Okay sure, thank you for your kind input, we’ll definitely take it into consideration. Nobody said anything about forcing, that is a very strong word - we’re not forcing anyone, just considering the different possibilities with input from the community, let’s be clear about that.
Of course, if we can have everything on the app, that’d be best. It just has to be well functioning enough so that people don’t migrate the groups and communication out of Couchers and into other platforms like Whatsapp
The Facebook groups/communities already exist so I think it would be silly not to take advantage of that outreach (you gotta hand it to them, they know how to design groups!). Like @kellyt said, I don’t think it would ever be a central communication platform and there would be zero affiliation.
Regarding public trips: One perhaps fringe feature I liked about them was to look for hosts in an entire region. Outside of dedicated city trips I’d regularly need a host in roughly this distance but not in that specific place.
And then there was that one time (probably not something I’m ever going to need again, but who knows!) I’ve been interrailing, had some days without a concrete plan and tried looking for a host anywhere in Italy. Found some places I’d never have visited otherwise!
Think this would be great instead of hangouts, especially in way of safety since it will create a more community sense and approach
Most local (CS) communities have a WhatsApp or FB group now anyway so would be a great way to replace it or integrate it so there’s a better safety net as well.
+1 for groups. Be great if local ambassadors could moderate like the old days.
One extra I would like to see GO is “friends”.
To me CS was better before “friends”. You couldn’t even search for individuals easily. Most had a CS name and it was generally odd. You logged on solely to meet people in the place you were travelling to. Your references were solely from your guests or hosts. Made more sense on a hospex platform. They screwed that up.
I think the friends feature was badly implemented on CS. There was never any reason for it, and it was never really pushed anywhere. I can imagine situations in which we could make is useful, for instance many people here are keen on a ‘friends of friends’ feature, which helps establish trust (useful for some people but not all)
Maybe you’re right but I found the initial absense of “friends” on CS promoted the purity of hospitality exchange by default. If you wanted to talk to friends or to search out friends of friends, you had facebook. If you wanted to stay with a Norwegian person in Norway, you had couchsurfing. I thought it strengthened the reference system because you knew that good references came from good guests or good hosts - not some buddy from highschool or random character. (And that interaction only occurred due to the strength of your profile description and your couch request) I liked the “old-school” vouching badges for the same reason. Those badges came from having good experiences with experienced couchsurfers. It did get a bit cliquey later on though so I can get why that was dropped, but adding ‘friends’ and incorporating facebook profile links was a bad move in my opinion. I personally have never pursued a ‘friends of friends’ fuction so I can’t really speak to it but it sounds equally cliquey to me.
Yeah I see your points, I’m not totally sold on friends here myself. Though I don’t really envision it getting as cliquey as the vouches (which was just limited to 3 per person). My issue is with whether there’s enough to justify the functionality, I think there’d have to be more than just for mutual friends. Would you mind starting a topic on it with your points, and try to engage why other people might want to see it implemented?
@XpXnx The friends feature was useful while the “friends of friends” search filter still worked. I’m all in for dropping the feature altogether, though; as long as we get some “contacts of contacts” filter that’s just looking for your past interactions.
It was definitely inconvenient to check that way if the person had more than one page of references. I miss the friends of friends feature too. It helped you see how many degrees of separation there were between you and other people you had met. I miss that close-knit community vibe, tbh.
Fair enough, you get extra convienient fuctionality but I feel the trade off is the devaluation of the reference system. I waffle on about it abit more in the seperate thread dedicated to the friends feature. It’s just my opinion though.
I totally agree, I used Cs Groups a lot, mainly “travel companions”, even when I couldn’t access them in the app, while traveling, I accessed them in the browser
I think a mix is needed to build up trust. Groups, rewards, references, gender, other activities in the community, rest of profile, they all add up. It is for the user to decide how to do the calculation, but the website can default to a certain way.
I think also the kind of friend-relation is important.
I think that’s a very good feature. Personally I really like the public trip feature (or wasn’t it called open request or something?) , as it allowed me to find couches when I couldn’t find any with requests, and also to go to places where I would never have gone (hosts in small towns get zero requests).
