If nearly all Airbnb reviews are positive, does that make them meaningless?
academia.edu
academia.edu
Does this make letters of recommendation from German companies meaningless?
Some will say yes, but regardless of that, what is certain is that the whole situation developed a kind of flourish language that can express at lot about the employee without ever being obviously negative. Some sentences can even be translated into school grades.
There are numerous books about this language and even more websites and they all more or less agree, so this language is pretty standardized since at least maybe 30 years. A last interesting point about this language is that some things are said by leaving out certain phrases or words, so you say something by not saying something.
Finally I'll give you few examples [+]. May they serve as an example for a future AirBnB language;-)
He has specialist knowledge and a healthy dose of self-confidence.
Meaning: This person is an arrogant jerk.
He's quickly become popular with clients.
Meaning: This person can't negotiate at all.
She had great empathy for the needs of the staff.
Meaning: This person flirted more than they worked.
His sociability helped to improve the atmosphere a work.
Meaning: This person is an alcoholic.
[+] Translated by me to the best of my knowledge. I'll spare you the German originals to avoid clutter. If you want sources shoot me a message, E-mail is in my profile.
To give a person grade A in their performance evaluation you would write:
Er erledigte seine Aufgaben stets zu unserer vollsten Zufriedenheit.
To give grade B you would just change one word slightly:
Er erledigte seine Aufgaben stets zu unserer vollen Zufriedenheit.
Both translate into English as:
He always completed his tasks to our complete satisfaction.
The difference is that in the first sentence the word complete (vollsten) is the superlative which makes as little sense in German as it makes in English and is grammatically incorrect.
Grade C would be expressed like this:
He completed the tasks assigned to him to our complete satisfaction.
Here the word always is missing.
Another positive example would be:
His behaviour towards superiors, colleagues and customers always set an example.
Here the order of superiors, then colleagues and then customers is vital.
EDIT: I guess the first example could be translated literally like: "He always completed his tasks to our completest satisfaction." I didn't write that above because I think vollsten in German doesn't sound nearly as bad as completest sounds in English, at least to my ESL ear.
A: "He always completed his tasks to our complete satisfaction" ("complete" being the superlative)
B: "He always completed his tasks to our satisfaction" ("always" emphasizing the consistency of our satisfaction)
C: "His work was satisfactory"
F: <something that omits any mention his work>
Although B sounds a little awkward to me.
F: "He makes an effort at completing his tasks."
From my experience a CV is usually skimmed through very quickly because you have a huge stack to process, so picking up on these hints would require significant effort and understanding of who wrote it.
The way around it is that employers can decline to make any statement at all, which is then taken as a negative.
From the former employer's point of view not giving a reference is probably a better use of time, unless they especially wanted to torpedo someone
This is not true.
In your examples, it sounds plausible, but if you are suspicious (and surely everybody reading such a thing is) you could interpret any statement as expressing something negative in a positive way. Ultimately it's more like a Rorschach test for the reader.
Broadcast TV, and it gets messy when it's a fleeting expletive. And you can wear a shirt saying "Fuck the Draft" in a courthouse[1].
Does it actually even happen often that people who leave jobs under hostile or negative circumstances ask for recommendations?
Personally, i'd never even think to ask for a recommendation from the few jobs i've left or lost under bad circumstances. I only ever use references from jobs where i've parted amicably anyway. Do other people actually try and get recommendations from places they were fired from or left because of not so good reasons?
I may be wrong but I think here (BC, Canada), employers aren't allowed to give negative recommendations, I don't think they're required to give one though. I've never checked, but this is what i've been told over the years, so I might be wrong about this part.
It's not called a "recommendation". It's "Arbeitszeugnis" which translates to more of a testimonial or certificate making it a kind of must have. Not having it would be like finishing school without having grades. So yes, it's especially a big topic in hostile or negative circumstances as it's (even the wording) usually part of an agreement at the labour court.
It doesn't say that you are always entitled to get the best one though because another judgement says that the certificate needs to be the truth.
There are thousands of lawsuits every year because of that. In the end the employer needs to bring up solid proof for wrongdoing to justify a bad certificate. So usually, if you get an job applicant with a bad work certificate, you can be sure that he REALLY messed up on his last job. Unusually it would probably be better for the applicant to say he/she has been unemployed than show up with a bad certificate.
Hosts flip out all the time on 4-star reviews. They loose can "superhost" status and other such things after a couple non-5 star reviews. Giving a 1-star review is probably worse than causing $100+ in damage for some of a lot of these hosts.
