Airbnb's new safety page

The way many people here jumped to conclusions after the initial AirBnB story based on almost no information is really disheartening. Insulting the founders of the company, the victim, and concocting conspiracy theories based on a few paragraphs of information with barely any evidence is a really poor way to conduct oneself. Most decent people wouldn't do it in face-to-face conversations without getting to know a person at least slightly, and it's unfortunate that our psychology is built in a way that an extra layer of anonymity afforded by the internet enables a large number of people to drop all sense of tact and respect, and jump into personal attacks with very little information about the actual incident. If you're one of the people that engaged in this type of behavior, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You're doing real damage to real people, while knowing almost nothing about what's actually going on, but more importantly, you're damaging your own reputation.

I had the opportunity to hear the founders speak a number of times. They're one of the very few founders that are incredibly genuine about bringing a positive change into the lives of their customers. They live and breathe positive change they bring to the world, to the point where they carry letters from customers that thanked them for saving their lives because the bank would have repossessed their home if not for AirBnB. Jumping on them because they didn't have a chance to give a complete response while handling a crisis is really uncalled for.

I don't know the victim but it's easy to misinterpret events after going through an emotional trauma. Most likely it's a misunderstanding, but even if it isn't, it's really inappropriate to insult people given the information currently available. In fact, it's never appropriate to insult people, and it's best to hold back criticism until more information is available, lest you do some real damage to real people.

There are some valid concerns about where personal responsibility ends and liability begins (legally and ethically), and how AirBnB's service will evolve to address these issues, but there are different ways to discuss these concerns, and discussions here so far have been nothing but poisonous.

I am under the feeling they believe they can crowdsource the security. I understand security and safety will hurt their business scalability, but they will eventually have to offer insurance, escrowing, legal support and authentication to their customers.

Failure to do so will probably end up in the service collapsing under its own weight.

Well, at least the part about "Will someone steal my grand piano?" is gone.

I'm not an active Airbnb user, but I've read in comment threads here that if you decline a guest, your search rankings go down. Is this true or FUD? If so, how does that reconcile with "If for some reason it just doesn't feel right, feel free to say the booking won't work for you. If it's not right for you, it's okay to walk away."

Hmm looks like a lot of work for relatively little in savings [1]. As a guest I'd rather avoid it and pay the premium for the convenience of a traditional hotel [2]: you just walk in and book a room. I recognize that making friends is claimed as the other benefit of using Airbnb, but I doubt that ever had as much broad appeal as the promise of saving money.

[1] - And even with this much work, there are still substantial risks, for both the host and the guest.

[2] - The only exception might be extended stays of weeks/months.

This looks great -- definitely much more informative than the previous answer, and pretty honest about the (small) risks of using airbnb.

Is this still Hacker News, or have I traveled to a strange and horrifying dimension where we've become Reddit? Enough Airbnb posts already!