Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

HN has been pretty disgusting the last few days: the level of schadenfreude here has hit ridiculous new highs.

It seems that every time a story breaks about a successful company, a bunch of envious and disgruntled people come out of the woodwork and jump onto the bandwagon headed straight for the founders' heads. A community of seemingly intelligent and rational individuals turns into the most rabid, emotionally-charged group of catty girls I've ever seen. We only have one side of the story here. What if the've offered help and she's rejecting it? What if there are some very legitimate reasons that AirBnB is not going totally public about it? You don't know, and you have not heard the other side of the story.

The same thing happened with Dropbox. You guys were so ridiculously quick to foam at the mouth with your theatrics and conspiracies.

It's pretty revolting. Envy is just not a good color on many of you.

Edit: Spelling. Thanks, Jacques.

View on HN

It's 'schadenfreude'.

This issue is very emotionally charged because:

  - everybody that uses AirBNB thought 'this could be me'

  - everybody that has a sister thinks 'that could be my sister'

  - everybody that runs a start-up thinks 'this could be a
    shakedown' (including some preposterous claims about
    hotel chains putting her up to this)

  - everybody is wondering if AirBNB is sitting on a huge
    stack of cash why they didn't just put it right and
    changed their terms of service / signup process

Being the 'ebay of spaces' means that you will be doing the same things that ebay spends the most of its time on: battling fraud. AirBNB is coming of age with this incident, from now on the stakes will be raised considerably in how they deal with the reputation of their hosts and tenants.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Looking forward to the period after this incident has blown over when AirBNB will be a company that is that much stronger and that will put action to their claims of transparency and being a 'trusted marketplace'.

If they can make that work they'll be fine.

" everybody that has a sister thinks 'that could be my sister'"

Because ransacking the home of my brother is no big deal, according to modern gender politics, right?

Nah, probably because EJ is most likely female.

She is, she confirmed it in her followup blog post.

Being the 'ebay of spaces' means that you will be doing the same things that ebay spends the most of its time on: battling fraud.

This is the most old-school HN insight I've seen so far, thanks. Quite often, what a business appears to do for it's users (allow you to read your mail on line, hook landlords up with renters) and it's competitive advantage (spam fighting, ad targeting, fraud detection, &c.) are very different things.

Back when I was young and rode a nice, sporty dinosaur to work, I made software for publishing classified ads. On the surface, it's a publishing business. But in reality, it's an operations business, because classifieds used to have very high revenue per column inch, but the transaction costs were also very high. So the profitability of a page of classifieds was driven by how efficiently the paper could take ads.

Anyways, I agree with your speculation. Running a c2c business is going to be all about fraud and other bad actor detection as well as operation efficiency.

This is probably the most useful comment of the bunch for me personally and my startup - I'm trying to learn from other people's lessons (it's the cheapest way to learn), and I think what you said above really helps. I made the comment elsewhere, but here's what I learned:

* Respond quickly

* Respond in the open so that there's no he-said / she-said

* Be fair, and err on the side of the customer

* Don't spin the company line - be thoughtful, especially if someone has lost money / time / confidence / data / faith in humanity

* Think "This could be me / this could be someone I know & love"

* If relevant, get the authorities involved quickly so that you can be sure it's not a shakedown.

* Assume the customer is telling you the truth unless you have specific and verifiable reason to believe otherwise

* Get insurance

* Don't let others (especially those with interests) speak for you.

* Try to establish a single point person for all contact with the customer, and make that person easily and quickly available to the customer at the customer's behest

* Try not to respond to what's said in the press

Did I miss any good lessons here?

Are they really things you learned here that you couldn't mostly have written down before by thinking on "how should a company interact"? They sound pretty ideal, but what when you can't "be fair" and also "err on the side of the customer"?

What when you can't establish a single point of contact because you don't have the resources? What current state of your company will you deprioritize to make that a priority?

What does "don't spin the company line - be thoughtful" mean? If your company line changes as soon as you put thought into it then (a) where did you get it in the first place? and (b) in what way does it represent your company, anyway?

