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Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

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Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

#191

Post by nlh »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #16

It's not surprising at all. All of these review-driven P2P marketplace businesses end up with the same problem. After the initial phase of early adopters that offer generally high quality products, a flood of fake or low-quality listing tries to squeeze money out of the platform. These people are not listing their homes on Airbnb, they are trying to make a living by extracting as much money from the platform as they…

You make a great point about the (de)evolution of marketplaces.

Does anyone have any thoughts about how marketplace operations could prevent this sort of race to the bottom rot? It does kind of feel like an inevitability these days and I wonder if there’s a real solution.

I suppose part of the problem is that the growth-at-all-costs mentality exists in conflict of quality-at-all-costs. Maybe the answer is just to stay small and niche, which enables quality control without scaling issues.

Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

#192

Post by _hcuq »

aliqot wrote: post #163
nebula8804 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't win in this race. Do research in your tourist destination to avoid these places? Well Youtube is full of influencers pushing garbage info, Reddit is being quietly stuffed full of authentic sounding comments and you might as well forget Yelp/Tripadvisor. It seems like a massive scam perpetuated at all levels of the stack.

Holiday! Inn! Express!

Free!

Breakfast!

Clean!

Rooms!

Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

#193

Post by kmos17 »

Airbnb removed the visible star ratings on comments sometime ago, clearly they are optimizing for hosts and maximizing bookings, to me as a long term user of the platform it’s made it worst and disincentives hosts from providing good customer service. Overall I’ve had good experiences, and there are great places and hosts but it requires more research time to find them and to me that’s a bad sign of where it is heading.

Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

#194

Post by berkes »

dorchadas wrote: post #169
boringg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully those properties will come back on the market at a reasonable price so that we can offset some of the housing inequity that airbnb is directly responsible for.

Seriously. I can only hope the tide is turning and these AirBnBs will be back in the hands of the people who actually live in the cities. Sadly corporations will probably eat them up and let, though hopefully as long-term instead of short!

> will be back in the hands of the people who actually live in the cities.

There apparently is a real demand to rent such places for short terms like holidays or trips. Banning AirBnB, or AirBnB going down, won't remove that demand.

Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

#195

Post by dorchadas »

pharmakom wrote: post #95

The real crime of Airbnb is the added pressure on residential housing stock in globally desirable cities. This story is pretty awful, mind.

Yep. This is a huge issue often overlooked by the AirBnB apologists. Long term lets in Dublin, experiencing a huge housing crisis, doubled during the pandemic as a lot of AirBnB hosts fled back to the long-term market. Sadly I believe they're likely all back to AirBnB now.

Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

#196

Post by dorchadas »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #11

Play with snakes, get bitten. AirBnb started out as a company that basically fostered and encouraged illegal, unregulated short term rentals. Many of the hosts were breaking various ordnances and bylaws to rent you their home. There is also a huge societal cost in terms of increases rents and reduced permanent housing supply because of AirBnb. So if those type of people at that company screw you over, don’t be surpri…

Started out? I believe they still are in a lot of places.

Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

#197

Post by njarboe »

nebula8804 wrote: post #152
hourago wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars. Tourists traps excel on this niche of scam. They serve bad food at high prices, but quite often not so bad or expensive as to be illegal. The only reason this business exist is because most people would visit them just once, customers are replaced each day with new arriv…

You can't win in this race. Do research in your tourist destination to avoid these places? Well Youtube is full of influencers pushing garbage info, Reddit is being quietly stuffed full of authentic sounding comments and you might as well forget Yelp/Tripadvisor. It seems like a massive scam perpetuated at all levels of the stack.

People used to buy travel books from known publishers where the author had at least gone to the restaurant or hotel at least once. I haven't bought one in decades, but maybe that is the future.

Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

#198

Post by dorchadas »

berkes wrote: post #194
dorchadas wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I can only hope the tide is turning and these AirBnBs will be back in the hands of the people who actually live in the cities. Sadly corporations will probably eat them up and let, though hopefully as long-term instead of short!

> will be back in the hands of the people who actually live in the cities. There apparently is a real demand to rent such places for short terms like holidays or trips. Banning AirBnB, or AirBnB going down, won't remove that demand.

No, but it'll force them to go to places that are actually planned to accommodate them. Tourists are included in city planning, believe it or not, but they're not expected to be taking up the actual residential places of the city. That's why areas are zoned for hotels and there's regulation around them.

Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

#199

Post by rjzzleep »

candiodari wrote: post #181
mcculley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a useful way to think about how markets/platforms evolve. I have yet to use Airbnb. But it seems that the target customer has changed. I have been aware of them since they first showed up on Hacker News. They were pitched as renting an airbed where hotels are not a useful choice. That target customer is a demographic that I had aged out of before they started. If they were still marketing only to very young p…

What I don't get is ... where is the government in all this? As the article points out: the owners of the property clearly violate a lot of laws. So I hear violating the law gets you into "trouble with the law". Well, clearly it doesn't.

I once went to the German police over an illegal listing, after the owner got physical when I asked him to turn on the heat at night.

The police laughed at me and told me what I did wrong. Part of it was racism, but the other part of it was just laziness.

To actually get something to happen you have to send a letter to the general prosecutor, who then orders the police to investigate. This process takes months.

Re: Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed

#200

Post by vishnugupta »

hourago wrote: post #102
mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #16

It's not surprising at all. All of these review-driven P2P marketplace businesses end up with the same problem. After the initial phase of early adopters that offer generally high quality products, a flood of fake or low-quality listing tries to squeeze money out of the platform. These people are not listing their homes on Airbnb, they are trying to make a living by extracting as much money from the platform as they…

> App Store app reviews, restaurant review apps and food delivery apps. Fortunately it's not a big deal if these are scams. It's just a few dollars. Tourists traps excel on this niche of scam. They serve bad food at high prices, but quite often not so bad or expensive as to be illegal. The only reason this business exist is because most people would visit them just once, customers are replaced each day with new arriv…

You have nailed this. I have been pondering about such anonymous marketplaces and I came to similar conclusion as yours.

In a non-tourist marketplace you get lots of repeat customers and not too many inflow of new customers. So merchants are highly incentivised to provide decent quality service/product. If not then they won't get repeat customers and there aren't too many new customers to keep their business running. There's also a kind of word of mouth review. So chances of fake products and scammers is quite low.

Tourist markets on the other hand are exact opposite for reason you have already explained. And an online marketplace is essentially a tourist marketplace. There's a good reason Apple is so ruthless about Appstore moderation. They don't want it to turn into an Amazon like marketplace. The irony is Amazon's unique selling point was that they are not Ebay in that they would vouch for the quality of goods being sold there. But now in search of profit Amazon has become Ebay. And this is how every online marketplace will be I have seen way too many of them.

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