[O__________O]

Neither Couch Surfer, nor Meetup are designed for dating — and in my experience anyone using them for dating has a negative impact on there intended use. In the case of Meetup, there are dating groups, but in my experience those are a waste of time.

[giantg2]

You don't have to use them for dating to feel less lonely. You can use them to build up a network of friends and have relationships form more organically. Weren't you also the user posting about a friends first approach? This seems like the closest thing to that.

[O__________O]

Used to attended wide variety of Meetups and used Couch Surfer too. It’s pretty obvious when people are attending or using a platform for dating, though they rarely say so. For example, hosts that only host attractive females on Couch Surfer. Or meetups where attendees leave if there’s no attractive female that are in attendance or only talk to the attractive females. Even females that are interested in dating are easy to spot too in my experience. — Very rarely are people that are interested in dating taking a friends first approach, it’s time consuming, and to my knowledge no platform that enables users to build a “friend reputation score” based on users rating them.

[orthoxerox]

I remember someone writing an article about becoming a couchsurfing host to have one-night stands. By the end of the first summer the dude

- learned how to reliably tell if his guest was willing to sleep with her hosts before inviting her - came up with a rehearsed tour of the city, complete with a spontaneous romantic lunch in a hidden gem of a cafe (with a reliable poker-face waiter) - ironed out the kinks in the "from the front door to the bedroom" follow-up routine

[O__________O]

Also relatively easy to spot hosts like this if you know how — though platform oddly doesn’t actively ban users doing this.

Honestly, I don’t think a lot of users understand how potentially dangerous some online services are or for that matter, how to manage or recognize risks; not to mention platforms generally hide their risks, since it impacts user engagement.

[soco]

Anything that you do "for dating" usually goes south because it will be by definition forced. The above comment said instead going to meetups for museum visits, dining, basically sharing experiences, opening yourself to new.

[O__________O]

Not really true, but is true that it’s highly random and takes a large sample in my experience to actually find someone.

In my experience, all the event types mentioned are largely attended by single people looking for dates. Even the language exchange groups, which have a highly specific and functional intent, tend to be single oriented.

On the flipside, if platform attempted to enforce maintaining 50/50 balance of user base that’s single or not single and explicit forbids users mentioning dating unless they are above a predefined “friend score” — it would remove a lot of people that are not interested in relationship attributes.