Hosts will rarely rate guests < 5 stars, simply for fear of retaliation.
The problem here is that guests are never told that 5 stars = normal stay. This leads to problems. If AirBnB was more up front about expectations it would make their review system a lot better.
Yelp is hated in the restaurant industry for similar reasons.
For me, it's pretty obvious that rating is arbitrary and depends on how optimistic/perfectionist/obsessive/etc. the reviewer is and that there is not much difference between 4 or 5 stars.
Obviously it's also more reliable in the context of other evaluations by the same reviewer which the platform has easy access to, i.e. if someone always gives 5 stars, then a 4 star review from him is much worse than one from someone who never gives 5 stars.
Basically the same as our current 5 star/1 star dichotomy but it makes things more clear to people who are tempted to give 4 stars.
I just mark favorite tracks and favorite albums. The track and album ratings are separate, because I might love an album as a whole, but also have a couple of individual favorite tracks on that album.
And I don't have any music in my collection that I don't like or am completely "meh" about. If it's in my library, I already love it, the question is whether it's an all-time favorite or not.
If I have a stay that's genuinely superior, I'll write an enthusiastic review. Other than that, "it was fine" or "don't come here" is really all I need to say.
At the end of the day most people just want to know if people think a service, movie, driver, seller, etc. is worth it or not * . If you need more info you are going to read the reviews anyway.
* An exception might be niche user review communities like myanimelist or rateyourmusic
The difference between the critic rating and the user rating is useful information to have when making a viewing decision. If they are both low, that tells you something. If one is low and one is high, that tells you something.
You're looking at a jacket and you see that while some people rate it 5/5, most of the ratings are 4/5 and 3/5, and 85% of the reviewers say they would recommend the jacket to a friend.
So you read the reviews, and gather that most of the medium scores are because the arms are a little shorter than expected and the cut across the back is rather wide. You also notice that everyone is praising the quality of the fabric and worksmanship. Good information, since if you have short arms and the back muscles of a powerlifter, that jacket would probably be a good purchase.
That is good use of a scoring system, but it requires people to care about it and about writing reviews. It works for niche sites, but completely breaks down somewhere like Amazon, or on Uber/Airbnb where you get punished for anything less than a perfect score.
The sane way to do it would be to ask yes no questions, but that would require thinking.
Nearly every time I have a bad experience with a company the problem is systemic, but a bad rating will be associated with the random person who served me. So I don't participate. If the problem is particularly bad I find another supplier.
Even if the company has systemic problems, they still need to pay bills as long as they still have the job.
Finding another company is a smart option. I'd also write to the management to explain why that problem is blocking you from doing business with them, without mentioning who you spoke with.
Just like a lot of people I know will tip 20% on a restaurant bill without even reflecting on the level of the service, because it's so ingrained into people that wait staff rely almost entirely on tips for their livelihoods so people feel guilty using this quality signal mechanism the way it was initially intended.
The entirety of their livelihood is dependent on our judgements of their service.
Federal minimum wage is 7.25 after taxes this is about 250 per week wherein most people in this situation are paid every 2 weeks. That is to say that one cannot expect to have more than 2 paychecks per calendar month for a grand total of $1000. If you didn't need food, clothes, medicine, or anything else this is about enough for rent.
What this means is that the employee/employer relationship not to mention the individuals ability to live indoors and have food is actually predicated on the ability to achieve greater than minimum wage. Tipping out even if they can do so isn't enough to keep anyone afloat. Not tipping in a state that has a tipped minimum wage is not that much different from dining and dashing its just not illegal because its never been illegal to screw someone if they are substantially poorer than you.
But repeating the pattern, that's a state rule. Different parts of the state don't exempt jobs from minimum wage. (God, I'm glad I'm not a lawyer). In San Francisco, for example, the minimum wage is $15.59, and as far as I can tell, it holds whether you're tipped or not.
US tipping etiquette has nothing to do with good service and all to do with propping up underpaid staff.
As for US tipping etiquette, cactus2093's point was that current US tipping doesn't really reflect what was originally intended. But kingkawn made a claim that extended past the current US tipping practices.
I guess from a strategic point of view it might look better for the AirBnB's and Ubers of this world to have lots of '4.7 out of 5' ratings than 'xx% of people wanted the service provider to be punished', especially to first-time users. But yeah, if Uber in particular wanted to honestly represent what the ratings actually represented it'd be a simple upvote/downvote.
