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Comment by mikeg8 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Airbnb is in the same boat as the latter two in regards to fair employment regulations.

> Flaunting social norms

In the case of Airbnb, what was the social norm? Staying in a hotel? Wouldn't all disruption be flaunting social norms??

I think applying your own moral standards to a company in this way can get precarious. Beside the outlier cases of trashed rentals or someone left in the cold (which is harmful, but again, a very small percentage of their volume), the majority or Airbnb hosts and guests seem to find value in their service and choose to use it. How immoral is that, in reality?

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Have you lived in a city or a building infested with Airbnbs? It's a hell for a person to live in a building infested with Airbnbs. Also, not to mention that Airbnb was one of the major factors in driving rental and apartment prices up for long term renters/buyers. I would say Airbnb did more harm to actual people living in the city than Uber ever did. Airbnb willingly allowed people to own multiple properties and just rent them out on short term. There is a reason a lot of major cities in the world had to pass laws that would restrict people from listing their secondary properties on Airbnb and even then, I don't think Airbnb enforces those laws at all. But hey, they are a YC company and care about how people travel, so people eat that bullshit up. At least hedge funds don't pretend to be noble and tell us upfront that all they care about is making money.

> In the case of Airbnb, what was the social norm? Staying in a hotel?

The social norm is the expectation that your neighbors won’t be running a hotel next door.

The hosts and guests find value. The neighbors of the hosts often have a miserable time, which is why usually zoning laws stop people running hotels wherever they like.

> In the case of Airbnb, what was the social norm?

Paying your taxes. AirBnB has managed to avoid VAT by pushing that responsibility onto hosts. UK is looking to changing this arrangement.

seems to be pretty sleazy:

https://www.quora.com/Did-Airbnb-get-sued-for-running-a-robo...

"What Airbnb did in 2010 and 2011 was to use a bot to spambot to email who had posted short term vacation rental ads on Craigslist. The emails claimed to be from women who liked their listings, suggesting that they try Airbnb. "

Interesting. Craigslist uses an anonymous email routing mechanism, in order to allow people to contact the ad poster. And vice versa.

Does Craigslist actively monitor the messages being passed through?

Edit: Why did I get downvoted? It was a legitimate question. It may have deviated from the article subject, but that’s how conversations flow, and how you learn of new things.

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