Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Airbnb Racks Up Hundreds of Millions in Losses Due to Coronavirus

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–118 of 118 posts

Re: Airbnb Racks Up Hundreds of Millions in Losses Due to Coronavirus

#111

Post by dang »

listenallyall wrote: post #107
dang wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite: we moderate HN less when YC or YC startups are involved. Obviously the trust of the community is critical and we would be dumb to risk that. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... It doesn't mean that we don't moderate such threads at all, though. We penalized this one the same way we've been penalizing almost every coronavirus story, because if we didn't, HN would have consiste…

Thanks for explaining. > we've been penalizing almost every coronavirus story Only you know the actual volume of coronavirus-related stories, and whether leaving them as-is would cover the entire top 10, entire first page, or entire first 3 pages. However IMO the adjustment, or "penalization," being applied seems too severe. CV is obviously the most important news topic in the world right now, the situation changes e…

There's an eternal tug of war about which stories belong on HN's front page. No one is ever pleased; frontpage space is the scarcest resource HN has [1], so there's never enough for the topics one is interested in [2].

The principles we try to apply are the "significant new information" test for major ongoing stories [3], and optimizing for intellectual curiosity [4]. One thing we don't do routinely is moderate by which stories are most important in the world. There are always many things going on that are far more important than the topics that appear on HN. If importance were a leading factor, HN would become a regular news site and cease to exist as HN. Important stories tend to drown out the quieter, odder, or deeper ones that gratify curiosity. HN is mostly a site for the latter. That's how a biography of George Gershwin can be at the top of the front page in the middle of a global pandemic.

In practice, a crisis like this is inevitably going to show up on HN a lot. But it will show up in unpredictable ways (because predictability is the enemy of curiosity), not like it does on a regular news site.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527396, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Airbnb Racks Up Hundreds of Millions in Losses Due to Coronavirus

#112

Post by dang »

listenallyall wrote: post #109
tptacek wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On any given day, most of the world's most important news topics aren't on the HN front page, and don't belong there. There are plenty of other sites that do a better job of reporting on the entire world.

> most of the world's most important news topics aren't on the HN front page because they don't gain traction among the HN audience. CV has, and to a very large degree, according to dang's comment above.

> because they don't gain traction among the HN audience

That's a bit of a misperception. They do gain traction. If we didn't moderate them, HN's front page would consist of the hottest topics of the moment and would be a different site altogether.

The strongest force on the internet is indignation—orders of magnitude stronger than curiosity—so there need to be countervailing mechanisms (like software and moderation) to contain its effects and allow HN to be HN. Upvotes alone don't do it, unfortunately.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: Airbnb Racks Up Hundreds of Millions in Losses Due to Coronavirus

#113

Post by yesplorer »

CydeWeys wrote: post #102
yesplorer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they're indeed not fit to run their business, period.

OK, so what are you going to do about it?

Am I supposed to do something about it? Do you know the meaning or point of a discussion forum? You're such a bad loser, lol.

Wsj published the article, what are they going to do about it?

Don't be rude, it's stupid.

You can have the last word.

Re: Airbnb Racks Up Hundreds of Millions in Losses Due to Coronavirus

#114

Post by compsciphd »

chadmeister wrote: post #4

It's kind of frightening to think of the broader economic impact it would have on the whole real estate market if Airbnb went belly up. Aren't there a ton of cases where people are mortgaging multiple homes and paying them off with the revenue they generate? That cash just dried up over night and there doesn't appear to be any incoming federal support. Edit: Look, I'm all for affordable housing, but when viewing this…

what do you think happened during the great depression? People before it got greedy and would buy property and mortgage it to buy the next, and so on and so forth. they were highly leveraged and lost it all because of that. The lucky ones were the ones that didn't mortgage nor collateralize the house they lived in, so they didn't become homeless.

Re: Airbnb Racks Up Hundreds of Millions in Losses Due to Coronavirus

#115

Post by richajak »

unlinked_dll wrote: post #74
shartshooter wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the herd will be thinned out for sure. Customers of ours are starting to lay folks off. Ultimately, it's a question of how long and deep the downturn is. A couple of months and VC-backed companies already losing money may be ok. A couple of quarters and you'll see a lot go belly-up depending on who they sell to.

This isn't winter kill thinning the herd though, it's more like the mass extinction of American Buffalo during the push to the west. Companies with good fundamentals are laying people off en masse and burning their cash reserves rapidly. It's not just the VC backed companies, or the low marging/highly leveraged mom-and-pop, big box retail, airline, whatever. I'm terrified what's going to happen on May 1 when rent che…

We were brainwashed that sharing economy (uber, wework, airbnb) was going to be our savior. We were renting because assets were too high to own, better to do short rent; cheaper and less commitment. Looks like those sharing economy model cannot solve the root cause. The coronavirus acts as a RESET to the whole society. We may see a collapse in housing price, business bankruptcy, and stock market. If we have to think positively, the current situation will only stop when all of these apply -stock price reflects 8-10x true profit, not EBITDA -average housing price in Manhattan will be be 3x working class income. -young people get decent job, not survival gig, not blocked by increasing retiree or union.

If this virus was artificially made or by natural evolution, I can say it was meant to reset the society. It will actually prevent WW3.

Re: Airbnb Racks Up Hundreds of Millions in Losses Due to Coronavirus

#116

Post by listenallyall »

dang wrote: post #112
listenallyall wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of the world's most important news topics aren't on the HN front page because they don't gain traction among the HN audience. CV has, and to a very large degree, according to dang's comment above.

> because they don't gain traction among the HN audience That's a bit of a misperception. They do gain traction. If we didn't moderate them, HN's front page would consist of the hottest topics of the moment and would be a different site altogether. The strongest force on the internet is indignation—orders of magnitude stronger than curiosity—so there need to be countervailing mechanisms (like software and moderation)…

I appreciate your thoughts in this thread, and more importantly, your willingness to explain your decisions. Your diligent moderation throughout the site ensures it remains a terrific, unique and much-needed resource. Thank you!

Re: Airbnb Racks Up Hundreds of Millions in Losses Due to Coronavirus

#117

Post by dang »

listenallyall wrote: post #116
dang wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because they don't gain traction among the HN audience That's a bit of a misperception. They do gain traction. If we didn't moderate them, HN's front page would consist of the hottest topics of the moment and would be a different site altogether. The strongest force on the internet is indignation—orders of magnitude stronger than curiosity—so there need to be countervailing mechanisms (like software and moderation)…

I appreciate your thoughts in this thread, and more importantly, your willingness to explain your decisions. Your diligent moderation throughout the site ensures it remains a terrific, unique and much-needed resource. Thank you!

Thank you too! It's important feedback to hear that the explanations are helpful, because otherwise I need to recalibrate how I do it, or just (if it's not working) do less.

People are most welcome to ask further questions if there's something we haven't explained yet. I'm slowly building up a corpus of links to previous explanations, which is why my answers are so full of HN Search links. Eventually we might compile all that into some web pages.

Re: Airbnb Racks Up Hundreds of Millions in Losses Due to Coronavirus

#118

Post by everyone »

dang wrote: post #65
everyone wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hear hear! fuck those greedy fuckers!

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? We ban accounts that do this, and have had to ask you before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That comment is about as substantive as many of its sibling comments, I just happen to have expressed the information in a highly elegant / terse way. Also, that is not flamebait imo, and was not intended as such. The purpose of flamebait is to bait others into an argument, there is no argument to be had with my comment, no lure or hint; it's a simply bold statement. As you can see, no one has replied.
Post reply on HN