we won’t be able to really see what works until it’s tested in practice, at which point we can iterate. But generally I think start simple and expand from there.

60

I disagree with making a safety score implicit. It wouldn’t be useful for me as a vulnerable surfer when I look at profiles with similar community scores. It also won’t serve as proper, explicit feedback to users on what is affecting their score negatively, so that they can take the required action to improve it.

I’d like to hear more views from others for this!

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61

Just wanted to chime in here because when CS did this, it made “super hosts” very upset. I get that we want to make it more fair, but it doesn’t seem fair when people who have lots of experience and positive feedback are randomly pushed to the bottom.

(I am going to start a thread on what I think would do that better - displaying an acceptance rate so that busier/more popular “super hosts“ may seem less appealing (or more appealing, depending on how up you are for a challenge). Hosts that get less requests would have a higher acceptance rate naturally :slight_smile:

62

How about making the “can host” and the “wants to meet” two different things?

In CS you could set your “status” as can host/ cannot host/ wants to meet, and in the search result, if you wanted to find locals to hang out but you didn´t need a host, all the people that had “hosting” on were filtered out. Wich is not accurate. I´m open to host, but I´m also open to go to a museum, so I will set up “wants to host”+“wants to meet (or hang out or whatever)”, and maybe some people are open to host, but don´t really want to hang out with their guest, or don´t have time, so “want to host”+“doesn´t want to hang out” would be clear and solve this two issues.

I would chang this to “please leave a note on the guestbook” or “please describe your experience”. For me references are way more important than any point system, or anything wirtten in the profile by the person. What others say about the person is what gives you the real idea of how the interaction is going to be. And also is what keeps the trust system running. Let´s please reinforce the idea of leaving a reference, not make it an additional nuance “just if you want to”. Please?

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63

Very good point, it seems not just the anonymous component is important, the outward feedback component deserves just as much emphasis. Will definitely keep this in mind. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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65

I feel that there are many factors to why people may not want to come forward and call their harassers out publicly. A quick google search will help you understand why.

That’s what you’re talking about right? Because the only anonymous portion we’re proposing is the part where we ask members if they felt SAFE and COMFORTABLE (i.e. to check that life was not in danger, there was no unwanted sexual advances) throughout the encounter. References are still public. If you’re going to call victims cowards and “stabbing” their harassers in the back, then it’s literally victim shaming.

Hope you can clarify your stand on this, because I am not comfortable with having this kind of mentality on the platform.

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66

I stand with Kelly on this, too. Platforms that have been developed later than Couchsurfing have benefited greatly from having an anonymous element to references. In a world where people are increasingly sensitive and egos are fragile, it’s not that easy to leave a candid negative reference without fear of being attacked or shamed.

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67

I don’t think anonymous negative references are a wise idea. In the world we live and, particularly in Brazil nowadays, politics go hand in hand with fake news and “trollers” staining reputations through gossips and rumors is easy and it’s being widely used. If a guest didn’t like something about the host it could just use this unproven “reference” as a vendetta. It’s better to say it out in the open, so that the host has at least a way to reply.

68

I think there is a misunderstanding here. There is ZERO intention for us to have a public, anonymous reference function. When we say anonymous aspect to references, it is solely on letting users anonymously score the SAFETY of each interaction. Each interaction will still have a public reference.

So once again, I have no idea where this thread is going because I don’t think allowing victims a safe way to raise the flag on predators is “cowardly” and “backstabbing”.

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69

Thanks for sharing the article, @kellyt!

Indeed, an anonymous option for feedback doesn’t give power to cowards. It gives power to voices that don’t want to end up in a shouting match whenever they rise an issue. A lot of people are just too accustomed to being able to shout down accusations without constraints.

Also can’t see the danger here being anonymous vendettas. We’re talking about a medium value from unrelated encounters. No need to mull over the effects of one wrong feedback. And the people that will be worried about the overall picture are exactly the people that should be worried.

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70

While, I still don’t see the positive point in allowing anonymous negative references, maybe I am misunderstanding the proposal and I didn’t understand @nolo sentence about “medium”, I strongly believe that named sources are much better than anonymous ones: https://asbury.libguides.com/c.php?g=65794&p=4540878

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Thanks for pointing that out. I meant mean, though that probably doesn’t catch the working of the score so good either. I think it’s well phrased on Couchers.org:

We destigmatize negative reviews by moving the goalposts from expecting everyone to be 100% as it is in Couchsurfing™ to putting people around 60-80% on average. People won’t feel so bad about moving someone down from a 78% to a 76% if they’ve done something wrong. If a person frequently makes others feel unsafe or uncomfortable, you can expect that they’ll have very low scores.