Ironically, on platforms more focused on allowing consumers to choose based on qualitative reviews than penalising based on quantitative scores, I tend to find 4* reviews are much more likely to be well-informed enough to influence me into buying the product than the 5* ones, as well as more likely to be a genuine reflection of the purchaser's sentiment.
They’re not entirely explicit about it, but to leave anything less than 5 stars AirBnB you have to leave a text explanation of why you did. So it becomes clear quickly that 5 is the norm and less is for an actual problem.
Once Uber started asking me a thousand questions about why I was leaving someone 4-stars, I stopped leaving reviews entirely.
I also think that it's different for restaurants than for drivers. When looking for restaurants whether in my home city or traveling, of course we look at 4 stars or above. But never have I once looked a driver's rating, I just call a car and take the first one that is assigned to me, cancelling only for reasons not related to ratings at all. Maybe it's just me that does that?
> Today the average rating on Yelp sits in between “A-OK.” (3) and “Yay! I’m a fan.” (4).
src: https://blog.yelp.com/2018/09/restaurant-ratings-on-yelp-are...
Hosts must hate him.
In general, it's been extremely difficult to read between the lines on reviews since they're all five stars, and sometimes you end up reading things unintentionally.
Better for consumers but not better for AirBnB. The fact that potential customers assume that 5-stars indicates an exceptional rather than standard review is an advantage for AirBnB. Revealing the actual rating expectations would cheapen the perception of all the existing reviews.
As a longtime Airbnb user I can't imagine staying at a place just because it has a good star rating. You have to read the reviews and see what people liked and didn't like. If a place has a bad star rating I generally wouldn't consider staying there at all, but a 4.8 star rating with lots of substantive reviews and no real complaints is very different from a 4.8 star rating with a bunch of people noting that there's deafening construction noise from 8AM to 8PM.
Also, how would anyone retaliate on Airbnb? You can't see the host's review until after you've posted your own.
Exactly. This is how CouchSurfing works. It's just another way of asking "Would you recommend this place / this person to your friend?". And that's what people really want to know, after all.
Thousands of pounds shipped over thousands of miles of water. A miracle for its time. The improvements in food storage that came afterward were nothing short of a marvel. The ability to preserve food, to hold it in statis; it bought people time to ship and eat food (a very precious commodity indeed).
Looking back now and it seems strange. So much effort for so little gain, relative to what we're capable of doing now. Plug in a refrigerator and you're done. Ice cold for a lifetime.
There's still a lot of effort going on, but much of it is hidden—a landscape of electrical grids, mathematics, steel and gold mined from the Earth to create the technology in our kitchens.
Most people probably didn't even know things could be much better; that's all they ever knew. The leap to refrigeration was by no means an easy or obvious one. And it seemed to happened slowly as the infrastructure was slowly built up bit by bit over the course of a few decades.
Review systems remind me of the ice shipping industry: A marvel for its time, but only for its time. The ability to filter information about locations and products; to make informed choices by aggregating a large set of human opinions is remarkable. You can make choices about things you've never experienced, across a wide variety of domains: Amazon, Airbnb, the App Store, Shopify, Google Play.
But it's slow. It's tedious and subject to error. It's easy to miss great insights. It's the lowest common denominator for gaining information about a product, subject to manipulation and noise.
Nowadays, whenever I go on a 5-star review website, I'm thankful for the information when I can get it, but I always wonder when my refrigerator is going to arrive.
Obviously branding and status play a factor in many purchases, but the larger ecosystem / maintenance agreement ones are a different magnitude. Buying a camera is buying into a camera ecosystem, and buying a car is both a product and its serviceability. The Buick can be greatly reliable, but if its perception is that of something less reliable, you pay for perception not reality.
Frankly it makes us all dumber.
I think a more reasonable hypothesis is that the comment is fluff -- it doesn't communicate anything relevant but somehow makes you feel you learned something and changed your mind. That is not what I want to see more of on HN.
I suppose you can come up with ideas like AI curation or spam prevention, or some decentralized reputation system. Those sound pretty wild, but hey, I reckon refrigeration would have sounded pretty wild too.
Edit: I suppose they could step in and evaluate it as a platform and validate whether issues get addressed.
Reviews are free data, and you have to know how to navigate them.
I don't see the difference.
If reviews, or any post-review substitute technology, become the thing that helps imperfect humans make decisions, then that becomes the target for attack by misinformation. If reviews drive business, then so do fake reviews. Reviews are valuable, so there's a market in reviews.
> You can make choices about things you've never experienced, across a wide variety of domains: Amazon, Airbnb, the App Store, Shopify, Google Play.
