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How The Hell Is This My Fault?

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Re: How The Hell Is This My Fault?

#131

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #128
jcunningham wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as damage to the apartment, pictures with some proof would help (and would indicate the extent of the damage), and if the truth is to come out about the interaction with AirBNB then someone would have to dump their email cache. Visual proof has already been obtained by the police. Why does the victim have to provide photos to the general public? For that matter, why does she have to "dump her email cache"? Are…

> Are we putting her on trial on HN? Obviously not, maybe you should re-read that sentence in context. Pictures of the extent of the damage would go a long way towards explaining why she feels the way she does in a way that words will never be able to.

[deleted]

Re: How The Hell Is This My Fault?

#132

Post by jcunningham »

jacquesm wrote: post #129
jcunningham wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think she needs to explain every technicality of what happened. The police will deal with those matters. She's not on trial in the court of public opinion.

Actually, she chose to make this public, and she chose to do so apparently because AirBNB refused to move on terms that are acceptable to her. Nobody here is claiming that she is 'on trial', but when you go public with a story there will always be questions. That is because people will align with your story and your interests if they consider you to be the party that is speaking the truth. This is a fairly normal thi…

So this is not a trial but she needs to publicly provide documentary evidence for everything she has said up to this point, including photos of any damage and her entire "email cache"?

Please tell me who she owes this responsibility to?

Re: How The Hell Is This My Fault?

#133

Post by shareme »

1. Victim is not on trial here. 2. This is not the time to score link bait points. 3. Several layers of communication that are not direct here..let the parties come to their own way of helping and implementing solutions. I would imagine it does not help the police either ..

above all else. MA you are not helping just shut up.

Re: How The Hell Is This My Fault?

#134

Post by jacquesm »

jcunningham wrote: post #130
jacquesm wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we putting her on trial on HN? Obviously not, maybe you should re-read that sentence in context. Pictures of the extent of the damage would go a long way towards explaining why she feels the way she does in a way that words will never be able to.

Actually I think her words have done an excellent job of explaining why she feels the way she does and I don't want anyone else invading her privacy any more than it already has been violated. For that matter, I think you've got some nerve tracking her down, handing her contact details over to an Airbnb investor and claiming to be helping her to find an objective independent mediator.

Paul is not just 'some AirBNB investor', if you want to picture it that way, sure go ahead.

AirBNB has - in my opinion - been doing the very wrong thing here for much too long and this will blow up at some point if something isn't done pronto.

Tracking her down sounds like it was real work, believe me it wasn't, and as I explained below I gave her some hints on how to make that a lot harder than it was last night.

I figure that if by Monday this hasn't been resolved to everybody's satisfaction that it could get really ugly with losers all around, and EJ who has already lost more than anybody should go through still stands to lose the most. Once lawyers get involved all bets are off.

If you don't trust Paul to be objective when given the opportunity then that's your call.

Re: How The Hell Is This My Fault?

#135

Post by loy22 »

jcunningham wrote: post #122
loy22 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One question remains to be cleared: how did the guest got inside the apartment? What was the system used for the key transaction? I don't know how it usually goes, but I'd like this blind spot to be cleared. She published a number, an email address and a nickname on her blog, but no postal address. So the keys weren't shipped. She never called the number, and can't tell the gender of her perpetrator. Only the neighbo…

I don't think she needs to explain every technicality of what happened. The police will deal with those matters. She's not on trial in the court of public opinion.

Actually she is, and she has already won by a landslide against AirBnB. She's the victim and I wouldn't want to be in her shoes, but I also find the reaction disproportionate toward AirBnB. It's only fair that those "techicalities" are made public as well before everyone trash them to death.

AirBnB gives tools to pick your guest, the first one being the track record and ratings. Was the rating of Dj Pattrson Good/Bad/Virgin?

They also have a pretty straightforward safety tips page ( http://www.airbnb.com/safety ), but not a single precaution was taken. It appears she didn't even try to call her future guest. No neighborhoods or friends warned, nothing.

AirBnB is taking all the shit for an objectively irresponsible behavior. Nobody deserve what has happened to her, it's just horrible. On the other hand, AirBnB taking all the shit for this doesn't seem fair as well. They handled the crisis in a poor manner, but the perpetrators should be the ones paying for the damages.

AirBnB aside, she doesn't seem to take some responsibility for it (the rape victim analogy), and it's just not fair or reflective of the whole picture, if you're being objective for a minute this is the simple truth. I truly hope she will recover and learn from this awful experience.

Re: How The Hell Is This My Fault?

#136

Post by TeMPOraL »

jcunningham wrote: post #132
jacquesm wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, she chose to make this public, and she chose to do so apparently because AirBNB refused to move on terms that are acceptable to her. Nobody here is claiming that she is 'on trial', but when you go public with a story there will always be questions. That is because people will align with your story and your interests if they consider you to be the party that is speaking the truth. This is a fairly normal thi…

So this is not a trial but she needs to publicly provide documentary evidence for everything she has said up to this point, including photos of any damage and her entire "email cache"? Please tell me who she owes this responsibility to?

