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Comment by bredren | Hacker News Reader

This is obviously a bad situation. No one wants this to happen. (Except perhaps the FF participants) There have been plenty of bad situations at hotels as well, though.

I'm most interested in the final paragraph.

All because I trusted AirBNB that this individual was a “Verified” member with multiple positive reviews...

AirBnB has pioneered some of the workflow for establishing and communicating social proof. P2P requires trusted reputation.

If the story is as described, it appears AirBnB failed to provide a trustful counter-party. And it went very wrong as a result.

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> There have been plenty of bad situations at hotels as well, though.

Sure, but hotels are regulated and licensed and zoned so they keep those bad situations away from residential areas.

> AirBnB has pioneered some of the workflow for establishing and communicating and social proof.

It's really an open question of whether "reputation economies" are workable at all. I continue to be disappointed by user ratings on services like Yelp. I wouldn't trust anything more substantive than a new restaurant pick to such ratings.

But with Yelp they don't verify you've actually eaten at a restaurant or visited a business so it is very much up in the air and their stance is we don't spend our time verifying or taking up false claims so you're stuck. I've experienced this first hand helping businesses with their social media. It sucks a lot.

The only way to have sure reviews is to have some kind of receipt verification or pass the payment through the service so that you know for sure this person is paying for this service which AirBnB does. So there is a big difference from AirBnB reviews and reviews on Yelp and other sites that let you post without real proof.

> Sure, but hotels are regulated and licensed and zoned so they keep those bad situations away from residential areas.

Is it any better that hotel guests might have to stay near this sort of behavior?

Yes. The reality is that if this happens in a hotel, the hotel immediately kicks the "XXX party" out, and will usually move the aggrieved neighbors to a different floor or (as has happened with me at hotels with loud parties) do that and refund the night's cost.

Is that required by hotel regulations?

To an extent, yes, and more importantly it's civilly enforceable, because neighboring guests can chargeback the room if they're not moved (or even they are), and will almost certainly win the dispute.

I think the "verified" thing just means they've provided a certain amount of id - as it does on most sites.

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