Editing Veit Response CS Goes Corporate (section)

===First betrayal of the community: the “crash”===

In 2005 I met Casey when he showed up at one of our Hospitality Club Camps. We had some nice chats, smoked a clove cigarette or two together. He is a smooth talker. We kept in touch a bit over the next year, and then in 2006 Casey decided to shut down CS after a database crash. Here's a quote from his famous goodbye message: “I have devoted the last three years of my life to CouchSurfing. I have literally poured every cent I have into the site. I've sacrificed my health, my time, and my own ability to travel and meet people. In many ways I've put my life and wanderlust on hold to build this network. I'm not complaining; it's been a fantastic ride. As devastating as it is to consider, it looks like the ride is over. ”

What struck me as very odd quickly was the fact that there was no outcry from the most involved CS volunteers (“ambassadors”), many of whom I had been in touch with. I knew that if I had done the same thing and said: “oh, I want to travel again, so I'll shut HC down”, I would have had to hide quickly, so that our awesome volunteers who had dedicated so much time to the project would not find and lynch me. This didn't happen on CS - there was an outcry from the community, yes, but not from the inner circle. To us, they just shrugged their shoulders and basically said: “well, if Casey feels that way, it's his choice”. This just didnt make sense, and to this date doesn't - the crash was used so members would start donating (the database drop most likely happened, and Casey then saw it as a golden opportunity to bring attention and money to the site). CS' marketing has always been better than ours.

Thousands of Couchsurfers were stranded, so we immediately kicked into high gear, trying to help them out, finding them hosts through HC or getting them in touch with their original hosts and quickly set up mailing lists. But one of the worst actions I have ever seen in the hospitality exchange scene came after CS changed their front page from the sobbing goodbye-message to something claiming to help their stranded members: they gave them a couple of emergency links. Not to Hospitality Club, where a lot of them could have found actual help and the hosts they were looking for. No. To hotels.com and hostels.com. This was the breaking point for me. If I had ever shut down Hospitality Club for whatever reason, I would OF COURSE have sent all our members with a personal message over to CouchSurfing. No matter how big the differences or little quabbles between friendly competitors were, this would have been the only thing to do. I was shocked that CS didn't do that - it showed that they didn't give a rat's ass about the idea of hospitality exchange.

I also had a chat with Casey a few days later after they started to regroup, which I'd love to publish because it's rather disgusting. After that I had not much interest in talking to him anymore - I had learned my lesson. Casey Fenton is not an honest person.

Everything that happened in later years can be read up on plenty of other websites, the juggling around with the non-profit status, and lots of other issues with CS, no need for me to add something else here. What pisses me off personally is that they still put “1999-2011” in the footer of every page, so on an almost constant basis I have to answer the question who is older - CS (which actually went live in 2004) or HC (2000). Sigh.