Reviews steer hundreds to thousands of dollars of spending from every consumer. Nothing that valuable can be allowed to remain authentic.
> Reviews on Airbnb may all appear similar on the surface, but they nonetheless hold power as each one increases the amount of unique information available to other users, potentially reducing uncertainty for future hosts and guests. Our study confirms previous research focusing on star ratings: positive ratings and reviews are clearly the norm on Airbnb . No doubt, many positive reviews are the result of consumer experiences which frequently are genuinely pleasant. Nevetheless users should be mindful that there may be a number of other reasons for the strong positive orientation in so many Airbnb reviews: negative aspects of experience may be minimized, or left unmentioned, in reviews, due to factors such as: sociocultural norms of politeness, established trust among host and guest, review and rating reciprocity, lack of anonymity, as well as Airbnb ’s possible removal of reviews which violating their guidelines. Therefore, less-than-positive experiences may be concealed in lukewarm reviews where reviewers avoid overt negativity: for instance, in comments such as “Interesting stay in a nice neighborhood.” As a result, users should be aware that meaning resides not only in the information that is given, but also in the information that is excluded
I'm not sure people read that many reviews.
Speaking of which, despite its horrible UI somehow I find Booking.com to be more reliable than Airbnb in this regard. I think Airbnb's game of mutual reviews (that are not published until both parties agree) eventually proves to be disfunctional and useless. Booking.com gives the clients the freedom to say anything without the fear of retaliation. Of course there will always be very unhappy customers even if the place is amazing, but at least you know you can rely on the averages and specifically the wording of the reviews.
Why is this not clear? Airbnb is so opaque. It would be really easy to list this extra tax but they don’t, so I end up creating a new account.
This is the way, the only way, to use online reviews. I would be pleasantly surprised if an academic figured this out.
I used Airbnb a lot in the early days. My bookings were all over the place. Sometimes I needed an entire house, sometimes the cheapest place in the area that I can afford. A cheap place can be great as a Toyota Corolla is, but if you compare that to a Bugatti it seems less great.
We charged 20$/night since it was our first Time doing it. We put in the description, No TV. But the guest asked for a TV and Chromecast.
So we moved a spare living room TV upstairs. I went to the store and bought a 35$ Chromecast.
We got a negative review for the TV being Dusty.
It made us paranoid and we tried extremely hard from that point forward. Got some sort of "best host award"
Then our city shut us down.
I did notice that the last review I left isn't actually displayed on the site. It was far from negative, but I did leave 4 stars and note the extraordinary thinness of the walls, as it made hanging out inside of the apartment a bit of a exercise in stealth. Strangely, review was never listed.
In my case, there was not even a chance to write a review, not that I wrote a review and it didn't appear anywhere.
It seems that Airbnb's policy effectively hides the worst reviews (ones where the guest is moved to another unit and the host terminates the stay in a way that prevents a review from being possible), which contributes to the 'grade inflation' that we see in Airbnb ratings.
Hotels don't seem to do that. Partly because they have 100s or 1000s of guests so one bad review means nothing whereas on AirBnB many units are individually owned so those owners have a much higher interest in things like this.
I don't know a solution though as there are issues with dishonest reviewers as well.
I do know AirBnB removed a bad review I left. The review is reposted on my blog so it's not gone but it is effectively gone.
Case in point, I rent a 1 bedroom apartment in Los Angeles for 4 weeks. I arrive and it's clearly a couple struggling to make in in movie production. They tell me they are expecting funding for a documentary but that it's come a week late so they are going to go stay with friends for the next week since they rented the place to me.
The place a single sofa in the living room and a king size bed with only sheets. There are no lights in the bed room except a string of christmas lights. The advertised wifi is them leaching off the neighbors which only works in a corner of the apartment and only sometimes. They say I can hang out in the lobby for free wifi but "the lobby" is just an outdoor hallway.
They leave and I debate my options since I need to be somewhere for 30 days. I ended up staying. I check the fridge. It's disgusting and sticky inside. The bathroom and shower are also gross, clearly uncleaned for many many months. So I go buy cleaning supplies, clean the entire bathroom, the entire kitchen, and pull out all the removable surfaces from the fridge and clean them in the now clean shower. I then make do with this "crash pad" for 4 weeks.
Now the question is, do I leave them a bad review? I think many might see it as my moral obligation to warn others. But I also know it's a struggling couple. Probably 24-28yrs old. IIRC I gave them 4 stars but mentioned the wifi in the review but the review was still "Jack and Jill are a very friendly couple ...." because it just feels wrong to be mean to people you know AND it also feels wrong not to warn others.
