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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

I was a huge fan of Tilt and used them for multiple campaigns (mostly social fundraising things, like if a bunch of my friends were going camping we'd dump the bar tab on there, and it was fantastic for burning man camp fundraising).

I have to say I'm super disappointed in Airbnb buying and then destroying this company, especially with the shockingly small amount of notice. Between their new logo, their ill conceived muni advertising, the ability for their platform to facilitate racism, and their handling of this I have to wonder why they haven't hired a better marketing and PR team (or if they're just ignoring the team they have). Sometimes it seems like they actively hate their own brand.

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Well, it's pretty clear that AirBnB has become too large to support anything like burning man fundraising.

Our company WeTravel has seen quite an uptick since tilt shut down, particularly from burning man camps and private people. Tilt was always a formidable but impossible competitor. It's hard to compete with 'totally free', especially given that they had a war chest of $60M in VC funding. However, it apparently wasn't enough.

> the ability for their platform to facilitate racism

Hunh? Care to elaborate on a) what specifically AirBNB does to facilitate racism, and b) what you'd expect them to change about their 'platform' to stop people from being horrible?

In regards to AirBnB, there were a lot of concerns that people were simply not renting out to certain races.

Stuff like a black male tries to rent for a certain date, gets denied, and then an hour later a white female tries to rent it for the same date and is approved by the owner.

I believe in the example I'm citing the person affected actually created the second account of the "white female" and tried to keep the language very similar when they booked, so this example was pretty egregious.

There were also cases, although this probably fits in the category of mentally ill and just really mean, of people sending messages like "sorry no Asians" after denying a renters request.

AirBnB did respond though. One of the changes they made was how the profile picture was displayed during the booking process. Either they made it smaller or removed it completely if you were an owner approving people.

As a property lister, you are able to see the profile pic and name of the person asking to rent from you. This enables people to decide based on race/sexism pretty easily.

Not sure why this was downvoted, it's trivial for discrimination to occur when so much detail about a potential tenant is revealed and no reason needs to be provided for a rejection.

>Hunh? Care to elaborate on a) what specifically AirBNB does to facilitate racism, and b) what you'd expect them to change about their 'platform' to stop people from being horrible?

They are aware of a problem with some hosts discriminating against certain guests. Here is an article describing some things they're trying to combat this in California in particular.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/28/airbnb-l...

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