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Comment by IncRnd | Hacker News Reader

It's strange he booked at the location, when there were already so many bad reviews about the host. It seems as if he could have exercised a little more discretion and not put himself into the firing line of this host.

In the article the negative reviews from other people were all dated prior to his stay.

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All the reviews in the article are also scattered across different platforms, he posted his on Google Maps, another one is on TripAdvisor and another one on Facebook.

Is the expectation that when you book something on AirBnb, you're supposed to look on every possible platform to get a sense of what you're getting yourself into?

The point is that he found them immediately upon his looking for reviews. It's a renter's choice whether they want to read the reviews before or after staying at a property.

Sounds a lot like victim blaming to me. He only found those reviews after he went looking if people had similar experiences. My assumption is that those negative reviews didn't stand out on AirBnB itself, and thus he made the choice of renting the property.

And like he said in the post, we wasn't even able to leave a review, so it seems like many people with negative reviews were in the same scenario.

It's not victim blaming. Each side is responsible for their own behaviours. The host is responsible for how they acted, but the renter is responsible for not checking reviews prior to renting. This became obvious to the renter who authored this blog, though they only learned that in retrospect.

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