I don't know if there is a perfect solution. For example maybe I could have talked to them about the issues and asked them to pledge to do better? Maybe AirBnB could let me delay my review until the next person rents and I can ask if the issues were fixed? For example removing the "has wifi" setting.
There have been others where I never met the owners in which case bad things were more likely to get me to write a bad review but I still left the worry that if I did I'd be labeled a "user who leaves bad reviews, don't rent to them"
The question is if there is a correlation of these and your preferences.
I have stayed in 13 AirBnBs last year and rated them in a spreadsheet. Putting them in one of 3 bins: good, ok or bad. The average AirBnB ratings for my bins are:
good: 4.78
ok : 4.78
bad : 4.92
Taobao, the largest marketplace in the world that can sell $38 billion worth of stuff per day, has the same problem. That's why it's such a mediocre experience for certain niches, e.g. books. First, you cannot leave a review if you return or even engage in after-sales dispute. Second, since this is a marketplace, you usually do not review the item itself, you cannot leave a bad mark if you don't like your new laptop, because the shop is just a seller. So 99.9999% reviews on Taobao are along the lines of "shipped fast, received in 2 days, not bad, a bit of plastic stench and the box was broken, 5 stars".
It looks like this until they ask you to leave a review. Then the questions are like how was the check-in, the check-out, the parking lot and the cleanliness of the room. Now, if 3 out of 4 are good, then you just scored a dirty place 7.5/10. If you put cleanliness on so-so, then it is 8.7. Scores get super inflated to the point that all places are 9/10.
But I am guessing there is a reason. These aggregators must look like they contain only top-notch ads. And so all metrics are inflated.
Declining to give a review is your only weapon against poor service - particularly if you live in a parochial area where everybody knows everybody else. And I suspect social pressure will soon start to target that as well (refusing to deal with people who won’t haven’t got a history of glowing reviews).
The way the social dynamics works against the economic reason for reviews is fascinating.
It seems to be based on AI/ML, I think. I bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner which was terrible at picking up hair from the carpet, and when I went to add an Amazon review, it asked me an extra question which was something like "Good at picking up hair?". That must have involved either human interaction, or AI, or it's a question they ask about every vacuum cleaner and I'm showing a cognitive bias.
I am curious why nobody does this, do I miss some obvious disadvantage?
One obvious disadvantage would be that the friction increases drastically, hence reducing the number of reviews.
Change my view.
They also between 4.5-4.9, with those at the upper end better. Review volume is indicative too.
Have stayed in dozens of airbnbs, always had a great stay.
This is going to reverse horribly on all the "platform" businesses because they are totally conflicted. As ever, we will go back to the same stuff that people always used: word of mouth, building a trusted brand, etc.
All the "successful" unicorns are only distinguished because of their utterly trash brands. Every one of these companies grasped the short-term gain (whilst saying that private capital meant they were long-term thinkers), they hired staff who had no idea how to run a business and were interested only in enriching themselves, and they are basically toxic now. AirBnb, to my mind, are one of the worst. There is no coming back from this.
So on the truth spectrum, are these "modified truths", "eluded to truths" or "curated truths"?
There are several example of businesses/industries talking out of both sides of their mouth and a remote orifice. Autotrader buying KBB was similar as well as the recent dotORG domain transaction attempt. Its winner take all.
Its just business as usual, though you have to admit... They don't have a public troll problem on their platform. Kudos to them!
No, it doesn't, if the intended value is for it to be null. However, if the intended value is for it to be something else, then it makes the data incorrect.
So, if guests are trying to say every host on Airbnb is amazing, and they are in fact all amazing, then great.
But if not, then we need some other way for guests to indicate "host was not acceptable"
If the negative reviews sound whiny, I ignore them. If they bring up valid concerns I stay away from the product/business.
To see just one bad review is a huge sign not to rent the place, as everyone are so super polite to each other, even despite negative experiences.
And hell yeah, I’ve written/read too those lukewarm reviews. They are the most trustworthy, imo.
1, 2, 3, 4.0, 4.2, 4.4, 4.6, 4.8, 5
Then, inflation will require it to be:
1, 2, 3, 4, 4.90, 4.92....
Normal people with lives, jobs and families have too much to lose. It's too easy for people to unleash mob justice.
> academia.edu wants to access your Google Account / mjd@fpuhpx.com / This will allow academia.edu to: / See and download your contacts
Me: Nope.