Recently the largest hospitality exchange network couchsurfing.com announced a new website and mobile apps rebuilt from scratch. And indeed, my personal experience with the website was that it’s much faster and more reliable now. But if you go through a list of features announced, you can’t help but notice that a variety of old features widely used in the past disappeared.

One particular claim mentioned in the announcement is an improved ease of use. In my experience, even though the site was redesigned twice over last two years or so, the user experience deteriorated significantly.

For example, when you write a reply to a message, a modal window pops up.

There is no way to see the message you are replying to, to read previous messages one has to dismiss the window, or open the message feed in another window/tab. Yes, the dimming background and shades are very sexy, but why not just follow the common practice and place the reply box below the message feed (the way it’s done in most social networks and chats)?

Another thing which bugs me is event discovery which never really worked properly, but now it seems completely broken. Say, I want to go to Thailand and I want to see all the activities happening there and pick the one which is the most interesting to me. One would assume that if you search by country you’d get all the events in all the cities… Nope. I’m not sure how it works, but it seems the only way to find all the events is to search by city. And the only reasonable way is to contact locals which seems interesting to you and ask them to show you around. I’d guess broken event discovery is also one of the reasons why events don’t get as many participants as they potentially could — people just don’t notice them.

Local groups contain a vast amount of useful information aggregated over years, but there is no way to make use of it — no search available for discussions.

Couchsurfing claims that some of these features would be available soon. And hopefully they will be able to fix usability issues mentioned above. But even if they get the technology stack right, there is a much more challenging issue they are facing — how to revive and maintain a healthy community.