Editing Veit Response CS Goes Corporate (section)

===CS was never about intercultural understanding and peace===

An interesting email exchange developed. In the end Casey didn't want to join forces because he claimed that our “goals” didn't align - for him it was NOT, and I repeat this, it was NOT about intercultural understanding and peace. In fact, Casey specifically quoted these goals from our front page and said that we differed there. I have never published these emails, and probably never will because they were a private exchange. But with yesterday's news of CS trying to make a business out of hospitality exchange it's imperative for the community to know how this could happen. This is important. So again: from the very beginning, CouchSurfing was NOT about intercultural understanding and peace. Only in later years would they copy some of our ideas, start claiming to “make the world a better place one couch at a time”, change their domain from .com to .org, when they realized that in our idealistic community it IS important why we do this. I would not have spent 14 years of my life building a hospitality exchange organization if I didn't believe in this idea, most volunteers would not help out just to get others a free place to crash, and they certainly don't want to do this to make someone rich. We share a common belief. Casey does not have this belief.

Soon people started using Hospitality Club to promote the new cool site. We had always filtered messages between members for spam, out of the fear that spam could kill all trust in the network and started treating CS promotion messages as spam. A decision that haunts us to this day, since this was seen by some in the community as censorship. I also was wrong about the name - it IS catchy and especially the media loved it, giving CS an advantage over our a bit clumsy Hospitality Club ;-)