What if it turns out AirBnB believed they did respond quickly, fairly, thoughtfully, got the authorities involved, didn't officially let anyone else speak for them, etc. and this situation still developed because human communication is like that and other people didn't perceive the same intentions in their behaviour as they did?

Did I miss any good lessons here?

You can't please all the people all the time? You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs? No gain without pain? Whatever you plan for won't be the thing which trips you up? The best laid plans of mice and men? Shit happens? It's what you do with it that counts?

This was just posted today: http://blog.airbnb.com/our-commitment-to-trust-and-safety

In particular: "With regards to EJ, we let her down, and for that we are very sorry. We should have responded faster, communicated more sensitively, and taken more decisive action to make sure she felt safe and secure. But we weren’t prepared for the crisis and we dropped the ball. Now we’re dealing with the consequences. In working with the San Francisco Police Department, we are happy to say a suspect is now in custody. Even so, we realize that we have disappointed the community. To EJ, and all the other hosts who have had bad experiences, we know you deserve better from us."

Looks like I wasn't so lame after all in taking some lessons learned. If AirBnB can learn some "obvious" lessons from this incident, so can I... and you.

I didn't say you were lame or that they were bad points, I was more on the side that (a) you can't always win, (b) if you wait to start until you are sure you can win any situation, you'll be waiting forever.

We're not really thinking that the AirBnB founders, if asked last year, would have said "don't communicate sensitively to a crime victim" or "good customer service means responding slowly" of "don't work with the police", and now they've been hit by this and learned these lessons they know better, are we?

Planning to do everything right first time is a common failure mode and procrastination mode, that's all.

One extra issue: a bunch of startups concerned with splashover reputational risk (in extremis, and we are nowhere near this, 'why should I use/partner with/fund you, you're associated with bad actors so I don't trust you'.

This isn't rational, but we're talking about hearts not heads here. Look at the damage Dow Jones has taken by association with the News of the World.

I actually thought that Airbnb were having their PayPal moment--where PayPal actually realized it was not in the business of payments, but in the business of anti-fraud and risk management. Then I realized this is probably a bizarre one-off case, and the responsibility lies on the renter, not on Airbnb. Although they could supplement renters with insurance, I don't think this is their 'big test'.

What happens next time? Airbnb will either settle with the person quietly (as they've done successfully in the past), or the renter will sue the person who damaged or stole their property. That's all there is to it.

I think I've seen it suggested on HN that many huge companies got that way with some shady past behaviour. I can't help thinking on that with regard to AirBnB - if they started up demanding full ID, who would use them? Who trusts giving their full ID to a little known company? Nobody. So they start up with a reputation based trust system because that's the only option they have. Now they've got lots of users, big investment, and a horrible event twisting their arm to do something (e.g. requiring ID which they couldn't do before, or spending more on security staff teams which they couldn't afford before), and it might not hurt them much to do so.

Viewed from the future with hindsight, perception shifts to show them as a large company with a shady past "a very insecure system to gain traffic followed by a switchover to a legitimate system".

(This is not the same thing as saying AirBnB planned bad things, it's a musing on how things happen and how things are perceived.).

This is the most intelligent comment I've seen about this whole business. The phenomenon isn't limited to YC companies-- we saw it in e.g. the reaction to Zuckerberg (at 20 or whatever) calling users "dumb fucks" and to Biz and Ev (jokingly) asking if they could cut in the food line at Facebook-- but the problem is at its worst with YC companies because we have to scale back on moderation.

When users work themselves into a frenzy over an ordinary issue and upvote a stream of mostly duplicate stories about it, we can just kill most of them. But with controversies about YC companies we can't or we'll get accused of censorship.

I don't know if there's a solution. We may just have to resign ourselves to the collective IQ of HN decreasing for a few days whenever there is a controversy involving a YC company.

A comment that broadly accuses the HN community of jealousy, and questions the motives of everyone commenting, is the most intelligent comment you've seen about this?

Huh.

> ...an ordinary issue...

Nice.

I think this is a good illustration of part of what's wrong here. To the woman whose life has been upended by this, this is not "an ordinary issue". Similarly, everyone that's said so far that this has not been handled as gracefully as it could have been, and that there might be something we could all learn from that, should not be dismissed as just being envious of another company.