72

This is basically a well established in social sciences Likert scale, I think this is a good lead to go. Definitely better than numbers, especially out of 10. There’s also a 7 point version we can consider.

There could be statements instead of questions, for example: “I felt safe with XXX”; strongy disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongy agree

image

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73

I love the idea of the 7 point! The color gradient is good too.

Would it make sense to split up the community rating into 4 things:

  • Overall community rating
  • Hosting rating
  • Surfing rating
  • Safety rating

The overall rating obviously would be the main rating shown, but you could click to see a breakdown of their rating. This would provide a better picture of what to expect. Some people are much better hosts than guests and vice-versa!

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74

Hopefully you will be able to create a rating system that will deter both inappropriate behavior and retaliatory references. Wtihin CS i was surprised to see poor behavior from people id met that could have easily resulted in negative references despite their lack of concern, probably because they could have just returned the favor to the opposing party.

75

hey guys, saw this come up on the bottom of the page, hope it’s not too old to reply.

I think there are 2 things that haven’t been considered in this conversation:

First is the fact that you’re kinda rating 2 things: the person and the hosting situation… how is that gonna be addressed? (maybe in another forum).

Second: “Anonymous Reviews” I think the main reason why on these platforms people don’t “report” negatively, especially with people, is that it is basically ineffectual and forces them to reveal a lot for no real reason. A review online is not some exposé. It is also kinda mean for someone if they have had a terrible experience… I don’t want to share it online, even anonymously! And with a reference, one bad one, no matter how bad, can easily be disregarded. What if someone has 100 good refs and 1 bad one? People will go “hah, the internet is full of crazies, they must have mis-interpreted something”. I understand of course, some people will intepret it differently and avoid, but I don’t think relying on that is really going to solve the issue people have brought up here. I would say having an anonymous review won’t really fix the issue regarding creeps.

The main tool to remove creeps is basically reporting them. Leaving a bad reference? It’s inconsequential. If someone has had a bad experience, an anonymous review is pointless, they should be reported instantly and removed if it was that bad in the first place. It also removes profiles that will just have loads of negative references, which makes hte community look bad. It’s the internet, we’re gonna get creeps, whatever happens. Get them out!

Now there is still a place for anonymous feedback… For example is someone needs some points to improve on, but ultimately so they can improve their contribution to the community. If you wanted to say “they were lovely, but by god, they needed to have a shower” :- ok, that’s probably fine as an anonymous review, it’s something to improve. They aren’t a bad person, but perhaps in the future they can improve their situation (better couch or something) so future guests can enjoy them.

Also I saw in the later things a definition developing between “let’s hang out all day” vs “i’m working”… has anyone mentioned how they do it on BlaBlaCar? If I remember correctly they have it on the profile of drivers like “I never talk” “I’m a chatterbox” as well as a few gradations between. I think a similar thing could work in this context, and it can be changeable, or maybe even a response to the requests to stay. “I’d love to host, but i’ll be really busy, is that ok?” Then you can go into it with realistic expectations.

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76

Hi Benjamin, thanks for sharing your thoughts and welcome to the forum!

I understand the intention and scope of the anonymous aspect a bit differently. The intention, I believe, is not about having written references posted anonymously. Anonymity would be quite impossible to achieve like that, at least to the people involved. And that’s the kind of anonymity we are aiming at: enabling users to call on negative experiences, even when they wouldn’t want to write about it (and reveal themselves, just as you point out as well). So the anonymous aspect is mostly about making the written reference independent from leaving a quantified feedback (by selecting values on a scale or ticking choices). And then processing this feedback in a way so that it’s not directly traceable to a particular user either.

From it’s scope, it’s not directly related to reporting, as it would only visualize collective opinions. There could be consequences, if a certain aggregated threshold is reached, but reporting a serious single incident should be an entirely distinct matter to leaving a reference. I’m not aware that there’s already concrete ideas sketched out, who exactly would act on reports and which guidelines they would follow. But there is a topic on reporting already, so if you have more ideas on it, please share them in Reporting and Moderation!

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It’s never too late to reply, unless we locked the topic for some reason! Thanks for chiming in.

I’ve noticed that when this happens it’s often the case that other people who wrote positive reviews felt something was off, but they weren’t confident/direct enough to write a bad reference. We’re hoping that by allowing anonymous ratings, people can still write something positive (like thanking their host or mentioning their good qualities), but also being able to discreetly indicate that they weren’t always comfortable. It’s complicated, especially for women, to publicly admit that something felt wrong - and it’s even harder when that person has all positive reviews or just a few negative/neutral ones.