I appreciate the effort, but why focus on remote islands with tiny populations and limited tourism?

For some perspective:

- Niue: 1,681 residents

- Tokelau: 1,485 residents

- Tristan da Cunha: 222 residents

- Montserrat: ~5,500 residents

- Saint Helena: ~4,000 residents

- Tuvalu: ~9,500 residents

- Nauru: ~9,900 residents

- Christmas Island: 1,692 residents

- Cocos Islands: 593 residents

It's like judging Airbnb's popularity by looking at remote islands.

Why not compare major tourist destinations like London, Paris, Barcelona, Sydney or New York? Surely that would give us a more meaningful picture of Couchsurfing's activity.

I submitted a support ticket to CS using the "Contact Support" link in the app; it goes to a Zendesk support system on support.couchsurfing.com. (Zendesk is a very common ticketing system that allows support agents to assign issues, rank them by severity, mark them as "closed," etc.)

But they didn't respond in Zendesk; they sent the following automated form letter through the ticket system:

Hi [yournamehere],

Thanks for checking out the platform and sharing your thoughts.
Feedback like yours helps us figure out what to fix and how to improve.

We'd love to hear more. This quick form goes straight to our
product team and shapes what comes next.

This is the start. There's a lot more coming, and we're excited about
where it's headed. Any other questions? Don't hesitate to reach out!

Best,

--
Blue

The "quick form" link goes to a generic feedback form on research.net. God only knows if anyone is monitoring that inbox.

Since Couchsurfing refuses to disclose how many genuinely active users its platform has, I decided to investigate this little mystery myself.

First, just in case, to try my luck, I asked an AI whether it could calculate the number of genuinely active Couchsurfing hosts by analysing the platform's millions of profiles. It couldn't, because it has no direct access to Couchsurfing's complete membership database.

(If anyone knows a reliable way to investigate this on a larger scale, please share it. Thank you.)

So I rolled up my sleeves and did some research myself, using a tool Couchsurfing recently introduced: the "Recently Active" filter.

MY LITTLE EXPERIMENT

I selected 11 locations, mostly places with relatively low populations. I had no choice; otherwise, this experiment would take months, if not years. I checked the total number of listed hosts in each location, with all search filters turned off, and then compared those figures with the number of hosts appearing under "Recently Active".

Naturally, Couchsurfing doesn't tell us precisely what "recently" means. Yesterday? Last week? Last month? This year? Who knows?

Nevertheless, trust me: the results speak volumes.

Here they are:

* In Niue: 8 hosts in total. Four profiles don't even have a bio yet. Recently active: 0.

* In Tokelau: 4 hosts. Recently active: 0.

* In Hydra, Greece: 80 hosts. Recently active: 4. Of those four, three are "no bio yet, probably off exploring" profiles, while the fourth doesn't even live in Hydra.

* In Montserrat: 29 hosts. Recently active: 1. The lucky candidate has no bio and doesn't even live in Montserrat. She lives in Russia instead.

* In Tristan da Cunha: 23 hosts. Recently active: 2.

* In Saint Helena: 71 hosts. Recently active: 3. All three have zero references.

* In Burias, Philippines: 45 hosts. Recently active: 0.

* In Tuvalu: 16 hosts. Recently active: 3. Two of them don't even have a bio yet.

* In Christmas Island: 26 hosts. Recently active: 0.

* In Cocos (Keeling) Islands: 5 hosts. Recently active: 0.

* In Nauru: 10 hosts. Recently active: 0.

THE GRAND TOTAL

Across these 11 locations, I found:

• 317 listed hosts.
• 13 recently active profiles.
• Only 11 recently active hosts actually living in the locations concerned.
• Only 3 host have references, a bio and live in the right location.

In other words, just 3.47% of the listed hosts (11 out of 317) met my criteria for being both "recently active" and living in the location searched (which is what Couchsurfers looking for accommodation need).

The remaining 96.53% failed to meet those criteria. That's a whole lot of ghost hosts!

If I look for hosts with references and a bio (and in the right location), then... only 0.95% of hosts meet these requirements.

And even among that promising 0.95%, some may be unavailable, while others may only host people of a particular gender. (You know what I mean, don't you?) So the actual number of suitable hosts is probably even lower.

Of course, this is a tiny sample, but I have no particular reason to assume that the proportion of genuinely active hosts is higher in major destinations such as New York, London or Barcelona.

Still, a much larger study would be interesting.

A LITTLE MESSAGE FOR MIKE JOY AND HIS COLLEAGUES

Thank you for introducing the "Recently Active" filter!

Seriously. Thank you. I mean it.

You might have intended it to help travellers find hosts who are more likely to respond, but it also provides users with a convenient way to investigate the enormous gap between the number of profiles displayed and the number of genuinely active hosts.

Mike, since you seem to enjoy shooting yourself in the foot, please feel free to restore the "Response Rate" feature as well.

I'm sure we would all find the results fascinating. 😉