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Comment by ogezi | Hacker News Reader

That's the problem with the on-demand companies' business model, you often have to put complete trust in complete strangers. This is generally dangerously. But this won't get the coverage it deserves until an "important" host is seriously injured or even killed by a guest.

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I think this is more the eBay/PayPal problem: if you are soliciting both sellers and buyers on your service, you are going to have various moments of ethical crisis when it makes absolute business sense to screw over one or the other (the two not always being in balance or not providing you the same amount of revenue).

So what do you do?

AirBnB without listings is like eBay without listings. (Though I've generally heard that eBay tends to come down on the pro-buyer side)

Even without the ethical crisis, there are simply going to be situations where the true facts are simply unknowable to a customer service rep. So, do you screw over the person providing the property (who may in fact be a lying scumbag)? Or do you screw over the other person renting the property (who may be the lying scumbag)? (Or may simply have utterly unreasonable expectations.)

And, yes, my understanding is that eBay evolved to simply default to the buyer being right.

Generally dangerous seems disingenuous. I think it's generally practical to assume most people are decent human beings. It's worked very well for me over time (and clearly has worked for services like uber, lyft, ebay, craigslist, airbnb, etc), but it when bad actors appear (as they always do once you hit a certain number of persons involved), it's what happens then that counts the most.

I think E-bay has tended to handle things very well, I haven't heard many horror stories about them (if ever), and they've been around for quite some time (as software companies go) and quite successful. Uber and AirBnB on the other hand I've heard plenty of horror stories from. It may (or may not be) the reason I've not used Uber in months and months and have only ever booked a room once on AirBnB (which I cancelled last minute and still paid for).

That's true under so many circumstances. If you book a chain hotel, you are really just trusting that the chain has reasonably tight control over the quality of the branch. There are plenty of 'nightmare' hotels out there, and the main guard are reviews, which isn't too far off from airbnb (a hotel will have a higher volume of guests to leave reviews, and the social incentives are different, which is why I didn't call them the same).

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