
Airbnb’s Plan to Build a Grassroots Political Movement - kawera
http://time.com/4416136/airbnb-politics-sharing-economy-regulations-housing/?xid=tcoshare
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mark_edward
Is this the new polite way of saying Airbnb plans to build a new astroturf
movement out of its contractors?

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smacktoward
"Organized in top-down fashion by a corporation in order to further its
commercial interests" is a lot closer to the definition of _astroturf
movement_ than it is to _grassroots movement,_ that's for sure.

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droopyEyelids
Slight misunderstanding, I believe in marketing speech anything your company
or a company you support does is defined as "grassroots" and anything a
competing interest supports is defined as "astroturf"

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eat__the_rich
NO. Astroturf is inherent BS upon any examination. Go back to your McMansion,
McPologist.

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dgacmu
Ahh, I believe there were some sarcasm tags there that didn't render in your
browser.

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xfour
Not sure how well this is going to work judging from the last time they tried
to buy a vote
[http://sfist.com/2015/10/23/airbnb_frantically_doing_damage_...](http://sfist.com/2015/10/23/airbnb_frantically_doing_damage_con.php)
though admittedly that did work out in their favor in SF in the end.

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jaredandrews
This ad campaign still _blows my fucking mind_. How did this leave the 4x4
space of open office of whoever thought it was a good idea? I don't know how
big of a company AirBnB is but presumably more than 1 person had to give this
the thumbs up, right?!

I absolutely love AirBnB as a user and I hope they can come to agreeable legal
terms with the communities they are in. As a programmer and potential employee
these ads say to me: "don't ever try to work at AirBnB, we only drink the
finest Kool-aid and there is a lot of cyanide in it."

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mwfunk
I know absolutely nothing about the people that run AirBnB, but based on those
ads my brain instantly imagined a small group of twentysomethings from rich
families who'd never worked a day in their life prior to getting out of
college, who have yet to mature intellectually or otherwise past the point of
thinking that being really snotty and sarcastic and dismissive of their
opponents is an effective form of argumentation, whose entire worldview is
circumscribed by whatever bubble of funemployed trust fund hipster kids they
socialize with and have always socialized with, but who somehow fell backwards
into a good idea and accidentally ended up with some VC money and just enough
competent friends/employees/business partners to get the thing off the ground,
but still have no idea what they're doing and are just coasting from the
momentum of a great idea and good-enough execution so far.

Again, I have no idea what these people are actually like, but that's the
mental image of the company that those ads (and other company statements and
actions over the years) conjure up for me. If that's the intent of their
marketing, then mission accomplished I guess, but I've got to think there are
better messages they could be putting out there to help their cause.

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ben_jones
I've met a few. All upper twenty-somethings who have drank so much of the
Kool-Aid that absolutely everything else they taste tastes like Kool-Aid. I'd
feel sorry for them if they weren't making a ton of money off it. Which is
ironic because that's exactly what the Kool-Aid tells them: if it's profitable
it's moral.

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eat__the_rich
How about they actually comply with what the affected municipalities are
asking? Oh, that's right, it's a bunch of wealthy elite deluded scumbags who
don't know what it's like to get constantly bombarded and destroyed by people
like themselves.

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metaphorm
better title: "Airbnb pays for lobbying"

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godzillabrennus
Funny, tech companies and legacy businesses are spending a lot of money
lobbying but there is only one fund I've seen focused on this arena. If I were
a VC I'd look closer.

Seems like a good time to be in the industry. Though my words are self
serving.

Because, naturally, as any good entrepreneur should be doing, I am putting my
efforts into this underserved market. My startup is in the grassroots lobbying
space and we are starting our pilot with organizations in California on August
1st. We have two trade associations on board and are working on on-boarding a
global non profit.

If anyone is interested in bringing us into the government affairs or
government relations department of their company and wants to chat they can
email me hn <> at <> strapr <> dot com and I'd be happy to chat with them.

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lxmorj
Illegal hotels / full-time Airbnbs are going to be problems. However, given
that X% of homeowners are out of town Y% of the time, it's a waste of
resources to leave X*Y% of residences empty on any given day.

I like to travel. I like having an apartment. For a given amount of dollars, I
can travel a significant amount more with Airbnb covering some of my rent
while I'm gone.

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mindslight
Oh cuil, yet another political movement of people who've bought into the
housing bubble, thinking they can outrace a treadmill. What could (continue
to) go wrong?

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jsemrau
In my opinion, having large scale technical infrastructure suppliers support
openly a political agenda is dangerous. Before Uber and Lyft moved out of
Austin they tried to rally their users in a similar way. The question is what
will be next? The precedent has been set. (Not to sound overly dramatic)

I wrote about it here: [https://medium.com/@thisTenqyuLife/uber-and-lift-set-
a-very-...](https://medium.com/@thisTenqyuLife/uber-and-lift-set-a-very-
dangerous-political-precedent-bc6585126198#.5hbyb4wq9)

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fish_taxo_man
Gross.

