Huntbnb finds illegally sublet properties on Airbnb
huntbnb.com
huntbnb.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173540
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173611 (OP deleted after being called out; if you read the thread title on my second-most recent comment, you'll see it was a Huntbnb submission. A little HN protip :) )
Can't find the third thread unfortunately.
The third link was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173504. I haven't seen people trying to game HN so outrageously in a long time.
Looks like I'll be up late banning sockpuppets.
I noticed that someone in one of the deleted threads accused us of having censored the post. That is false. We didn't touch any of their posts [1]. It was the submitters who deleted it. Perhaps they noticed that our anti-sockpuppet mechanisms were preventing their throng of fake accounts and upvotes from working.
In general, we penalize posts less, not more, when they are critical of YC and YC-funded startups—precisely because we don't want to be accused of venal censorship. That doesn't stop people from accusing us, of course, but at least we can in good conscience say it's not true.
When people try to game HN this horribly, though, it's a different story. I take that personally.
Edit: I just banned 22 sockpuppets. (Edit: 26.) The apparent ringleader is also banned until we get a promise that this will never happen again.
1. We may not even have seen them. I didn't, at least—I was away from my computer all day. On the one hand, it's dismaying to see something like this at #1 when I come back after 14 hours. On the other hand, it's reassuring to see HN users taking care of it by the time I refresh the front page. Thanks!
We (huntbnb) apologize for the confusion. This is some genuine work we did and have been getting some great attention from the media folks (http://pando.com/2014/08/13/thanks-to-huntbnb-people-who-sec...) and several users across the country. Our only motive behind getting on HN is to get more visibility and take this to more users. This is our (at least mine) first time posting something on HN and obviously we didn't do it right. We initially posted it but couldn't view it and re-did it again twice. We had no intentions behind scamming the voting process nor we tried to up vote. It's just that we didn't do it right. And we apologize for one of our members accusing you guys for censoring our post, because we genuinely were frustrated for not letting us post something. Again, that was uncalled for and we apologize.
The recent post by "taitems" was by someone who read one of the articles about us online; it wasn't any of our members. We were so excited about a) someone thinking that our feature is a HN material, and b) getting good attention from a lot of HN users. Unfortunately, it didn't last longer since we were mistaken for astroturf'ing HN. Again, we sincerely respect your decision and this is a good learning lesson for us to be careful from hereon. The only reason I'm writing back is we strongly believe in the value HN brings to any new and upcoming ideas by giving them the right visibility and want you guys to realize that we aren't any sock puppets trying to move up HN for fun. That'd be the last thing we do.
Thank you for your time!!
Can Airbnb pull a plug on the site? (technology wise and not in any lawyer kind of way).
We are using a publicly available endpoint so they could always pull the access but we think that end point is used by other services too.
It is a shame that Airbnb does not provide such a feature, but I see the conflict of interest. They may be able to even charge for such a feature. If it provided features like alerts for illegal listings based on the exact addresses, hands-off customer service on behalf of the property owner to remove the post and contact the poster, and was priced right it might be worthwhile to avoid the hassle.