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Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

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Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#341

Post by redsparrow »

crimthrw2022 wrote: post #240
oneoff786 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

If technology doesn't make things easier, what's the point of it?

Well, this is a cynical answer, but I think in this case: make money. Making things easier is one way to use technology to make money. Having a significant market share and making it difficult for others to enter the market is another way to use technology to make money.

There was (probably) a point in history where AirBnB existed to make things easier. Now I'm pretty sure it's just there to make money.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#342

Post by cnst »

I call this "protection from real customers".

If it takes me 5 minutes to solve this puzzle of yours, I just lost 5/60 of my hourly wage, which could easily be $10 or more.

What a novel idea to protect your website from real customers. The worst is when they do these puzzles when you simply want to access some static information like the product page, the cost of serving which is way below 1¢.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#343

Post by [deleted] »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #185
qwerty456127 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, they can only be solved by unusually smart people Wut? Have you actually ever met a person who can't? I always suspected the electoral majority is not particularly bright (which sort of contradicts the idea of near-100 being an average IQ nevertheless) but if this is "unusually smart" then things feel really creepy.

I never met one in person, but in email support, yes. And it makes sense. Statistically, an IQ of 100 is the population median, meaning, assuming a Gaussian repartition (which it usually is for human traits), that's about 10% of people scoring around 80 or lower. To give an idea of what level of intelligence this means, we can wonder what that kind of people cannot do? In the US, the military don't do a systematic IQ…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#344

Post by imiric »

jb1991 wrote: post #272
imiric wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a large enough scale, I agree that there's an impact to locals. But don't tourists also boost the local economy, the travel industry and introduce different cultures themselves? It's not such a clear case that this is all negative. The lack of regulations is an issue of local governments not catching up to tech companies, as usual, not Airbnb's. > Basically, tourists aren't locals, they should have a right to live…

> What if those tourists do eventually become locals after staying at an Airbnb? Are you against migrants as well? The fact you are conflating these two issues and even asking this question indicates how anyone should interpret your overall argument.

I'm not conflating them, but taking the counter argument to an extreme. The question was tongue-in-cheek, I wasn't expecting a "yes".

The objections to "overtourism" are in small part the same ones to gentrification, which essentially boils down to a large amount of migrants moving into a community and "disrupting" the local lifestyle. I'm not saying this isn't a problem in many cities, but that a) it's often viewed in a xenophobic light instead of accepting that communities change rapidly due to globalization, and that this change is not always entirely negative, and b) that efforts to regulate this should come first and foremost from governments, and not expected from companies whose only goal is increasing profit. This is the same way it has worked for the tobacco, pharma, food and many other industries, but it's clearly not working well for the tech industry, as governments struggle to catch up to the sheer amount of rapid changes affecting almost every part of society.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#345

Post by imiric »

drstewart wrote: post #323
jb1991 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been so turned off by the entire concept of AirBnB, ever since their practices ruined several cities I love with massive overtourism influence. Like so many tech companies, the influence has just gotten completely out of control in the modern world on a global scale.

Exactly. Look at Venice, which was a quaint little town nobody had ever heard of until Airbnb came long. As you correctly point out, without Airbnb excessive tourism wouldn't exist. It's so nice that I've been able to find a single villain to blame this problem on instead of talking about the broader housing crisis that leads to this, which is completely the fault of governments to address housing shortages due to in…

> Look at Venice, which was a quaint little town nobody had ever heard of until Airbnb came long.

Venice, Italy? Arguably the most popular tourist destination in Italy for... decades? Centuries? Airbnb might've exploded this popularity, but Venice has always been Italy's Disneyland.

> look at Miami Beach. It's banned Airbnbs and short term rentals, and now housing there is incredibly affordable and not the most expensive in Florida.

Drastic measure aside, which has surely plummeted profits from tourism, are you sure the drop in real estate prices has nothing to do with the fact most parts of Florida's coastline will be underwater within the next few decades[1]?

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/miami-is-the-most...

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#346

Post by MichaelZuo »

bradstewart wrote: post #335
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AirBNB doesn't want bots scraping their data. They currently have a monopoly on STR listings - so they don't really need to care about user experience. This is what you end up with.

They have a monopoly on STR listings? I use VRBO at least as often (probably more) than AirBnb.

It does seem like a very bizarre thing to say. As if GPT-3 decided to comment on HN.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#347

Post by seattle_spring »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #282
nickpp wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, basically, Not In My Backyard, no?

No, I think OP is advocating for a more balanced, community-oriented approach. The the moment AirBnB is a free-for-all, where externalities are unfairly borne by the local community. A better way would be to design a community-oriented system of rules that are applied when an owner wants to rent. For example, in this neighborhood, we allow up to X00 units to be rented during this quarter. It may change next quarter.…

Where exactly is Airbnb a “free-for-all” nowadays? Every municipality I can think of where it might affect housing prices has very onerous regulations on STRs.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#348

Post by IshKebab »

vidarh wrote: post #184
IshKebab wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait are you really suggesting that the Airbnb programmers thought "guys, we need to stop low-IQ people from using our site"?? That's crazy. > explicitly advertises that their methods can keep out "low-skilled workers" on "human fraud farms" Uhm yeah. They're trying to keep people from human fraud farms (who happen to be low-skilled workers) out. It's not a weird elitist conspiracy to keep all low-IQ people from soci…

How do you think they distinguish a low-skilled worker working for a human fraud farm from a low-skilled worker not working for a human fraud farm?

I don't. We're talking about intent.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#349

Post by seattle_spring »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #66
fastball wrote: post #37

As someone who added CAPTCHA to their own platform recently after resisting for years because of how much I hate them, I have to tell you that the unfortunate truth is that eventually bad actors ruin the party for everyone on every platform. CAPTCHA is necessary for the same reason locking your car/house is necessary. You can probably not do it 9 times out of 10 and it will be fine, but then that 1/10 happens, all yo…

I run a community forum and have done so for over ten years. Spam accounts is a regular occurrence, but thanks to various services (akismet, stop forum spam), captchas, and simple word / behaviour filters (anyone with Anyway, at one point we decided to just block the IP ranges from countries like Russia and Vietnam, which seemed to have the most spam accounts.

Spam on a “community forum” is a whole different world than all of the potential damages criminals can cause on a platform like Airbnb.

Re: Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices

#350

Post by seattle_spring »

Do you have a bunch of ad blockers or similar types of add-ons running? I doubt they’re using this sort of captcha for every user, and I wouldn’t be surprised if something about your setup flagged you as potentially malicious or fraudulent.

If your aim is to deactivate every other possible strategy a site has for knowing if you’re a real user or not, then of course you’re going to end up with stuff like this. This can’t possibly be a surprise to you, can it?

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