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Comment by roamerz | Hacker News Reader

Does Airbnb offer other alternative methods of identifying riffraff? I don’t use the service but I wouldn’t unless they offered a way for me to profile customers. Background checks and/or ratings would probably suffice. Name and picture are obviously very subjective but people use what is available and probably won’t participate unless they have a way to protect their business.

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> Does Airbnb offer other alternative methods of identifying riffraff?

The newspiece mentions a problem of racial discrimination based on checking profile pictures and how a name sounds. Do you feel it's appropriate to equate someone's ratial background with "riffraff"?

No, not based on immutable characteristics like race and gender; but, I want to see other signs that might indicate somebody I don't want to rent to. For example, I'm going to be very leery of renting to somebody with neck tattoos or a teardrop tattoo. Others might not want to rent to somebody who wears a MAGA hat in their photo. Owners have a right to decide who stays in their house.

Side note: it seems HN memory-holed the article altogether: not flagged, showdead has no effect. It's just....gone.

Owners do not have an unlimited right to decide whom to rent to. They can decide to rent to no one, but once they start offering to rent they must follow the law.

This is naive. There are an infinite number of ways to legally discriminate. Not all discrimination is bad. When you buy a five star product over a one star product you are discriminating.

This makes no sense, your analogy.

When you're SELLING a five star product, and you choose only to SELL it to [people who you look upon favorably] then you're discriminating.

Someone looks at one star homes (for example) on AirBnB, and five star. Chooses a five star. They haven't discriminated against any protected class in choosing the five star home. The homeowner absolutely can by refusing.

But discrimination based on things other than race, gender, etc. is not necessarily illegal, or even wrong. When a company is considering candidates it discriminates based on skill, experience, demeanor (and the vague "culture fit", which is indeed worthy of criticism as a criterion). With AirBnB, the renter applies, and the owner has the [now quickly eroding] right to refuse. Basing that on things other than immutable characteristics is not necessarily wrong.

You can do the reverse, it's not uncommon for an eBay seller to refuse to complete a sale if a buyer has a poor rating.

Of course not. Same goes for their general appearance. Just saying that there needs to be a way to rate risk. If the ratings are reliable and can’t be gamed then that is one and probably the best method.

Airbnb hosts rate their guests. Seems like a decent system to me.

This system creates a vicious cycle - cannot get a rental without history, and cannot accumulate history without rentals.

It creates a gatekeeper that enables discriminative behaviors.

Welcome to a world where everyone is judged to be equal to the lowest common denominator unless proven otherwise. Do you have a lock on your front door? How do you determine who you invite into your home?

Enabling discriminative behaviors does not mean using discriminative behaviors. It’s called freedom. Judge people by their actions not by what you think they are allowed to see by a gatekeeper.

This is horribly gamed. Host/renter give each other good ratings. Or neither rates because neither is sure what the other person will do so they wait for the other in a stalemate.

I think your option is to get insurance if you're running it as a business. Vacation rentals have existed as long as vacations have.

I only needed to attempt booking through AirBnB once before I gave up and used VRBO.

Sure thing. Insurance. My long term insurance costs are going to be reflective of how good a job I do evaluating who I rent my vacation home to. If I make good choices my insurance costs are probably going to stay reasonable. If I continually rent to riffraff who damage my property the insurance costs are going to rightfully skyrocket. Now i’m out of business.

Next solution?

The hospitality business isn't for everyone.

Why do you feel this is necessary? I've never heard of a hotel doing background checks on guests. Either you can pay or you can't. If you only want the most upscale guests, charge more.

Hotel operators don't usually live in their hotels. If it's your home you're renting, you're going to have a very different tolerance for risk than if you're renting out a separate property (or set thereof) with a diversified resident risk pool.

You mean some sort of social score? Now that would be groundbreaking. /s

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