Óscar
Night of the Living Dead
One of the greatest inventions of the 21st century was ruined by... greed, I suppose? It went all the way from the 2011 promise that "CouchSurfing will never make you pay" (surprisingly still online) to the 2020 call for monetary help (a "decision of last resort") to a paid-subscription model that has remained even after the pandemic, only becoming more universal and more expensive in 2026. So, a platform that was originally built on human-to-human trust started deceiving its members long ago, but the most recent, dating-app-inspired 2026 update comes close to being a scam. First, in order to hide the fact that the vast majority of profiles have long been inactive, they removed the one feature that still made it easy to use, the ‘Last log in’ filter, replaced by a vague 'Recently active' tag (initially, by nothing). More dangerously, they moved every user, regardless of their hosting status, to be an 'active host' you can send requests to, unless they subscribe and change their status every single month (there’s no permanent switch off). Thus they're seemingly trying to lure back the disenchanted (they start receiving request notifications in their emails, though some of these do seem to be made-up) and give the false impression of an active community before potential new subscribers and, I suppose, before potential investors as well. My real-life friend María José died in a car crash in 2024, along with her father. Ten years before, she'd signed up on Couchsurfing, which she never seems to have used. In 2026, M. J. became an 'active host' you can send requests to, asking to stay with her wherever she is now... and will remain so for eternity, for, being dead, she can no longer change or delete her profile. One can only imagine how many Couchsurfing users created profiles since the company was launched in 2004, left them to rot, passed away at some point in the 2000s or 2010s or 2020s, and have been peacefully lying in their graves until April 2026, when they were summoned back to inflate the numbers of a now-shady company. To top it up, if a user has no home pics, as is the case with many of them, an image is chosen of a place above the clouds... Unless having a Couchsurfing profile grants you some special form of immunity against death, they must be at least in their hundreds, statistically. But the Resurrection of the Dead comes shortly before the Apocalypse, the End of all Ends. Please choose Couchers or BeWelcome every time you can. Couchsurfing's tactics are plainly immoral, perhaps illegal.