201–210 of 254 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well who knows what keys they might still have? Everyone i know has lots of keys and doesn't get all of them changed immediately.
Then they have the keys to a set of locks that have since been changed.
As much as some people might view this as "sometimes things go wrong", which is basically true, that's not the whole story. The story here is that people are doing things that in most jurisdictions are illegal. AirBnB is profiting off this. Do something illegal and you can't insure against any negative consequences. The whole EJ situation is a potential inflection point. Without knowing the full facts (which no one s…
The way this is turning is really ugly. EJ is a victim, plain and simple. And it's not a simple robbery where someone just tossed some drawers and ran through the place, they took their time and found everything you'd not want them to find. There is no rectifying that, she was invaded, there is nothing that will undo that, not money, not new stuff, not anything. That's just how it is. There are police reports, it hap…
As much as some people might view this as "sometimes things go wrong", which is basically true, that's not the whole story. The story here is that people are doing things that in most jurisdictions are illegal. AirBnB is profiting off this. Do something illegal and you can't insure against any negative consequences. The whole EJ situation is a potential inflection point. Without knowing the full facts (which no one s…
"But there's something "off" about EJ's position here. Why is a vandalized apartment leaving her homeless?" Put yourself in the position of a person who has just had their apartment burglarized (remember: they stole her personal documents and valuables) and their keys stolen by probable drug addicts. Also, remember that the police have arrested one of the vandals, but probably not all of them. Ignoring, for the momen…
I'm struggling to believe how much of a cock-up this is becoming. What should be a simple reality: "sometimes things will go wrong" is turning into something that even seems to be infectious. I give it two days before Y Combinator is explicitly associated with airbnb in a newspaper.
Sometimes things do go wrong however the impact of them going wrong differs between businesses. When things go wrong for a mobile phone company lots of people might have poor reception but when things go wrong for AirBNB, a person could actually get killed. This has always been my fear and I sincerely hope they shutdown or pivot before this happens. AirBNB hasn't been upfront about the level of risk their customers u…
The identity theft aspect brings up a whole new concern. If a renter steals a host's identity without trashing their place, there's no way to know that something went wrong until it's too late. And if the host subsequently rents her place to other guests, there's no way to know who the identify thief is.
What's going to be a game changer is when stories start breaking about owners who rent out their space as a way to lure in people for killing or torturing them. Right now it's about "you were stupid, why did you rent your space out to strangers?". Later on it'll be "why did you try to save $20 and go sleep some place where you're 110% vulnerable?". You don't control the locks, you don't know the neighborhood or even…
People need to have some smarts about who they meet with. The service can do some things, like integrating the Facebook graph, but ultimately the two parties to the transaction must be responsible for checking each other out before they meet.
Whoops?
I will do that for friends and if I'm around myself, for friends of friends too, but even then the scheme needs to originate from some plausible circumstances where I can evaluate my potential guest in other context before we discuss accommodation. So, receiving an email from someone I don't know ("hey, I know your friend, can I stay at your place?") doesn't fly.
It's my home and I don't want to think about whether tonight's guest is that one from a thousand or ten thousand who will wreck my place.
There is a deep ethical problem with starting or funding airbnb, in my opinion: The fraction of people with enough sophistication and resources to be good, safe, hosts and guests is a tiny, tiny fraction of the people in the world. It is absurd to think that airbnb could ever scale to justify its investments if only those sophisticated users were customers. The model relies, therefore, on large numbers of hosts and g…
What about all of the good that AirBnB does for the large majority of people who use the site? Is there a deep ethical problem with letting people supplement their income, while also letting travellers have a cheaper option for a night/weeks stay? The vast majority of people who use AirBnb benefit from it.
They were also fatally flawed products.