u/Ok-Sell9346

The SXSW sub has been noticeably slowing down over the years - what a shame. And almost no chat about SXSW London coming up in a few weeks.

Are you going? What are you looking fwd to? What are your tips / recommendations? What sector are you best represented by? (Film TV music tech advertising etc)

Did you go last year?

Curious who is out there engaging this year!

I have 500 mbps internet in my house that works as advertised on all my devices, but for some reason on my Quest 2 it's always struggled to get above 50mbps. I've always just tolerated it but have had some annoyingly slow downloads recently so I'm wondering if there's anything I can actually do about it?

Well CS platform owners did another dirty protest on their own doorstep today eh? But how?

My hot take: Couchsurfing was never really a “product” in the way most tech platforms are. It was a community first, and the platform was just a thin layer holding that together. Its success came from trust, generosity, and a shared ethos—not from good UX, solid engineering, or thoughtful product development. In a weird way, it survived despite the platform, not because of it.

That’s what makes the long-term decline so baffling. Over the years we’ve seen:

• The shift from a community-driven project to a venture-backed company
• The introduction of paywalls/subscriptions
• Multiple redesigns that seemed to ignore how people actually use the platform

And now this latest update, which honestly raises a harsher question: how does something this fundamentally broken even get shipped? In most startups, something at this level—both technically and in terms of user experience—wouldn’t survive basic QA, let alone make it to production. Yet here it is, live, affecting everyone.

Love the origin story of Casey Fenton founding CS after a trip to Iceland where he emailed students for a place to stay, but what actually happened next and how is the whole thing tone deaf?

So I’m trying to understand:

• Who actually owns Couchsurfing now, and what’s their incentive structure?
• When it transitioned from community project to company, what changed internally?
• Why do the product decisions consistently feel so disconnected from user behaviour?
• And more bluntly: is this just mismanagement, or is there something structural that explains how such low-quality releases keep happening?

Curious what others think...especially anyone who’s been around since the earlier days or knows more about the ownership/history side.

Utterly baffled.