A comment that broadly accuses the HN community of jealousy, and questions the motives of everyone commenting, is the most intelligent comment you've seen about this?

Actually, it is. Nobody here should be making personal attacks or accusations without knowing the full story. And nobody here knows the full story, yet everyone feels entitled to act as Airbnb's PR team. It reminds me of the redesign attempts where the guy comes in and says "here's what you should do!" and they don't really understand why the decisions were formed or what lead up to them. Weren't we just here with Groupon and Yelp being ripped apart for supposedly being involved in extortion? It turned out to be a bunch of flailing business owners who were on their way down, Groupon and Yelp were just the catalyst. For every one of those complaints, you can find another happy business owner who says those companies have helped them tremendously. What do we see now? This woman is pissed off, and you can see another person who had the same problem happen to his apartment. Everything stolen, horrible experience. With meth addicts. Exact same story, Airbnb settled, he's happy and using Airbnb again.

Airbnb has no financial obligation to this woman. Yet we all still feel entitled to let them know how to run their business because of what happened to one of their customers, and with hardly any information. As if that's bad enough, some people have gone as far as calling Brian psychotic. I hope you realize how absurd that sounds to those of us who know him.

By ordinary issue I meant one not involving a YC company. E.g. software patents.

Well, this certainly clears it up. To those of you who have been concerned with Airbnb and PG's actions over the past few days... it's just because you're jealous and stupid.

Classy, Paul.

It's a kind of stupidity I myself have fallen prey to in the past. One of the things I learned from being one of the earliest users of reddit is how easy it is to let indignation cloud one's judgment. Time after time I'd be led into angrily upvoting some story, only to learn later that things were not at all as they seemed initially.

After many years of being faked out, I gradually learned to reserve judgment when my indignation buttons were (intentionally or unintentionally) being pressed, but I still had incomplete information.

I'm more curious than angry, I want to know AirBnb's side of the story.

Unfortunately brianchesky's comments here are brief and he ignores the replies:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=brianchesky

AirBnb are giving low-key responses given the coverage it's received. Perhaps this is for privacy or legal reasons, or for PR / reputation reasons, or they don't think their response will be perceived as adequate by the so-called "angry mob" here. Maybe it's just they don't think it's any of our business how they deal with this situation.

The incomplete information you mention is frustrating. I'm sure many people here like me would like to know how a company should deal with this kind of PR - and personal - crisis, and were hopeful we'd see more of this played out in public after EJ's blog. The visibility this story has received from the upvotes on the TechCrunch, FT, and blog post stories has led to us getting more information than we otherwise would have had.

Are we really being manipulated or "faked out" into voting, or is it not a rational response given that the visibility tends to lead to more information leaking out?

My guess is that it is for privacy and legal reasons. They cannot make public details about their conversation with a customer they have a contract with without potentially violating privacy agreements. The best they can do is release fluff pieces or remain completely silent. They went with the former though between those two choices, I don't think it makes much of a difference.

Now the accuser can easily clear all this up by publishing her original communication with airbnb and their exact responses. Instead she continues to post summations which the public here seems to take as a definitive word(wrongly, in my view).

I've a hunch that when the dust settles, we'll be reading a lot of mea culpas from HN users who rushed to judgement against airbnb.

Time after time I'd be led into angrily upvoting some story, only to learn later that things were not at all as they seemed initially

Exactly. To me it seems very suspicious that the airbnb accuser won't release original communication between her and airbnb. She can do that voluntarily. However, airbnb being a corporation cannot do the same unless as a court proceeding. On the same note, airbnb also cannot publicly indulge in setting the record straight and calling out a former customer no matter how much she may be at fault. Folks at HN simply appear oblivious to these finer points.

That's the crux of it, simply that we should wait for more information before making a rush to judgment, the same reason we have a legal process instead of entering a liability verdict after the first day of media accusations.

> I don't know if there's a solution.

There's a very obvious solution: Airbnb need to do the right thing. Right now. Publicly and privately.

It's really not hard. Whatever they've done wrong in the past few weeks, they can make right pretty quickly, and the conversation will shift just as quickly.