> Please tell me who she owes this responsibility to?

To the people, if she cares about public opinion.

> That is because people will align with your story and your interests if they consider you to be the party that is speaking the truth.

This summarizes it all.

Re: How The Hell Is This My Fault?

#137

Post by cageface »

babebridou wrote: post #105
cageface wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think their treatment of the victim is really a sideshow. The real issue here is that the underlying assumption that it was relatively safe to let total strangers into your home has been publicly shattered.

Give it time, and people will get out in the streets again (terrorist attacks), people will eat meat again (mad cow disease), people will buy cucumber again (killing cucumber), strangers will shake hands again (H1N1 influenza), hell, people will even go visit Chernobyl as tourists. It's not a "real" issue, it's more of a temporary difficulty. AirBnB's business exists since the dawn of time. A setback, if you prefer.

The naive level of trust on which they've built their business is gone. I think they can survive this but not without some significant structural changes.

Re: How The Hell Is This My Fault?

#138

Post by Goladus »

petegrif wrote: post #42
sriramk wrote: post #18

I can't believe I'm defending Arrington here but for once, I think PG is off and Arrington is right. Arrington's editorializing has been fairly tame in this story. A lot of the mess has been due to EJ's posts and Airbnb's attempts at damage control. If you look through the original post, there are only a couple of lines where Arrington says Airbnb isn't financially responsible and that is, imho, a fair interpretation…

Agree. Airbnb have a big problem but it isn't Techcrunch. And I don't see why Arrington shouldn't defend himself.

Well, the manner of his defense doesn't help his image as a drama queen, but he's probably fine with that.

Re: How The Hell Is This My Fault?

#139

Post by sunchild »

jacquesm wrote: post #134
jcunningham wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I think her words have done an excellent job of explaining why she feels the way she does and I don't want anyone else invading her privacy any more than it already has been violated. For that matter, I think you've got some nerve tracking her down, handing her contact details over to an Airbnb investor and claiming to be helping her to find an objective independent mediator.

Paul is not just 'some AirBNB investor', if you want to picture it that way, sure go ahead. AirBNB has - in my opinion - been doing the very wrong thing here for much too long and this will blow up at some point if something isn't done pronto. Tracking her down sounds like it was real work, believe me it wasn't, and as I explained below I gave her some hints on how to make that a lot harder than it was last night. I…

The nagging issue for me is the extremely unusual eloquence of the victim. I wanted to believe this was just another online echo-chamber shit-show until I read her blog posts and found EJ to be a level-headed, articulate and eminently reasonable person.

EJ says that AirBnB didn't offer to help and stopped communicating with her after the 25th of June. That's in direct conflict with pg's report to TechCrunch.

It's one thing for AirBnB to say "hey, buyer beware – you know the risks". (In fact, that's a perfectly valid response, albeit not a great business move.) But it's an entirely different thing to dispute the victim's story.

Now we're in a situation where someone is not telling the truth. On one side, you have a group of people with a lot of money and time invested into a business. On the other side, you have an extremely sympathetic victim of a crime. And somewhere in the middle is the fact that these kinds of unfortunate eventualities should have been obvious to both AirBnB and to their users.

Re: How The Hell Is This My Fault?

#140

Post by raganwald »

jacquesm wrote: post #97
kyro wrote: post #95

HN has been pretty disgusting the last few days: the level of schadenfreude here has hit ridiculous new highs. It seems that every time a story breaks about a successful company, a bunch of envious and disgruntled people come out of the woodwork and jump onto the bandwagon headed straight for the founders' heads. A community of seemingly intelligent and rational individuals turns into the most rabid, emotionally-char…

It's 'schadenfreude'. This issue is very emotionally charged because: - everybody that uses AirBNB thought 'this could be me' - everybody that has a sister thinks 'that could be my sister' - everybody that runs a start-up thinks 'this could be a shakedown' (including some preposterous claims about hotel chains putting her up to this) - everybody is wondering if AirBNB is sitting on a huge stack of cash why they didn'…

Being the 'ebay of spaces' means that you will be doing the same things that ebay spends the most of its time on: battling fraud.

This is the most old-school HN insight I've seen so far, thanks. Quite often, what a business appears to do for it's users (allow you to read your mail on line, hook landlords up with renters) and it's competitive advantage (spam fighting, ad targeting, fraud detection, &c.) are very different things.

Back when I was young and rode a nice, sporty dinosaur to work, I made software for publishing classified ads. On the surface, it's a publishing business. But in reality, it's an operations business, because classifieds used to have very high revenue per column inch, but the transaction costs were also very high. So the profitability of a page of classifieds was driven by how efficiently the paper could take ads.

Anyways, I agree with your speculation. Running a c2c business is going to be all about fraud and other bad actor detection as well as operation efficiency.

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