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Comment by okprod | Hacker News Reader

If Airbnb actually cared they would have invested in their operations already; Chesky giving "a promise to verify the photographs, amenities, cleanliness, and safety of all the listings on Airbnb", which the article notes is underway, is ridiculous -- Shouldn't this be a bare minimum of this type of business before they start operating? Basically what the "safety team" does is how Logan Roy from the show Succession works -- do whatever you want, skirt ethics and laws, and then pay money and have people sign NDAs.

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The problem is that Airbnb and a ton of other modern high-scale companies is that they only work when they don't require humans on site. It's simply not economically possible to send a human being to an off-site location for 14% of $200. Similarly, if each person on your social network generates $5 in ad revenue per person per year, automatic bans and community moderators are the only way to go, because you can't afford to pay someone to read all of the posts. Or if you have an 800 number, you'd better hope that the robot answering machine can solve almost every problem, because any time even a minimum-wage call center employee has to spend 15 minutes on the phone with a customer one-on-one that customer's account is no longer profitable for the company.

As a consumer, I appreciate the low prices and high purchasing power that I currently enjoy - I can get trinkets from distant lands on a whim and have many things done on my behalf without my lifting a finger, hedonistic luxuries that would have been only accessible to a king in centuries past. And obviously, the powerful AI-like corporations that optimize for profit above all else are profiting from the situation. But as a human being it kind of sucks.

low prices are a certain optimization. Others can optimize for experiences. I personally haven't used AirBNB because I don't like the risks associated with the use of their product. Some people love it.

The free market at its best. You can choose the cheap-but-cuts-corners option, or pay more to get more.

Of course, this implicitly depends on informed consumers, so it’s a bit troubling that Airbnb is leaning so heavily on NDA-based settlements. I don’t have a feel for how common that strategy is in competitors, say hotel / VRBO.

People will definitely pick hotel/hotel chain based on price vs. quality.

In the case of AirBnb, while you certainly have some people looking to pick a particular kind of property/experience vs. a hotel, my sense is that most people are going with AirBnB vs. hotel to save money.

The problem is that the cheap option kills off the pay more to get more option. Informed consumers, especially those who have perfect knowledge of the effects of their actions on future and who can optimize for cooperate-cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma, are largely a myth. The general store only works because a significant number of people were buying their weekly groceries at the high-quality price, it withers away when the only consumer surplus left in the market is at the tippy top of the demand curve. Even if they were viable in the long term, it would be easy for competitors to temporarily undercut them and put them out of business. It's easy to observe that small-town general stores disappear when WalMart and Dollar General arrive.

It may be even harder for these niche businesses to survive on the Internet, where instead of clinging to existence through the local customers who don't want to drive to the big city Walmart, the more local source for Internet customers is the first ad from the Amazon conglomerate they already have an account with. That's a lot easier than drilling down through the search results to the specialty site (that you've vetted as an actually more valuable option, not a scam forwarding cheap junk) and creating an account there.

Rational, informed consumers do not exist, human beings do. Capitalism does not create an infinite spectrum of a free market where all needs are met, there are winner-takes-all effects that distort the result. I don't claim to know of a better system, and I don't have the power to change the current system, but I can imagine some changes to resolve various injustices that the system's current incentive structure will never arrive at.

There's bigger issues IMO, based on the article:

* Accepting hosts with prior criminal charges for battery, who then proceeded to sexually assault a guest.

* Under-resourcing trust and safety teams until it became such as big problem, the CEO had to step in.

* Choosing to lay-off the entire Portland trust and safety team during COVID, telling them to relocate to another country (Canada) during a pandemic (!!) at lower pay, or lose their jobs.

I used to work for a 'sharing economy company' (no, not Airbnb, but also not naming names), on what you'd call "trust and safety". I don't feel like we got enough resources.

It was less about trust and safety, and it was more about, "How do we make problems disappear?" There were plenty of sensible ideas that would've improved safety for our users, but they were ignored.

> * Accepting hosts with prior criminal charges for battery, who then proceeded to sexually assault a guest.

The article says the offender had been charged but not convicted; what are they supposed to do? Know better than the justice system? And then they'd have complaints that people who have been wrongly accused at some point and found innocent, many of whom are likely to be minorities, are denied business by AirBNB.

AirBnB should just implement its own social scoring system. Apply it to everyone so they already have data for future hosts and guests.

/s but I kinda want to see such a tech and head-explosions of the announcement.

Is it really that unreasonable to tell someone they can’t be a host until their violent crime charges are resolved?

"Innocent until proven guilty"

AirBnB is not putting these people in prison they just aren’t letting them be hosts.

I mean, would you be cool with letting someone charged with a violent crime work at a daycare until found guilty?

I'm not saying it's not a problem, I'm saying there's no simple and fair solution.

They could disclose the charges and let guests decide.

My roommate, who was hired for disaster response at Airbnb at the beginning of covid (January) was thought by us to be un-layoff-able due to her important role. months of her working 12 hour days go by, and she ends up laid off in the mass lay off that Airbnb did around June.

I saw how hard she worked. I saw how important her role was, and they threw her aside. AirBnB is a disaster when it comes to anything involving safety, health, or disaster response.

sounds a lot like how HR works- both as a front and on the inside.

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