Until then? All public evidence indicates they're still doing the wrong thing. Really, what do you expect? This is an issue of basic human empathy, and the apparent lack thereof. Business issues have been very much a secondary concern in all discussions about this.

You didn't read his comment. I'll simplify it for you: you have no idea whether Airbnb has done the right thing by this customer, but you seem to have no trouble telling everyone how simple this issue is to dispose of.

Has Airbnb even claimed to have actually done anything? I've seen empty words and no action or even claim of action. Have I missed something?

The full story is pretty irrelevant. What we have is clearly sufficient to know that Airbnb doesn't have a clue how to handle this, either with regard to the particular customer, or the wider PR disaster.

I agree with the overall sentiment of your statement. I think people have blown this situation far out of proportion. People touting their model is broken or that the company is going to fail over this one inciden... Same with Dropbox. It does have something to do with their successes.

That said:

People attacked the founders because, for better or worse, they got directly involved in this. And if one of the co-founders really did tell her to take down that blog post to make sure their valuation doesn't take a hit, that'll draw a lot of ire.

Plus, Airbnb has millions of dollars. They have the PR capacity to deal with these scenarios. If they aren't framing their true side of the story, whose fault is that? Like it or not, people are going to speculate especially when there is a long history of corporations side-stepping responsibility. (I am not at all suggesting that Airbnb is not trying to help. I'm saying why I can see how people can assume the worst) The fact that PG has to publicly defend them is ludicrous. It's like a father defending a fully-grown son.

The core issue here beyond the Dropbox security folly and the previous Craigslist/Airbnb debacle (which both sparked a ton of vitriol) is that this exact scenario this woman went through was bound to happen and should not have gotten out of hand. Credit cards get stolen. The process is: phone a 24-hotline, cancel a card, get a new one in the mail, challenge the fees, hopefully get money back. With this Airbnb scenario, the woman had to contact Airbnb through a freelancer who worked for them because no one initially responded to her e-mails or phone calls!

Craigslist does a very good job of warning people of the dangers all across the process. If you click on sublets, there are huge links at the top warning of fraud, scams, and personal safety tips. If you click on a post, there is a giant yellow box that warns the user of scams. On Airbnb: Nothing on the homepage, nothing on the lists of properties, and nothing on the listing itself. Airbnb isn't liable for the damages (as stated by their agreement) but they should have made more of an effort to educate the users of the potential hazards of the site and liabilities for the buyer. Hell, I used Airbnb in Paris and I genuinely thought that Airbnb would have a very responsive team in case shit hit the fan. With Craigslist, there is no false sense of security: every step of the way, they warn you.

The whole situation far bigger than it needed to be.

At the risk of being considered a complete troll, Reddit used to be very anti-commercial (I remember some of my best posts being ripped as too commercial there), and there has been a lot of influx of people from Reddit over the last year or two.

Perhaps the anti-commercialism has seeped in too.

This story comes soon after the issue with AirBnb being outted where they were emailing/spamming listers on Craigslist and posing as fake people. Not only is this illegal (CAN-SPAM act) but also unethical and dishonest.

One thing I didn't see from this was a response by PG. Only silence.

But I didn't assume his stance. After all, there's a lot that happens behind the scenes. (And I can't track all responses to stories on HN.)

But now we have this story. I'm still open to seeing how things play out and finding out what's really happened. But, so far, it's not looking good for AirBnb or PG. All the sympathy is going to EJ IMO.

And I did see a response by PG which essentially called Arrington's reporting "bullshit." His comments also seemed to directly contradict what EJ said. So someone's not being completely honest.

Given that EJ's the victim and PG's an investor, most readers are likely to be biased in favor of EJ (unless they are an HN/YC/PG fanboy).

So I wouldn't call it shadenfreude. I see it as AirBnb/PG having at track record based on other, recent, controversial events. I think to blame HN or its "collective IQ" is somewhat ignorant and self-serving.

Eventually pg did repeat AirBnB's line blaming a rogue sales team, which I found utterly credulous (what else did anyone think they were doing? why haven't they been outed and nailed to the wall?)

Maybe it's as simple as being angered when you see someone outrageously victimized and then doubly wronged by a startup that you previously had a lot of respect for?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com