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Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

insideairbnb.com

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Re: Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

#21

Post by joe_the_user »

zzleeper wrote: post #6

Devils advocate: Suppose your stats are biased by a % of bad listings (fake, bad, etc.) that violate some rule. Would you want to include them in your numbers? If having the correct statistics (i.e. excluding these bad listings) was important for regulatory or marketing purposes, then fixing this before the report is part of the fiduciary duty of the firm with its shareholders, so no surprise here.

Note that this article is a reply to the statements made by Airbnb at [1]. Specifically claiming "95% of our entire home hosts share only one listing" when this is true only because you modified those listing days previously (to remove said multi-home listings) can't be chalked-up to naive data clean-up.

You present no evidence that the purged data wasn't listings that previous made money for Airbnb - there's no evidence it was "bad" in any way except making them look bad and the chart in the article seems to show it was corrected only so long as they needed to look good.

[1] https://www.airbnbaction.com/data-on-the-airbnb-community-in...

Re: Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

#22

Post by nommm-nommm »

brcs77 wrote: post #8
pmikesell wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's because it suggests that professional landlords / developers are using the platform to sidestep rent control laws, as opposed to regular people just renting out their homes while they are away on vacation.

And so what if they are? Have them pay the proper taxes then. Win-win for the property owner and the city.

There is issues of locals being 'displaced' in places like NYC because it often is more profitable for landlords to rent on Airbnb rather than rent traditionally. The real big deal is tenants have lots of rights whereas transients do not, so it creates even more incentives to ditch the locals in favor of Airbnb guests.

Then you can argue "why shouldn't NYC turn into a city of transients?" Which is probably more of a personal opinion if that is "wrong" or not.

To the GP:

The other thing to mention is in the US housing regulations are incredibly local so you're going to find a huge difference in different cities in how regulated rentals are. You will read online mostly about NYC of SF which have their unique problems.

Re: Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

#24

Post by SeanDav »

zzleeper wrote: post #6

Devils advocate: Suppose your stats are biased by a % of bad listings (fake, bad, etc.) that violate some rule. Would you want to include them in your numbers? If having the correct statistics (i.e. excluding these bad listings) was important for regulatory or marketing purposes, then fixing this before the report is part of the fiduciary duty of the firm with its shareholders, so no surprise here.

I tend to disagree with you. This looks shady, unless they declared the fact that they were trimming their listings prior to presenting the data.

The report is supposed to present the business as it is and has been over recent time. It is very difficult to justify making a whole lot of adjustments to ones business and then try say "this is the way our business looks - honest".

Re: Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

#25

Post by elemeno »

zzleeper wrote: post #6

Devils advocate: Suppose your stats are biased by a % of bad listings (fake, bad, etc.) that violate some rule. Would you want to include them in your numbers? If having the correct statistics (i.e. excluding these bad listings) was important for regulatory or marketing purposes, then fixing this before the report is part of the fiduciary duty of the firm with its shareholders, so no surprise here.

Generally speaking, altering your statistics to report to regulators will open you up to a lot of potential legal trouble as the regulators might well decide to take the view that you're deliberately giving them misleading information.

If you need to massage the date to represent what you believe to be a realistic view of your data then you still need to start off with your 'bad' data and explain why you don't believe it's representative and present your arguments for altering your data along with your 'clean' dataset. That way you can't be accused of misleading regulators and you'll have best opportunity to present your arguments for why your initial dataset is 'wrong'.

Your fiduciary duty to shareholders almost certainly includes not making yourself liable to having legal action taken against you by the government.

Re: Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

#26

Post by huhtenberg »

dang wrote: post #13

That title puts a pretty heavy spin on the story, so we changed it to a factual, representative sentence from the article. If someone suggests a better title, we can change it again.

Erm... so what happened to the much-touted policy of always keeping the original title?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466

Re: Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

#27

Post by joelhaasnoot »

zzleeper wrote: post #6

Devils advocate: Suppose your stats are biased by a % of bad listings (fake, bad, etc.) that violate some rule. Would you want to include them in your numbers? If having the correct statistics (i.e. excluding these bad listings) was important for regulatory or marketing purposes, then fixing this before the report is part of the fiduciary duty of the firm with its shareholders, so no surprise here.

Except they only did this in New York. Only if they had gone ahead and did this as a global crackdown, that argument might fly.

Re: Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

#28

Post by gedrap »

tazjin wrote: post #23

It's interesting that the word "photoshopped" is being used for this kind of manipulation as well.

I found it fairly odd as well, then checked the domain, insideairbnb.com, what the hell? Sounds like some corporate blog domain. But no, it's not. Tiny yet frustrating detail.

Re: Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

#29

Post by brbrodude »

sdoering wrote: post #14
brcs77 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so what if they are? Have them pay the proper taxes then. Win-win for the property owner and the city.

So what? Let the strongest do as they please - very democratic, indeed. Just because you could tax them and the city might profit doesn't automatically invalidate the reasoning behind the current rules banning practices like this in the first place. Maybe the reasoning is flawed. OK - then prove it, lobby for a change, but not just do as you wish and ignore the current laws because they are in the way of your busines…

I'm at a point where I've given up arguing, and maybe hoping, too. If anything history proves that the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Now as more and more democracy is eaten by monetary power I feel only what's left to do is to wait for the big shock.. It's sad to think that even when people dedicate their time pro-bono to building tools and information medium like this, at most what it does is moderate temporarilly the recklessness of one group at the expense of very limited resources of others(like the free-time, dedication, small-money that people make available for this kind of stuff) but while there's money to make in subverting it there'll always be incentive to push the way through and put much more money, time and resources into doing it, if someone call you out you can just tone it down a bit and start over another day, seems like there's no winning. I'm brasilian and understand the the judiciary of USA is stronger and faster than in other country, but even then still this logic prevails, for elsewhere and where I'm at.. eh, dreadful.

Re: Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot

#30

Post by rubidium »

dang wrote: post #13

That title puts a pretty heavy spin on the story, so we changed it to a factual, representative sentence from the article. If someone suggests a better title, we can change it again.

The source title was good: "How Airbnb's Data hid the Facts in New York City". This is a damning article for AirBnB and they need to respond. Let's not try to hide it.
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